Breaking protocol: anticolonial rhetoric and diplomatic speech at Lumumba and Sankara

Abstract

This article studies the speeches of Patrice Lumumba (1959, 1960) and Thomas Sankara (1983, 1984, 1986, 1987) as a shared corpus of African speech performed on the international diplomatic stage, despite the quarter-century gap and the different contexts separating the two speakers. It identifies and compares the rhetorical devices through which these two men, speaking from a position of institutional weakness, legitimately occupy solemn diplomatic platforms an independence ceremony, an interstate summit, a press interview, and a militant rally without fully submitting to the protocolary codes that ordinarily govern them. It also asks whether these devices reflect a stylistic constant specific to each speaker or a generic effect tied to the diplomatic situation of utterance itself. The method combines the tools of classical rhetoric (ethos, pathos, logos, performative speech acts) with those of postcolonially oriented critical discourse analysis, through a close reading of the five texts in the corpus, each situated in its immediate context of utterance: audience, place, occasion, and mode of transmission. The analysis shows that the ethos of both speakers rests less on protocolary legitimacy than on lived testimony and the concrete embodiment of their argument; that pathos, grounded in the enumeration of colonial suffering and in the notion of a “blood debt,” makes the affective neutrality required by diplomatic protocol difficult to sustain; that logos, organized around temporal or economic antitheses and performative acts involving the speaker’s own person, turns diplomatic discourse into a tool for exposing relations of domination; and that these devices amount to an internal subversion of protocol rather than an outright rejection of it. The result is a pan-African rhetoric of protocolary rupture, shared by both speakers despite differences of context, genre, and tone, which makes diplomatic speech an act of sovereignty proclaimed before the material conditions of that sovereignty have been fully secured.