Walking the Cliff's Edge: The New Nation'sRhetoric of Resistance in ...

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CCC 61:2 / deCember 2009

Bryan Trabold

Walking the Cliff’s Edge: The New Nation’s Rhetoric of Resistance in Apartheid South Africa

This article examines the rhetoric of resistance used by South African anti-apartheid journalists to expose the links between the apartheid government and death squads. By utilizing allusions, repetition, and a concept I refer to as “subversive enthymemes,” these journalists managed to reveal publicly information about death squad activity in a context of overwhelming constraints almost a full decade before these facts were confirmed by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

They [apartheid government officials] deliberately wanted the law to be vague. There are many people who criticize these laws

and said the guys who wrote these are stupid, they can’t write a decent law. That’s in fact not the case. The people who wrote

these things deliberately made them vague because they wanted people to not know where the edge of the cliff was, and if you

didn’t know where the edge of the cliff was, you were naturally cautious. You would stay very far away from it—a lot of people did. So your mainstream papers took a very conservative view

of it, whereas your so-called alternative press, in which the New Nation considered itself part, were happier to walk quite close to

the edge.—Norman Manoim, attorney for the New Nation, interview

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Copyright © 2009 by the National Council of Teachers of English. All rights reserved.

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For those working for the New Nation, an anti-apartheid newspaper circulat-ing in South Africa in the mid-1980s, conditions were, to say the least, stressful. The editor, Zwelakhe Sisulu, had been abducted from his home by members of the security forces wearing black masks. After psychologically torturing him, leading him to believe he was going to be the next victim of a death squad, they proceeded to detain him indefinitely without formally charging him with a crime. Despite domestic and international pressure calling for his release, Sisulu would be detained by the apartheid authorities for two long years. In addition to denying the newspaper its eloquent and charismatic editor, Sisulu’s detention sent a chilling message to those who continued to work for the New Nation: You could be next. For those who had previously been detained and who had suffered brutal physical and psychological torture while working as journal-ists for other newspapers, this was no idle threat. Other tactics of intimidation the government used included sending police to the offices of the New Nation, where they would lock the doors and detain the entire staff while searching through files for evidence of “illegal activities.”1 The government also sent the New Nation several warning letters identifying those articles in violation of the myriad censorship restrictions, threatening to close the newspaper if the editors and journalists did not desist from publishing similar articles in the future. The government ultimately made good on these threats at one point, closing the newspaper for a period of three months.

In the end, however, those working for the New Nation would not be in-timidated. In fact, the New Nation staff not only continued to publish during this time period but actually transformed the newspaper from one that was published every two weeks to one that was published weekly, increasing its circulation several fold in the process. Despite the existence of literally hun-dreds of censorship restrictions, those at the New Nation, along with those at other alternative newspapers, continued to publish articles that both exposed the numerous abuses of the apartheid regime and provided a voice to those individuals and groups the government was trying to silence.

The question guiding my analysis of the New Nation is how, specifically, the journalists working for this newspaper negotiated the dizzying array of constraints that allowed them not just to survive in this context but to actually thrive. My findings revealed that those working at the New Nation developed a strategy that consisted of trying to read the complex power dynamics for the purposes of determining the outermost point of acceptable resistance. In other words, those at the New Nation sought to achieve a delicate balancing act:

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maximize the amount of information published without crossing the unknown line that would lead to permanent closure. For the purposes of implementing this strategy, the journalists and attorneys developed several tactics perhaps best described as “oblique speak,” or “communication by implication,” a con-cept coined by Irwin Manoim, coeditor of another anti-apartheid newspaper circulating at that time, the Weekly Mail (74).2 In this article, I examine the two most significant tactics used by those working at the New Nation to link the South African government to the death squads operating at that time: al-lusions, as defined by Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca, and a tactic I describe as the “subversive enthymeme.”

Origins of Project and MethodologyIn the wake of poststructuralism, with its emphasis on the dominant role that discourses of power play in human relations, many scholars have focused on the ways individuals and groups seek to resist oppressive power. Several studies, of course, have focused on the use of language, both spoken and written, as a means of resistance. Much of this scholarship acknowledges and foregrounds the central role of power in shaping these acts of resistance while simultane-ously highlighting the strategic and tactical choices individuals and groups make within oppressive contexts. Ellen Cushman, for example, in The Struggle and the Tools, examines the linguistic practices of Quayville residents for the purposes of providing “an upclose account of the tight connection between agency and social structure as individuals maneuver through asymmetrical power relations” (xii). Shirley Wilson Logan’s We Are Coming: The Persuasive Discourse of Nineteenth-Century Black Women and Jacqueline Jones Royster’s Traces of a Stream: Literacy and Social Change among African American Women, meanwhile, focus on nineteenth-century African American women rhetors for similar purposes. As Royster writes in her introduction: “Despite such constraints, however, my research indicates that African American women’s resistance to sociopolitical barriers has been considerable and that, although their achievements have been devalued, they have not been thoroughly neutral-ized or contained” (4). Royster’s description of her project, which in many ways applies to Logan’s and Cushman’s, captures the essence of what James Scott refers to as the “arts of resistance.” In his compelling book, Domination and the Arts of Resistance, Scott examines the numerous ways groups have resisted op-pressive power throughout history: songs, dance, folktales, and jokes. Scholars in composition and rhetoric, with the broad range of methodological tools at their disposal—protocols, stimulated recalls, rhetorical criticism, interviews—

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are uniquely positioned to examine empirically an art of resistance that has been and continues to be used by groups in this country and throughout the world: writing. What does an examination of writers operating in contexts of constraints reveal about the intersection of writing, resistance, and power?

Upon arriving in South Africa for my one-year stay, I soon learned about the various and rich ways in which writing was used to resist apartheid, and I realized that I had a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to explore the issues of con-straints, resistance, and writing in relation to one of the most compelling libera-tion struggles of the twentieth century. I focused on anti-apartheid journalists for two reasons. First, the journalists working for these newspapers represented a collective group working together to challenge the apartheid government; second, these newspapers had considerable interaction with governmental censors, literally on a daily or weekly basis. Of the many anti-apartheid news-papers that existed, I chose the New Nation and the Weekly Mail for a number of reasons: both were written in English, both were national newspapers, and, perhaps most significantly, both were founded during a pivotal moment in the anti-apartheid resistance. One month after the Weekly Mail printed its first edi-tion and five months before the New Nation would print theirs, the apartheid government declared the first of several states of emergency, which created even more constraints operating on writers.

