Words have power. No surprise there. We know this because words can heal or hurt; they can tickle and tame an impulse. Words can titillate, incite and excite. They can also lift or crash the human spirit. They are the currency by which we trade promises and praises; insults and prayers. We live by words – because they often produce deeds.
Today, this column is concerned with words spoken eloquently, competently and powerfully by people called orators.
When a country lies prostrate under the crushing weight of chronic problems – poverty, disease, corruption, ignorance and a million related ills – inspirational oratory can play a crucial role in stirring hope, soothing anxieties and nudging citizens forward.
Taban Lo Lyong, the Sudanese poet, once famously and controversially referred to East Africa as a literary desert. With respect to political oratory, there can be no debate that Taban’s characterization rings true: it is an arid landscape. People are starved – not only of food and good governance, but also of rhetorical nutrition. If our national burdens sometimes appear too heavy, depressing and unbearable, it is because we are fed some of the most boring and bizarre political mumbo jumbo this side of speechland. One occasion, especially during election campaigns, we might be treated to verbal antics that the untrained ear may mistake for eloquence. Often, it is just buffoonery clothed in so much bluster.
And yet it was not always like this. There was a time when the Kenyan political speechscape shook under the soaring and calibrated diction of Mzee Jomo Kenyatta, Tom Mboya and Martin Shikuku – to name just three. Mzee’s speeches, in particular, had a mesmerizing quality about them. He had a way of modulating his voice to great effect. When you heard him, you could feel in your bones the authority, admiration and – unfortunately – sometimes fear in that famous booming voice.
Down south in neighbouring Tanzania, the late president Julius Nyerere was the undisputed master of the spoken word. Nyerere employed his unmatched eloquence to cement national unity and inspire pride in citizenship – and the results show to this day. He would also frequently harangue wabeberu na wakoloni mambo leo (imperialists and neo-colonialists) with such wit and charm that they hardly noticed the insult.
General Idi Amin in Uganda was, of course, the champion buffoon – the complete opposite of the intelligently fluent Nyerere or the authoritatively eloquent Kenyatta.
But what is it about oratory that gives it such seducing power over our minds?
Words delivered by a master orator have an unmistakable potency: their echo can linger for days – even years – in people’s hearts and minds. You can feel a flutter in your heart and tears well in your eyes. Such is the power of great oratory. Consider the opening in Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address: ‘Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.’
Or the closing paragraph in his Second Inaugural Address: ‘With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.’
When President Obama delivered his inauguration address, the expectations were off the charts. Here was a man who burst into the national stage and onward to the presidency by sheer force of eloquence. He eschewed his signature soaring rhetoric flourishes for a more earthly and sober speech. Some were disappointed. A professor of linguistics at the Berkeley School of Information said: “Obama’s a great speaker. I just don’t think he’s a great orator.”
Part of the pressure on Obama comes from the legendary reputation of orators in the African American community – such at the incomparable Martin Luther King Junior.
Michael Eric Dyson, a professor of sociology at Georgetown University, reveals the secret of African American oratory: “Start low, go slow, rise high, strike fire and sit down.”
This dictum sounds simple, but it is not. The potency is not just in the pace and modulation of pitch; it is especially the choice of words – delivered in a calibrated, evocative, and rhythmic flow – that really sets the speech on fire.
What happened to eloquence in our land? For how long shall we endure bland blather from our political leaders? Give us stirring speeches, if nothing else.
