The fourth Rhetoric, Theory, and Culture colloquium was held on Feb. 24, from 4 p.m. to 6 p.m. at the Walker Arts and Humanities Center, room 134. PhD candidate Vincent Manzie and second year PhD student Tolulope Odebunmi presented their current research on the topics “Applying the Rhetoric of Renewal Model in a Contemporary African Context: Lessons Learned from the Royal Dutch Shell Oil Crisis in Nigeria” and “WhatsApp: A Safe Haven for Gender Transgression?” respectively.
In her presentation, Odebunmi interrogated how Nigerians use emojis on “Whatsapp”. According to her, this study is relevant “in light of the homophobic atmosphere that seems to characterize sexual relationships in Nigerian society, an atmosphere that unfortunately turned harsher with the passage of the 2014 antisame-sex union bill” on the premise that “people [who] use common language in any context must recognize the underlying cultural tone [of such uses of the language] because cultural practices and beliefs are necessarily implicated [in language use], such as in the nexus between new media and certain linguistic practices among Nigerians.” In her discussion, she claimed that Nigerians transgress against gender when they use emojis on WhatsApp. There were situations in which men send sensual emojis to other men and women do the same.
Explaining this, Odebunmi said “there are many choices of emojis but users selected these to use. Their choice might be understood as deliberate acts of transgression or that the choices were made unconsciously.” Whichever it is, she believes, this use of emojis “point to the possibility for members of the LGBTQIA community in Nigeria to interact in a safe place.” Speaking to the Lode, Odebunmi revealed that she “intends to continue her research by investigating an exclusive Nigerian LGBTQIA platform to see how they use emojis in order to draw larger patterns of use, given that [her] current data is collected from heterogeneous platforms on WhatsApp. Manzie’s presentation “applies the crisis renewal model on a multinational organizational crisis in Nigeria in order not only to analyze the crisis points of conflicts in the multinational’s corporate rhetoric” with focus on the operations of the Royal Dutch Shell company in the Ogoniland of Western Nigeria.
The work also analyzed “how global relations, situated exigencies and cultural, social and economic tensions contextualize corporate communication strategies during crises.” Manzie pointed out that since Shell started oil exploration in Nigeria, there has been massive environmental pollution and this crippled the livelihood of the inhabitants of the area. In the history of Ogoniland, there were environmental activists who spoke and organized matches against the deterioration but nobody responded in the positive.
Rather than attending to the needs of the Ogoni people, the military government led by General Sani Abacha assassinated the lead advocate Ken Saro-Wiwa. In the case of Shell, Manzie said “a rhetoric of renewal is evident as the multinational corporation responded to a prolonged crisis involving multiple state and local stakeholders, [however] while the renewal model itself redresses traditional Aristotelian crisis rhetoric models, the Nigerian situation calls for a significant reframing of rhetorical strategies accountable to the colonialist legacies, cultural traditions, political volatilities, and socioeconomic particularities of these contexts.”
In advocating for this new communication pathway to solving the Nigerian problem, he offers that corporations should pay attention to the existing communication affordances that their spaces of operation already offer, and merge this with the corporations’ own methods. When this is done, he hopes, all parties involved in the crisis situation will be satisfied.