I began by examining and reviewing every edition of both newspapers that was available at the University of Cape Town library. I started with their first editions and stopped at 1990, the year the apartheid government released Nelson Mandela from prison and unbanned the African National Congress, the Pan African Congress, and the South African Communist Party. With this initial reading, I identified and photocopied articles that appeared to employ some form of indirection. I then conducted more than thirty interviews with the editors, journalists, and attorneys working for both newspapers, basing several questions on these photocopied articles. After transcribing and reading the interviews, I developed my categories of analysis, which I then used to code my transcripts more systemically. As a result of this process, I then proceeded to read, once again, every available edition of both newspapers over the same time period, photocopying literally hundreds of additional articles as a result of my more nuanced appreciation of these journalists’ strategies.

This article examines two series that appeared in the New Nation, one in 1987 and one in 1988, that focused on the South African government’s links to the death squads targeting those in the anti-apartheid struggle. Despite the fact

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that these journalists were writing in a context of overwhelming constraints, they managed to use various tactics of indirection in order to reveal information publicly about the government’s use of death squads almost a full decade before these facts would be confirmed by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

New Nation: Historical BackgroundBefore examining subversive enthymemes and allusions in detail, it is first necessary to understand the historical context in which they were used. In the mid-1980s, the apartheid government, facing formidable international pres-sure and massive domestic unrest, imposed martial law in one final attempt to maintain power. The government granted the police and security forces sweep-ing powers, which they then used to detain literally thousands of activists. It also issued several media restrictions designed to curb reports and images of armed police officers using massive violence against unarmed civilians that were undermining the legitimacy of the apartheid government at home and abroad. In an effort to control both the domestic and international press, the executive branch issued several administrative regulations to supplement the more than one hundred censorship statutes that had already been enacted by Parliament over the years. It is not possible to discuss the full scope of the censorship machinery in this article, but generally speaking, the statutes and emergency regulations were designed, as they are in virtually every oppres-sive context, for two primary purposes: to prevent the media from exposing the myriad abuses committed by the government and to deny a forum for the opposition. Some of the emergency regulations enacted prohibited reporters from writing articles that did any of the following:

• describing “scenes of unrest”

• containing “subversive statements”

• “promoting or fanning revolution or uprisings in South Africa or other acts aimed at the overthrow of the government”

• “promoting or fanning the breakdown of the public order in South Africa”

• “stirring up or fomenting feelings of hatred or hostility in members of the public towards a local authority or a security force” (Race Relations Survey 826).

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As Norman Manoim observes in the epigraph, the very scope of these regula-tions rendered them virtually meaningless for those who looked to them for guidance regarding the parameters within which they could safely operate.

It was within this context that the New Nation was born. The first state of emergency was declared in July 1985; the New Nation began publication in January 1986. The government loathed the alternative media in general, but the New Nation in particular struck a nerve. In fact, it struck three. The three publicly acknowledged “fears” of many in the Afrikaner community included the fear of communism (rooi gevaar), fear of blacks (swaartse gevaar), and fear of Catholicism (Roomse gevaar). Given that the New Nation was run by and overwhelmingly staffed by black South Africans who targeted the black com-munity, was funded by the Catholic Church, and frequently voiced enthusiastic support for trade unions and socialist principles, it is perhaps not surprising that the apartheid government developed a particular dislike of this newspaper. Irwin Manoim, coeditor of the Weekly Mail, grudgingly conceded: “The New Nation held a mantle of honor among South African newspapers: it was the publication the government hated most” (114).

In addition to tapping into these fears, the New Nation engaged in “ad-vocacy journalism” and was even more confrontational than other alternative newspapers. When asked during an interview, for example, what he viewed as the central purpose of the New Nation, the editor, Zwelakhe Sisulu, stated that the newspaper served as “a transporter of shared experience”:

And what I mean by that was that there were struggles that were taking place at a very basic level, and we wanted people throughout the country to understand that the struggles they were involved in were not as highly localized as they believed, but that this in turn was a national phenomenon. So I would say that really what the New Nation sought to do was basically to get people to share their experiences and understand that in fact what was happening was a national moment, rather than a highly individualized or highly localized moment.

The New Nation did not seek, therefore, merely to report news affecting the black community, but actually to mobilize the black community to take action against the apartheid government.

Moreover, the New Nation sought to promote resistance consistent with the values and objectives of the ANC and ANC-related organizations.3 Accord-ing to Tyrone August, a journalist for the newspaper:

For me, apart from, broadly speaking, trying to provide a voice for black people, they [the New Nation] were partisan in the sense that they regarded the ANC as

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the main representative of the black community, and they did tend to reflect the ANC’s views more than other organizations like PAC [Pan African Congress], for example, and AZAPO [Azanian People’s Organization].

Both of these objectives—trying to mobilize the population to resist the gov-ernment and trying to promote the ANC—were, of course, illegal. Indeed, they were the raison d’être of the censorship restrictions. In order to accomplish their goals and still survive, therefore, the journalists working for the New Na-tion needed to develop several forms of oblique speak.4

Allusions and Subversive EnthymemesAt a certain point in the liberation struggle, the apartheid government began to assassinate several political activists in the ANC and the South African Com-munist Party using a variety of methods: letter bombs, car bombs, shootings, and stabbings. As a means of denying its involvement, the government dissemi-nated allegations, some of which made their way into the mainstream media, that these murders were the result of in-fighting within the anti-apartheid movement. Tyrone August, when discussing how difficult it had been for him to work in the mainstream media prior to working as a journalist at the New Nation, provided an example of how newspapers would sometimes publish these governmental claims uncritically: “For instance, when Joe Slovo’s wife, Ruth First, was murdered, the Star sort of unblushingly printed this report linking Joe Slovo to the assassination of his wife because of the kind of sources that they relied on.”5 While those working at the New Nation knew this was complete nonsense, they were nevertheless in a difficult position. Clearly, they could avoid contributing to the government’s disinformation campaign by not reporting these false allegations, but how could they report the realities of the death squads without incurring the wrath of the censor?

