"We must unite now or perish!": Kwame Nkrumah's creation of a mythic discourse?

Nartey, Mark

Abstract

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.

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Aug 20, 2018
• Online Publication Date: Apr 18, 2019
• Publication Date: Apr 18, 2019
• Deposit Date: Jan 8, 2022
• Journal: Journal of Language and Politics
• Print ISSN: 1569-2159
• Electronic ISSN: 1569-9862
• Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 18
• Issue: 2
• Pages: 252-271
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1075/jlp.17051.nar
• Keywords: Linguistics and Language
• Public URL: https://uwe-repository.worktribe.com/output/8539167