Metaphor and Kwame Nkrumah’s construction of the unite or perish myth: a discourse-mythological analysis

ABSTRACT

This article presents a discourse-mythological analysis of how Kwame Nkrumah, a pioneering Pan-African and Ghana’s independence leader, exploits metaphor to formulate and promote a univocal and an ideologically marked narrative that says Africa must necessarily unite as a confederation or be doomed forever. Using critical metaphor analysis as an analytic framework and a dataset of twenty speeches, the study focuses on the discursive construction of the Unite or Perish myth, how it is naturalized into public consciousness and the embedded ideological meaning in such discourse. The analysis demonstrates that Nkrumah systematically utilizes war, religious and journey metaphors via a (de)legitimation strategy that serves a twofold purpose of resisting colonialism and imperialism and advocating a Union Government of Africa. The persuasive force or ideological function of these metaphors is heightened by their interaction with other rhetorical tropes and schemes such as contrast and rhetorical question. By providing insight into the use of language in the service of myth, this study echoes the crucial role of metaphor in realizing the discourse goals of political speeches and, more broadly, how politics is performed and conceptualized.

KEYWORDS:

• African unity
• critical discourse analysis
• critical metaphor analysis
• discourse-mythological analysis
• Kwame Nkrumah
• mythic discourse

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Aditi Bhatia and two anonymous reviewers for very useful comments on an earlier version of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Mark Nartey is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of English at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University. He specializes in corpus-assisted discourse studies and the theory, methods and application of critical discourse analysis in political and media discourses, including the interplay of discourse, identity-construction and argumentation. The present paper derives from work being done for his doctoral research on a discourse-mythological analysis of Nkrumaism: the socialist and Pan-Africanist principles and policies associated with the pioneering Pan-African and Ghana’s independence leader, Kwame Nkrumah. He has previously published in Corpora, Critical Discourse Studies and Pragmatics and Society.

Notes

1 Situated within a blended understanding of linguistic, pragmatic and cognitive approaches, CMA is underpinned by the following key terms: “metaphor”, “conventional metaphor”, “novel metaphor”, “conceptual metaphor” and “conceptual key”. See Charteris-Black (2004, 19–22, 34–41) for further discussion.