Allusion was one form of oblique speak that the journalists used. Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca observe:

There is allusion when the interpretation of a passage would be incomplete if one neglected the deliberate reference of the author to something he evokes without actually naming it; this thing may be an event of the past, a custom, or a cultural fact, knowledge of which is peculiar to the members of the group with whom the speaker is trying to establish communion. (177)

Indeed, Logan notes how nineteenth-century African American women utilized allusions in many of their speeches. When writing or speaking in contexts of constraints, in which there are clear threats—violence, imprisonment, etc.—

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from those in power for speaking about various subjects, the advantages of allusion are obvious.

Ryland Fisher, a journalist at the New Nation, discussed during an interview how those at the newspaper would utilize this tactic. He noted:

So, for instance, one of the emergency regulations that they introduced at some point was that you couldn’t write about the actions of security forces. So we never wrote about the police. But we did write about men in blue uniforms, driving yellow vehicles, engaged in a certain activity, and you know, involving a group of people who are unhappy about something. So it was ridiculous, and if you read it now, it would seem totally stupid. But people knew what we were writing about.

Fisher’s final comment is significant: “people knew what we were writing about.” Journalists at the New Nation could make allusions to security forces, confident that they would be understood because of the “knowledge [. . .] pecu-liar to the members of the group with whom the [writer] is trying to establish communion.”

“72 Hours of Terror,” an article that recounts the kidnapping and torture of an activist living in Moutse, provides a concrete example of the power of al-lusion. It begins: “A Moutse activist this week gave a harrowing account of 72 hours of interrogation and torture at the hands of four hooded white men” (1). Later in the article, there is a reference to the fact that “The alleged abductors spoke in Afrikaans throughout the ordeal and never removed their hoods,” and when these “white men” finally released this unnamed activist after three days, they “warned him that they would continue monitoring his activities through their informers” (1). The article concludes with the fact that this unnamed individual had been detained by the police the previous year “as a result of his political activities” (1). The journalist thus never states directly that members of the security forces tortured this political activist, but the numerous allusions make this fact abundantly clear, particularly to the readers of the New Nation.

In addition to allusions, journalists utilized another form of oblique speak, the subversive enthymeme. This tactic, in essence, represents a variation of the enthymeme defined as a truncated syllogism.6 To understand how this tactic functioned, it is useful to recall the classic example often used to demonstrate the difference between syllogisms and enthymemes:

Syllogism: Socrates is a man. All men are mortal. Therefore, Socrates is mortal.

Enthymeme: Socrates is a man; therefore, he is mortal.

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In this case, the rhetor expects the audience to supply the obvious claim, “All men are mortal.”

Imagine a situation, however, in which restrictions expressly forbid anyone from stating the fact that Socrates will one day die. In such a context, one could convey this meaning by emphasizing the claims that lead naturally to this conclusion, trusting that audience members would be able to take the final step on their own. In other words, one could use overwhelming evidence to demonstrate beyond a reasonable doubt that Socrates is a man. Then one could provide overwhelming evidence to show that all men up to that point in history have indeed been mortal. Rather than relying on the audience to fill in a missing claim leading to the conclusion, as is the case with a traditional enthymeme, one could instead trust the audience to fill in the logical conclu-sion following well-established claims. This is precisely the strategy the New Nation utilized when discussing the death squads operating in South Africa. Both series on this subject consisted of three articles, which, when read together, formed a subversive enthymeme.

In order to understand how the subversive enthymeme functioned, it is useful to consider the syllogism and traditional enthymeme one could use in a context free of censorship. The formal syllogism would read as follows:

Death squads targeting opponents of the apartheid regime are acting with impunity.

All death squads throughout the world targeting opponents of a regime and acting with impunity have been shown to have links to their re-spective regimes.

The death squads targeting opponents of the apartheid regime and act-ing with impunity have links to the apartheid regime.

The enthymeme would thus read:

The death squads targeting opponents of the apartheid regime are act-ing with impunity; they must be linked to the apartheid regime.

It simply would not have been possible, however, for the journalists working for the New Nation to make such a direct statement.

In each of these two series, therefore, the journalist wrote three articles that never explicitly made a direct link between the death squads and the apartheid government. They do, however, make the following claims explicit:

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Death squads targeting opponents of the apartheid regime are acting with impunity.

All death squads throughout the world targeting opponents of a regime and acting with impunity have been shown to have links to their re-spective regimes.

When the three articles are read together, the subversive enthymeme is formed, and the obvious link between the South African government and the death squads becomes clear.7

In addition to the subversive enthymeme formed when reading the three articles in their entirety, the journalists also used subversive enthymemes within individual articles. Similar to the subversive enthymeme formed be-tween articles, those within articles consisted of a series of claims that lead to a logical conclusion without ever explicitly stating it. Conceptually, subversive enthymemes formed between and within articles are the same, but those ap-pearing within articles are more compact, formed over the course of a few sentences, and thus more direct.

Subversive enthymemes and allusions, both forms of oblique speak, dif-fer in the following way. A subversive enthymeme is formed when the writer provides important information in a direct and uncoded manner for the pur-poses of making claims within a chain of reasoning that leads to an unstated conclusion. Allusions, on the other hand, consist of coded language and oblique references readers interpret based on their cultural knowledge of conditions in apartheid South Africa. Of the two series published by the New Nation on death squads, the 1987 series relies more on the subversive enthymeme formed by reading the three articles in their entirety, whereas the 1988 series more directly and forcefully links the death squads to the government by including several subversive enthymemes and allusions within individual articles.

1987 SeriesIn the July 30, 1987 edition, the New Nation ran the first two-page series on death squads that consisted of three articles. The first, “Death Squads Waging War in the Shadows,” chronicles the history of death squads in two Central American nations, El Salvador and Guatemala, exploring the purpose of death squads, examining their victims, and most importantly, explicitly linking them to the governments of those two nations. In this entire article, there is not a single reference to the South African government. The second article, “The Secret Slaughter without Boundaries,” focuses primarily on the numerous ANC

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members who had been assassinated over the years. As in the first article, no statements directly link the South African government to these murders. The final article, “Killings Didn’t Stop Liberation,” discusses how the use of death squads in Zimbabwe, Guinea Bissau, and Mozambique were ultimately unsuc-cessful in quelling the revolutionary movements in those countries.

