Article published In:
Journal of Language and PoliticsVol. 18:2 (2019) ► pp.252–271
“We must unite now or perish!”
Kwame Nkrumah’s creation of a mythic discourse?
This paper presents a discourse-mythological analysis of the rhetoric of a pioneering Pan-African and Ghana’s
independence leader, Kwame Nkrumah, drawing on Ruth Wodak’s discourse-historical approach to critical discourse analysis. The
thesis of the paper is that Nkrumah’s discourse, in its focus on the emancipation and unification of Africa, can be characterized
as mythic, a discursive exhortation of Africa to demonstrate to the world that it can better govern itself than the colonizers. In
this vein, the paper analyzes four discursive strategies employed by Nkrumah in the creation and projection of his mythology: the
introduction or creation of new discourse events, presupposition and implication, involvement (the use of indexicals) and lexical
structuring and reiteration. This study is, therefore, presented as a case study of mythic discourse within the domain of
politics.
Keywords: Africa, critical discourse analysis, discursive strategy, Kwame Nkrumah, mythic discourse, political discourse analysis
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Framework
- 3.Mythic discourse
- 4.Nkrumah’s discursive formation
- 5.Nkrumah’s discursive strategies
- 5.1The introduction/creation of new discourse events
- 5.2Presupposition and implication
- 5.3Involvement strategies: The use of indexicals
- 5.4Lexical reiteration and structural patterning
- 6.Conclusion
- Acknowledgements
- Notes
-
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