Rhetoric

Classical Greek Rhetoric and its Relationship to African Oratory

Many textbooks begin discussion of rhetoric's history at the 4th and 5th centuries BC with the work of Aristotle, Socrates, and others who highlighted techniques for persuasive argumentation in the courtroom and other settings, and there is debate about the influence of African oratory on Greek rhetoric. The question arises, for instance, as to whether the Greeks invented or merely catalogued tropes and schemes they learned from African orators. Deborah Sweeney's study of law and rhetoric in ancient Egypt uncovers the use of repetition, parallelism, antithesis, hyperbole, metaphor, and other tropes and schemes. The current intellectual milieu is one of increasing suspicion of revisionist history in textbooks, history that highlights European civilizations and their achievements and overlooks nonWestern civilizations and their contributions to rhetoric and other fields.

Certain anthropological and rhetorical sources, by African, African American, and White scholars, suggest that whereas ancient Greeks acknowledged the influence of Egyptians on their culture, later Eurocentric scholars, with their own agenda of establishing and maintaining views of White [Page 642]superiority, sought to diminish, if not outright deny, this African influence. James Berlin and other scholars committed to recovery of a history that fully describes the extensive cultural exchanges that went on between persons of ancient Greece and Egypt suggest, for instance, that Socrates and others studied in Egypt and brought back what they learned to help shape the teaching of rhetoric and other aspects of Greek civilization.

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