The first two articles in the series, “Death Squads” and “Secret Slaughter,” examine the strong similarities between death squads in other nations with those in South Africa, specifically in terms of their purpose and targeted victims. In the first article, for example, the journalist claims that death squads in El Salvador and Guatemala have sought “to neutralise anti-government opposi-tion as swiftly as possible” (6), and later describes this broader objective more specifically: “Firstly, it is an attempt to prevent the development of an unarmed opposition. Secondly, it is an attempt to prevent any support for the guerilla movements” (6). Compare this to the objective of death squads described in the second article that focuses on South Africa: “to neutralise key members of the opposition, prompt a breakdown in organization, prevent the maintenance of an open political presence, and to spread terror generally” (7). The objectives of death squads in these three countries, therefore, are strikingly similar, and the link between them is made even stronger by the repetition of such terms as “neutralise” and “opposition.”

The first and second articles also describe the similar targets of death squads in these three countries. In the first article, the journalist notes that the victims in El Salvador and Guatemala include trade union leaders, students, priests, and journalists. The second article, which focuses on ANC members and sympathizers who have been targeted, includes a leader of a trade union, a uni-versity president, academics, and a priest. The purpose and targeted victims of death squads in all of these countries, therefore, are virtually indistinguishable.

While these articles contain similar descriptions in terms of the purpose and victims of death squads, they differ in a significant way. In the first article, the link between death squads and the governments of El Salvador and Gua-temala is made explicit and repeatedly. After briefly describing the origins of death squads and their overall objective in the first two paragraphs, the third, fourth, and fifth paragraphs of the first article read as follows:

The silent executions enabled right-wing governments to stand aside with folded arms and deny any responsibility. They wanted to convey the impression that these squads were renegade groups beyond their control.

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However, it has since become common knowledge that the squads were set up by right-wing governments. (6)

Later in this same article, when examining the situation in El Salvador, the journalist again establishes this link: “Since then, death squads in El Salvador have been linked publicly to high-ranking military officers and other allies of the ruling group” (6), and “These squads are made up of soldiers, policemen, and private gangs recruited by right-wing businessmen and farm-owners. They are commanded by high-ranking army officers, and act on intelligence reports provided to them by the army” (6). When discussing the “disappeared” in Gua-temala, the journalist informs the reader that “the Guatemalan government’s complicity has been proved in at least 75 percent of these disappearances” (6). After outlining all of the similarities that exist between the death squads of El Salvador, Guatemala, and South Africa, these explicit links between the death squads of El Salvador and Guatemala with their respective governments are indeed significant.

The third article in the series, “Killings Didn’t Stop Liberation,” which fo-cuses primarily on the futility of death squads in other contexts, also establishes the link that existed between death squads in Zimbabwe, formerly Rhodesia, and the Rhodesian government. Specifically, the journalist writes about the assassination of one leader in the Zimbabwe African National Union (Zanu), Herbert Chitepo:

Although there was widespread suspicion at the time that Chitepo had died as a result of internal problems in Zanu, a book has recently been published in Zim-babwe—which draws on former Rhodesian intelligence sources—saying it was in fact carried out by Rhodesian agents. (7)

In this article the journalist also describes the assassination of Jason Moyo, a leader in the Zimbabwe African People’s Union: “Rhodesian security police admitted in interviews after independence that they had got news that the parcel was to be sent to Moyo by tapping a phone. They had intercepted the parcel and inserted an explosive devise” (7).

The links established in this article between the Rhodesian death squads and that government would have perhaps resonated even more strongly with a South African audience. In addition to the many similarities between the white supremacist governments of Rhodesia and apartheid South Africa, the specif-ics provided in this third article are directly applicable to the South African context. The fact that Chitepo was assassinated by Rhodesian agents despite

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the “widespread suspicion” he was killed as a result of “internal rivalries,” for example, directly mirrors the disinformation campaign surrounding the assas-sination of Ruth First described above by Tyrone August. Moreover, the fact that Rhodesian security forces assassinated Moyo with a letter bomb is significant given that the second article in this series, “Secret Slaughter,” chronicles the numerous ANC members who had been assassinated in a similar manner. The first and third articles of this series, therefore, provide considerable evidence to establish the second claim of the subversive enthymeme: All death squads throughout the world targeting opponents of a regime and acting with impunity have links to their respective regimes.

If the facts in these articles are not sufficient for the reader to see the connections between the death squads in South Africa and those in other countries, the journalist strengthens the subversive enthymeme by using similar phrases in the conclusion and introduction of these articles. The conclusion of the first article, for example, which repeatedly links the death squads in El Salvador and Guatemala to those governments, reads: “The war in the shadows has failed. The struggle continues” (7). The introduction of the second article examining ANC targets of death squads reads, “Former University of the North SRC president Ongopotse Tiro was the first victim of South Africa’s war in the shadows in 1974” (7). The journalist is clearly inviting readers to see the second article as a continuation of the first.

The second article, “Secret Slaughter,” not only completes the subversive enthymeme formed when reading the three articles in their entirety but also contains an important subversive enthymeme within the article itself. When describing the assassination of Joe Gqabi, an ANC leader living in exile in Harare, Zimbabwe, who “died in a hail of bullets from silenced weapons in the grounds of his Harare home” (7), the journalist informs the reader: “The white Zimbabwean detective who headed the investigation into the murder—and blamed it on internal rivalries within the ANC—was subsequently exposed as a South African secret agent” (7). In this sentence, the journalist conveys a fact that begs the question: Why would the apartheid regime engage in such activities if it had nothing to do with this assassination?

This second article in the series, with its subversive enthymeme con-tained in the description of the Gqabi assassination, strongly implies a link between the death squads and the South African government. The subversive enthymeme formed by reading the three articles together, however, conveys the real persuasive power of this series. By explicitly linking the death squads

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in other nations to their respective governments, and then revealing the many similarities between those death squads with those targeting opponents of the apartheid regime, the conclusion becomes chillingly obvious: The death squads acting with impunity, killing activists in South Africa and abroad, have links to the apartheid government.

