'Cadre deployment' and 'tenderpreneurship': Representations of race and corruption in South African broadsheet newspapers

Corruption has been an issue of rising political importance in South Africa since the country’s transition to democracy in 1994. Namely, it has been seen as a sign of the governing African National Congress’s inability to... [ view full abstract ]

Corruption has been an issue of rising political importance in South Africa since the country’s transition to democracy in 1994. Namely, it has been seen as a sign of the governing African National Congress’s inability to implement affirmative action policies known as Black Economic Empowerment and create the egalitarian society that was promised during the much-lauded transition. Against this backdrop, the presentation conducts a corpus-assisted discourse analysis of a 1.5 million-word corpus composed of twenty mainstream Anglophone South African newspapers published between 2008 and 2017. The corpus was constructed by querying the LexisNexis database with the terms black entrepreneur*, black investor* and tenderpreneur*, a portmanteau of ‘tender’ and ‘entrepreneur’ signifying nepotistic business practices. The presentation investigates the collocates of these terms with the help of WordSmith tools, examining their concordances in order to provide an idea of the multiple but nuanced representations of corruption in contemporary South African print media. In particular, the approach seeks to elucidate whether there are any conceptual metaphors – the understanding of one idea/domain in terms of another – that underpin the issue of corruption in contemporary South African print media. Moreover, the presentation provides a description of the semantic, syntagmatic and paradigmatic relationships of the relatively new word tenderpreneur* in the corpus.