How to eulogise the dead and departing

Last updated: December 23, 2013 11:18 pm

How to eulogise the dead and departing

By Sam Leith

There is a lot of talk at funerals: the funerals of politicians especially; the funerals of revered elder statesmen supremely. Nelson Mandela’s burial at Qunu was a case in point. Xhosa tradition says that burial should take place at midday, when the sun is at its highest and shadows at their shortest. Mandela was buried 40 minutes late because the speeches over-ran.Funeral orations belong to a special type of public speaking called epideictic oratory: that is, speeches of praise or blame. Business people take note: when you propose a toast or give a warm speech at drinks to celebrate a colleague’s departure, this is the category of activity you are engaged in.

And though the speech you make may be about somebody else, the way you make it strongly reflects on you. It is significant that epideictic speech also gets called “display oratory”: there is an element of showing off about it. Whether you are seeking to rally the South African nation after the death of Nelson Mandela, or Apple enthusiasts after the death of Steve Jobs, the eulogy is an occasion for restating or shaping the values of the tribe. Funeral orations are all about assertions of group identity: the lion-skin of the Xhosa elder, the flag of the ANC.

This is not by any means a new thing. Pericles’s funeral oration, as recorded in Thucydides’s History of the Peloponnesian War, set the archetype. You begin with a show of humility, typically by fretting that your mere words are inadequate to the occasion; you praise the dead; you restate the principles for which they gave their lives; and you finish by making clear that the debt the living owe them is to continue their work. These speeches look back in order to look forward.

This was the pattern to which the speeches made in Qunu effectively conformed. The Malawian president Joyce Banda, for instance, began by establishing her credentials and positioning herself in a position of humility: “The first time I was privileged to meet Mandela . . . In 1996 I was further privileged . . . .”

Then, like other speakers, including South Africa’s president Jacob Zuma, she retold Mandela’s role in his country’s liberation struggle. His story, in these many tellings, became exemplary: the man who, as his granddaughter Nandi put it, “went to school with bare feet and yet rose to the highest office in the land”.

President Banda’s peroration was perfectly Periclean: “It is now up to us – as leaders, as citizens, as a continent – to continue from where Tata Madiba left, so that his legacy lives on; so that what he stood for should not die.” Mandela’s fellow Robben Island prisoner Ahmed Kathrada’s speech took the same turn: “In this spirit, so exemplified in your life, it is up to the present and next generations to take up the cudgels where you have left off.”

President Zuma’s speech, incidentally, also provided evidence of a principle that should be so obvious as to barely need mentioning: nobody ever lost a crowd by making their speech too short. The Gettysburg Address, the great modern classic among funeral orations, was about 250 words long. Judging by the images of snoozing audience members beamed around the world, President Zuma could have profited from its example.

As I said above, your subject need not be a titan of world politics, nor even dead, to be the occasion for epideictic oratory.

But when speaking at a colleague’s retirement drinks – substituting the carriage-clock of Braithwaite and Braithwaite for the lion-skin of the Xhosa elder – for goodness sake, don’t let the audience doze off.

The writer is the author of ‘You Talkin’ to Me? Rhetoric from Aristotle to Obama’