1988 SeriesThe 1988 series on death squads shares similarities with the 1987 series in that it, too, uses three separate articles to form a subversive enthymeme. It does so in part by comparing South African death squads to the death squads operating in Chile under Augusto Pinochet. Similar to the 1987 series, the first article, “Hit Squads on the Rampage in Chile,” makes explicit links between the death squads in that country and the government. The second article, “Apartheid Death Squads,” never explicitly links the death squads in South Africa to the apartheid government but examines the similarities between South African and Chilean death squads in terms of organization, training, and access to informa-tion. Moreover, the journalist draws strong parallels in these articles between the similar political situations that existed in both countries prior to creation of the death squads. South Africans reading the description of Chile in the 1970s would clearly see the parallels with their own country: mass arrests, the declaration of a state of emergency by the government, detention and torture of leading activists, and suspension of the right of people and groups to organize.

In addition to the subversive enthymeme formed when reading these two articles together, the journalist also utilizes subversive enthymemes within the second article, “Apartheid Death Squads.” In one passage the journalist writes:

The declaration of the state of emergency two years ago is an open admission by the government that extraordinary legal means were necessary to restore order. But even these seem to have failed, with the government admitting that a revolutionary situation continues to prevail. It is against this background that the political killings and abductions have occurred. The identities of the killers remain mysterious. Given the choice of their victims, it is certain which side of the political spectrum the killers come from. (7)

After strongly hinting at the involvement of the government but not explicitly stating so, the journalist then invites readers to complete this subversive en-thymeme: “But that is as far as anyone would venture in trying to identify the killers without fear of reprisals” (7).

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Later in “Apartheid Death Squads,” the journalist constructs an ingenious subversive enthymeme by strategically using the phrase “pro-apartheid forces” and the word “elements” within a carefully constructed series of claims. The passage reads:

Given the form of repression that has emerged, mass intimidation and the system-atic removal of popular leadership seem to be the answers pro-apartheid forces have come up with. At a legal level, this has been achieved to a certain extent by the detention of key leaders. But there are clearly elements which have opted to operate outside the confines of the legal system. (7)

Note in the first sentence that the writer does not specifically identify the South African government but rather refers vaguely to “pro-apartheid forces.” In the second sentence, the writer describes the actions occurring at the “legal level,” primarily the “detention of key leaders,” but, again, never refers specifically to the apartheid government, despite the obvious fact that the government was taking these steps. Although the journalist has not yet mentioned the govern-ment explicitly at this point, readers have clearly “filled in” this meaning for themselves: What or who else could the journalist possibly be referring to? What other entity operates at “the legal level”? The purpose of not explicitly referring to the government becomes apparent in the final sentence: “But there are clearly elements which have opted to operate outside the confines of the legal system.” Given that readers have already determined that the journalist is referring to the South African government in the previous sentence, they in effect “carry” this meaning to the next sentence, perhaps not even consciously, making the “elements” referred to in this final sentence quite clear: elements of the South African government.

In addition to the subversive enthymeme formed between and within these articles, the 1988 series also employs several allusions. The journalist, for example, uses the kind of coded descriptions of security forces noted above by Ryland Fisher. These allusions appear both in “Apartheid Death Squads” and “The ‘Disappeared Ones’: Ten Years of Stabbings, Shootings and Abductions”:

• “Nkosinathi Solomon Shabangu . . . was gunned down in front of teach-ers and students on June 5 by three unidentified men, one in a bala-clava” (7)

• “Their son, Chris Ribeiro, said two gunmen appeared to have ‘dark, black faces’, but as he tried to pull one of the gunmen out of their

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getaway car he saw from the driver’s hand that he was a white man. He thought the driver had worn something over his face to make himself look black” (7)

• Armed vigilante gangs based in the townships have been responsible for some of the killings. But there have also been some highly organised killings involving white men (7)

All of these allusions would immediately be identified by readers of the New Nation. It was commonly known that security forces wore balaclavas when engaging in illegal activities. Moreover, the only whites who would be in townships, particularly during a state of emergency, would be members of the security forces.

To augment the subversive enthymemes and allusions in this series, the journalist uses repetition as a means of inviting readers to draw an obvious conclusion. In the article “‘Disappeared Ones’,” the fact that not a single one of these murders had been solved serves as a veritable drumbeat throughout this article: “His killers have never been found” (6); “Her assailants were never found” (6); “the cameraman’s killers have never been found” (7); “legal observ-ers predicted that the mystery of the Ribeiro slayings would probably never be solved” (7); “Police claimed they knew one of the suspects and expected to make an arrest soon. No arrests have been made” (7); “His killers remain unknown” (7); “His killers have not yet been brought to book” (7); “No one has yet been arrested for the killing” (7). This repetition supports the claim that the apart-heid death squads were acting with complete impunity. In “Apartheid Death Squads,” the journalist writes, “Not one of these murders has been solved,” and then cleverly cites a church group, which would have enjoyed some minimal political cover in relation to the “Christian” apartheid government, to state the obvious implications: “But unless the killers are brought to book, speculation as to who was responsible for the senseless slayings and bombings will abound, the SA Council of Churches (SACC) warned last week” (7). While the fact that not a single murder had been solved could suggest raging incompetence on the part of the South African police, it clearly suggests alternative interpretations, particularly given the other evidence provided.

Repetition is also used as a means of establishing previous links between the victims and the police or security forces. In several of these paragraphs, for example, the journalist emphasizes how many of the victims had at one point been banned or detained by the apartheid authorities:

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• Siphiwe Mtimkulu had been detained in 1981 (6)

• Moxolile Eric Mntonga “had been detained four times since 1981” (7)

• Sicelo Dlomo “had been detained a few days before his death and had once been convicted on a charge of illegal possession of a firearm. He said at the time he carried the gun because he feared for his life” (7)

• Rick Turner “was killed a few weeks before his banning order expired” (6)

The victims were thus not random South African citizens but those who had been targeted by the apartheid government in the past. The journalist also provides this leading bit of evidence regarding Matthew Goniwe, a political activist in the Eastern Cape, murdered in 1985 on his way home from a United Democratic Front meeting: “Goniwe had promised his wife before they left that the only person they would stop for would be uniformed policemen” (7).

