At Your Own Risk: A Celebration of Rhetoric

The Editor’s note Ten years have elapsed since with my colleague in Namibia, Jairos Kangira, we embarked on putting together what would become the first issue of the African Yearbook of Rhetoric. The wheel of Fortune has turned a full ten rotations – in spite of spanners thrown in its spokes. But AYOR, as we call it among ourselves, has survived. Over those past ten years AYOR can be proud to have achieve two aims: furthering the cause of rhetoric as an academic discipline in Africa; and bringing to our fold international luminaries such as Alain Badiou, Toni Negri, Cheryl Glenn, Gerard Hauser, Barbara Cassin, Claudia Hilb, Erik Doxtader and Ivo Strecker – I shall stop here this roll call. Those not named, but no less central to rhetoric studies, are to be found in the Journal. This ten-year issue is a celebration. It is a reprise of ten articles already published. I leave it to the Guest Editor, Klaus Kotzé, to explain why and how. He is particularly suited to the task: he belongs to the second generation of rhetoric scholars trained in Cape Town. He holds an AW Mellon Foundation-University of Cape Town Postdoctoral Fellowship in Rhetoric Studies, which gives me the opportunity to recognize the Foundation and thank them for their contribution to our postgraduate programmes. The Journal is self-supported. It is freely available. It is not a profit-making venture. That was the choice I made when the title was registered. The reason was simple: freedom from red tape, and editorial liberty. AYOR is beholden to no one, except rhetoric studies. Yet, it is read widely, and is accredited by the prestigious SABINET platform – a mainstay of scholarship in Africa. Whether AYOR can sustain this old- fashioned, truly liberal approach to scholarship (which is not what managerial ideology calls “research”) for another ten years, remains to be seen. We shall see. For now, enjoy this celebratory volume. Philippe-Joseph Salazar