Finally, the journalist uses another ingenious tactic that relies on the blurred meaning of a single word: “apartheid.” In addition to such phrases as “defenders of apartheid ideology” and “pro-apartheid forces” that appear throughout the articles, the second article is actually entitled “Apartheid Death Squads.” While “apartheid” is technically the name of the system within South Africa that regulated virtually every activity on the basis of race, it was obviously a system enforced by the South African government. There was, and still is, considerable slippage in the usage and meaning between “apartheid” and “the South African government.” Within this article, for example, I have engaged in the common practice of prefacing the description of the South African government that existed at that time with either “South African” or “apartheid.” The journalist clearly relies on this blurred distinction between system and government when using “apartheid” in this series.

Remarkably, the journalists of these two series not only managed to link the death squads to the South African government but also managed to culti-vate defiance. It would not be unreasonable to assume that a sense of tragedy and loss would pervade a series focusing on death squads: the horrific deaths experienced by the victims, the fact that so many young victims were taken away in the prime of their lives, and the suffering of the loved ones left behind. Both series, however, encourage continued resistance, which was the best strategic response to the death squads.

The 1987 series encourages resilience among its readers, making the point repeatedly that death squads in every other context have failed. The ar-ticle examining the death squads in El Salvador and Guatemala, for example,

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concludes: “The war in the shadows has failed. The struggle continues” (6). The 1988 series maintains a tone of defiance primarily through its use of im-agery. A large photograph of Matthew Goniwe, the young, charismatic activist, appears in the middle of this series. No picture of his casket surrounded by mourners, no close-up of his grief-stricken widow and children, but rather a picture of Goniwe, full of life, in a stirring pose of defiance: arm uplifted, fist clenched, standing in front of a microphone with his mouth wide open, as if rallying a crowd.

The defiant attitude these two series promote is linked to the only strate-gic response to death squads available to those in the anti-apartheid struggle, namely mass-based political organization. Once a person had been targeted, it was virtually inevitable that the well-trained, well-armed, well-informed death squads would carry out their mission. Mass-based political organization, there-fore, was the only possible solution, a point made in both the second and third articles in the 1987 series. “Secret Slaughter,” for example, concludes: “The fact that other national liberation movements survived assassinations was the result of the fact that they had sufficiently strong political organisation within their ranks to ensure that no individual could be indispensable” (7). The defiance promoted by both series in words and imagery is not simply an attempt to put a brave face on a desperate situation, but rather serves to convey a strategic message: now is not the time to mourn but to organize and resist.

In this political context, the subversive construction of meaning between journalists and readers must have been particularly charged. After reading these articles, most readers would not only realize the extent to which the South African government was using death squads but would recognize that this same government was preventing the New Nation from directly making this allegation. The fact that journalists and readers were able to construct mean-ing with one another regarding to this issue, despite the restrictions designed to prevent them from doing so, must certainly have strengthened the claim in these articles regarding the inevitable success of the liberation struggle.

Reading Power, Writing ResistanceAs noted above, the use of subversive enthymemes and allusions can perhaps best be viewed as tactical maneuvers that facilitated the overall strategy of the New Nation: to read the power dynamics in this context in order to deter-mine the outermost point of acceptable resistance. The writers of these two series, in other words, were fully aware that the government would recognize the intent of these articles. There are certainly many documented examples

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in which oppressed groups have conveyed coded messages to one another in the very presence of their oppressors.8 This was not the case here. Apartheid bureaucrats may have been supporting an unjust cause, but they weren’t stupid.

The issue, then, was not whether government officials could “figure out” what these anti-apartheid journalists were doing, but rather which acts of re-sistance they would grudgingly tolerate and which ones would prod them into action. Despite the fact that apartheid officials had considerable power over these journalists, there were several constraints operating on them as well, some self-imposed, others imposed by the international community. Constraints existed even for the constraints, which in turn provided the necessary space for these journalists to operate.

One constraint operating on the members of the apartheid government was their insistence that they were a legitimate government operating on the basis of law. Shaun Johnson, a journalist who worked for the Weekly Mail, de-scribed this attitude as follows:

There was a strange legalism. It [the apartheid government] always thought of itself as legitimate. Now that’s completely different from some kind of crazy dictator who is just murdering people [. . .]. They believed they were a legalistic state, and what they did, which allowed young idiots like us to drive them mad, was that they tried to play it by the book. Their book. And our lawyers were cleverer at it. [. . .] The emergency regulations were like that, and for every clause, there’s a loophole.

By making gestures toward adhering to the law and not flagrantly violating it, therefore, these journalists made the work of apartheid officials much more difficult.

International pressure on the apartheid regime constituted another im-portant constraint. Drew Forrest commented on the fact that the South African government was, in his words, “sensitive to external opinion”:

You know, Chile, they just assassinated, they just killed foreign journalists, not just Chilean journalists but foreign journalists. Here, foreign journalists were allowed in, they were allowed to send back the most damning reports to their publications in America or Britain and so on. So it was a constant tension in the government about wanting to repress, but not wanting to go too far, and that created the kind of space which made it possible for us to operate.

The South African government’s sensitivity to international opinion was particularly acute in the mid- to late 1980s with the growth of the formidable anti-apartheid movement in the United States and Western Europe. If apart-heid officials were to take any legal action against a newspaper, they knew

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this would only strengthen the position of anti-apartheid activists working to impose economic sanctions. Thus, while the journalists were engaged in complex calculations of power, so, too, were governmental officials: Was the information contained in various editions of the New Nation worth the risk of taking action?

The purpose of indirection in this context, therefore, was less about con-veying messages so convoluted that they would pass unnoticed by the apartheid authorities, but rather in displaying a basic adherence to the vague boundaries that had been established. As Norman Manoim, attorney for the New Nation observes in the epigraph, the law itself provided only a rough approximation of these boundaries; no one really knew where the edge of the cliff was, perhaps not even the apartheid officials. In the end, the decision concerning what ma-terial to publish and how to publish it came down to what Norman Manoim described as “gut feels”: “This is how this beast reacts, and you need to be able to read its reaction. Its reactions are unpredictable, but if you watch them closely, you can sort of make an informed call about how it is going to behave, which has not that much to do with their own law.”

Another important factor when trying to determine what to publish and how to publish it, which may very well pertain to these two series published in 1987 and 1988, was the sense of momentum anti-apartheid journalists acquired as they continued to engage in successful resistance. In several interviews with the journalists who worked at the New Nation and the Weekly Mail, many described the increased confidence they felt over time. Howard Barrell, who contributed to both the Weekly Mail and the New Nation and who was also secretly a member of the ANC, commented on this dynamic of the late 1980s:

We know that the initiative is with us. We also know, the more sensible amongst us know, that the state has not yet extended anything like its capacity to punish us. That’s clear. The question, of course, is whether it has the will to do so, which now with hindsight, we know it didn’t. [. . .] So you know there is a sense in which we created a space—we occupied it. The state can reoccupy it, it can set about to reoccupy it, certainly it has the ability to reoccupy it, and it can set us back for five or ten years, but in five or ten years, or three or four years, we’ll come back even stronger. I mean, that’s how we’re feeling at that point, and I don’t think that that is bravado.

Drew Forrest commented on this sense of momentum as well:

I think over time, and I mean this became much more pronounced towards the end of the 80s, the authorities themselves became less and less sure about what

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they were doing. The ruling elite had sort of lost confidence in itself and no longer had the kind of commitment to start cracking down left, right, and center. It was a function of lack of confidence, lack of capacity.

The successful resistance of these anti-apartheid journalists, therefore, was intricately tied to the larger culture of resistance within South Africa.

The differences between the 1987 and 1988 series reflect this momentum. Whereas the primary persuasive power of the 1987 series results from the meaning conveyed by the subversive enthymeme formed between the articles, the primary persuasive power of the 1988 series results from the numerous subversive enthymemes and allusions appearing within individual articles. In other words, the 1988 series is considerably more direct in its indirectness. This may account for the fact that the 1988 series includes an official denial from the government, which does not appear in the 1987 series: “The government has repeatedly denied that its forces have had anything to do with the bombings or political killings” (“Apartheid Death Squads” 7). Including this official denial, which provided the newspaper with some political cover, serves another purpose as well. After reading a series that so conclusively links the death squads to the apartheid regime, it evokes a sense of exasperation that the government could continue to issue denials in the face of such overwhelming evidence.

ConclusionEmpirically examining writers seeking to resist oppressive power seems a natural fit for composition and rhetoric, a field preoccupied with the writing and rhetorical practices of individuals and groups, civic participation, and social justice. Specifically, such research serves to advance Royster’s call “that we need a more concrete sense of human variety in the use of literacy in order to support the abstractions that we might very well draw more clearly at a later point in this analytical process as we place well-told stories of literacy next to other well-told stories of literacy” (6). Cushman’s, Jones’s, and Royster’s scholar-ship, with their fine-grained analysis of how writers in different places and at different times have engaged in resistance, offer the kind of well-told stories of literacy to which I seek to contribute.

Moreover, I would argue that examining writers such as those working for the New Nation, who develop a rhetoric of resistance, informs classical rhetorical theory in significant ways. Writers operating in such contexts must not only consider how best to construct meaning with their intended audience, the focus of classical rhetorical theory, but they must do so while trying to

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gauge the outermost point of acceptable resistance, an issue classical rhetoric never addresses. Classical rhetoric may offer some terms to describe the ways in which rhetors can construct meaning indirectly with audiences (“allusion,” “signifatio,” and “schematismus”), but it is not primarily concerned with how best to construct meaning for the purposes of subverting constraints of op-pressive power. This, however, is precisely the concern for literally millions of writers around the world who walk “quite close to the edge” in their efforts to determine the ultimately unknowable parameters of acceptable resistance. Such writers, who exhibit the ingenuity, creativity, and courage to develop a rhetoric of resistance, merit our attention as scholars. As Noam Chomsky once observed, “We should join with the kind of people who are willing to commit themselves to overthrow power, and listen to them. They often know a lot more than we do” (108).

Acknowledgments

Thanks to the anonymous reviewers of the early drafts of this article, and a special thanks to Patricia Stephens for her thoughtful and detailed commentary on my later drafts. This article is dedicated to all of those who worked at the New Nation and in the opposition media during apartheid. Their ingenuity inspires; their cour-age humbles.

Notes

1. Drew Forrest, a journalist for the New Nation, recounted: “The security police came in after the declaration of the state of emergency and they instructed every-body to sit in their seats and they would not allow them to move from their seats for like five or six hours while they searched the place. They had no power to do that, but people were just so shit-scared that they didn’t dare contradict them.”

2. Irwin Manoim, the co-founder and coeditor of the Weekly Mail, was the brother of Norman Manoim, who served as the lead attorney for the New Nation and who provided the epigraph for this article. The house they shared was firebombed at one point, but the intended target was unclear. At the time of the bombing, one of Norman’s political clients was staying in the house, so neither of the Manoim brothers knew at the time when I interviewed them whether the bombing was designed to intimidate Irwin, Norman, Norman’s client, or perhaps some combina-tion of the three.

3. The ANC was the political party of Zwelakhe Sisulu’s parents, Walter and Albertina Sisulu. Walter Sisulu was imprisoned on Robben Island with Nelson Mandela and was widely considered his closest confidant. Albertina Sisulu is one of the most

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well-known and highly regarded women activists in the anti-apartheid struggle. The fact that their son was editing the New Nation, therefore, would only have provided the South African government with yet another reason to hate it.

4. Another unique aspect of this newspaper was that it did not attach bylines of journalists’ names to specific articles. This not only represented the collaborative spirit of this newspaper but also served as a form of protection for individual jour-nalists. In the remainder of this article, therefore, I can only refer to “the journalist of this article,” without citing a specific name. Some of these articles may well have been written by more than one journalist, but I have no way of determining that at this point.

5. Joe Slovo was the leader of the South African Communist Party (SACP). His wife, Ruth First, was a prominent activist who had been detained by the South African authorities. She eventually left South Africa but remained active in the antiapartheid struggle. In 1982 she was murdered by members of the apartheid security forces who sent a letter bomb to her office in Mozambique.

6. It is important to note that many in the field, including Gage and Hairston, have argued that this conception of the enthymeme as a truncated syllogism is overly restrictive. Specifically, Gage points to Aristotle’s claim that the enthymeme repre-sents “the ‘body’ of all artistic proofs,” and from this perspective, the enthymeme becomes much more robust, which can be used, as Gage argues in this and other articles, to teach students how to compose arguments in a more systematic fashion. In addition to “Teaching the Enthymeme,” see Gage’s “An Adequate Epistemology for Composition,” “Towards an Epistemology of Composition,” “The Reasoned Thesis,” and “A General Theory of the Enthymeme for Advanced Composition.”

7. I realize that there are other rhetorical terms that could possibly be used to de-scribe this particular strategy. “Significatio,” for example, is defined as “to imply more than is actually stated” (Lanham 138). “Schematismus” is defined as “Circu-itous speech to conceal a meaning, either from fear or politeness, or just for fun” (136). While fear was a factor in this context, these journalists were certainly not using this strategy out of “politeness” or “fun.” Given the seemingly inexhaustible list of rhetorical terms, there could, of course, be others. In the final analysis, I opted for “subversive enthymeme.” Not only does it speak more directly to the considerable scholarship that already exists on enthymemes, but the term “subversive” captures an important essence of this strategy.

8. There has been considerable scholarly attention, for example, to the ways in which slaves in the American South would sing songs to convey meanings to fellow slaves that were not recognized by the slavemaster. And Nelson Mandela discusses in his autobiography the various strategies he and Winnie Mandela devised to communicate with one another in the presence of prison warders: “To get around

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the restrictions on discussing nonfamily matters, we used names whose meaning was clear to us, but not to the warders. If I wanted to know how Winnie was re-ally doing, I might say, ‘Have you heard about Ngutyana recently; is she all right?’ Ngutyana is one of Winnie’s clan names, but the authorities were unaware of that. Then Winnie could talk about how and what Ngutyana was doing. If the warder asked who Ngutyana was, we would say she was a cousin. If I wanted to know how the external mission of the ANC was faring, I would ask, ‘How is the church?’ Winnie would discuss ‘the church’ in appropriate terms, and I might then ask, ‘How are the priests? Are there any new sermons?’ We improvised and managed to exchange a great deal of information that way” (425).

Works Cited

“Apartheid Death Squads.” New Nation 4 Feb. 1988: 7.

August, Tyrone. Personal interview. 6 May 1999.

Barrell, Howard. Personal interview. 5 March 1999.

Chomsky, Noam. Power and Terror: Post 9/11 Talks and Interviews. New York: Seven Stories, 2003.

Cushman, Ellen. The Struggle and the Tools: Oral and Literate Strategies in an Inner City Community. Albany: State U of New York P, 1998.

“Death Squads Waging War in the Shadows.” New Nation 30 July 1987: 6.

“The ‘Disappeared Ones’: Ten Years of Stab-bings, Shootings, and Abductions.” New Nation 4 Feb. 1988: 6.

Fisher, Ryland. Personal interview. 11 June 1999.

Forrest, Drew. Personal interview. 14 May 1999.

Gage, John T. “An Adequate Epistemology for Composition: Classical and Modern Perspectives.” Essays on Classical Rheto-ric and Modern Discourse. Ed. Robert J. Connors, Lisa S. Ede, and Andrea A.

Lunsford. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1984.

. “A General Theory of the En-thymeme for Advanced Composition.” Teaching Advanced Composition: Why and How. Ed. Katherine H. Adams and John L. Adams. Portsmouth, NH: Boyn-ton/Cook, 1991.

. “The Reasoned Thesis: The E-word and Argumentative Writing as a Process of Inquiry.” Argument Revisited; Argu-ment Redefined: Negotiating Meaning in the Composition Classroom. Ed. Barbara Emmel, Paula Resch, and Deborah Ten-ney. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1996.

. “Teaching the Enthymeme: Inven-tion and Arrangement.” Rhetoric Review 2.1 (Sept. 1983): 38–50.

. “Towards an Epistemology of Com-position.” JAC 2.1–2 (1981). 12 pages. 23 July 2005. < http://www.jacweb.org/Archived_volumes/Text_articles/V2_Gage.htm>.

Hairston, Maxine. “Bringing Aristotle’s Enthymeme into the Composition Class-room.” Rhetoric and Praxis: The Contri-bution of Classical Rhetoric to Practical Reasoning. Washington, DC: Catholic U of America P, 1986.

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“Hit Squads on the Rampage in Chile.” New Nation 4 Feb. 1988: 6.

Johnson, Shaun. Personal interview. 19 April 1999.

“Killings Didn’t Stop Liberation.” New Nation 30 July 1987: 7.

Lanham, Richard A. A Handlist of Rhetorical Terms. 2nd ed. Berkeley: U of California Pr, 1991.

Logan, Shirley Wilson. We Are Coming: The Persuasive Discourse of Nineteenth-Century Black Women. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1999.

Mandela, Nelson. Long Walk to Freedom: The Autobiography of Nelson Mandela. Boston: Little, Brown, 1994.

Manoim, Irwin, Ed. You Have Been Warned: The Story of the Weekly Mail and Guard-ian. Parktown, South Africa: Viking, 1996.

Manoim, Norman. Personal interview. 31 May 1999.

Perelman, Chaim, and L. Olbrechts-Tyteca, L. The New Rhetoric: A Treatise on Argumentation. Trans. John Wilkinson and Purcell Weaver. Notre Dame, IN: U of Notre Dame P, 1969.

Race Relations Survey: 1987/88. Johannes-burg: South African Institute of Race Relations, 1988.

Royster, Jacqueline Jones. Traces of a Stream: Literacy and Social Change among African American Women. Pitts-burgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 2000.

Scott, James. Domination and the Arts of Resistance. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1990.

“The Secret Slaughter without Boundaries.” New Nation 30 July 1987: 7.

“72 Hours of Terror.” New Nation 19 Feb. 1987: 1.

Sisulu, Zwelakhe. Personal interview. 20 May 1999.

Bryan TraboldBryan Trabold is an assistant professor of English at Suffolk University, where he teaches courses in first-year writing, upper-level writing, and literature. This article and a previous article of his that appeared in College English in March 2006, “Hid-ing Our Snickers: Weekly Mail Journalists’ Indirect Resistance in Apartheid South Africa,” are based on the research he conducted in South Africa in 1998–1999.

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