A Critical Discourse Analysis of Mandela’s ‘I am Prepared to Die’ Speech: Insights into Language of Transformational Leadership

Abstract

Critical discourse analysis (CDA) is employed to analyze Mandela’s ‘I am Prepared to Die’ speech and identify the transformational leadership qualities demonstrated by Mandela. The analysis considers the speech's vocabulary, grammar, structure, and genre. The analysis reveals that Mandela exhibited the key characteristics of transformational leaders, including individualized consideration, inspirational motivation, idealized influence, and intellectual stimulation. Through his use of language and grammar, Mandela is portrayed as a strong, capable, devoted, fair, and responsible leader. The use of singular and plural first-person pronouns demonstrates Mandela's leadership qualities which include honesty, reliability, inclusion, and courage to speak the truth. It also highlights his ability to influence, inspire, motivate, and adapt to changing circumstances. Mandela employs transformational tactics to not only transform values, goals, and lives but also to persuade others through his actions, motivate by his vision, and establish challenging goals. In terms of genre and structure, the introduction effectively grabs the audience's attention with a startling statement and a clear thesis statement outlining key issues. The conclusion sums up the speech and ends up with a strong and powerful clincher, which gives the speech its well-known title. The body of the speech was packed with facts and details that were presented in a coherent and organized manner using narrative, descriptive, expository, definition, process, compare and contrast, argumentative, persuasive, cause and effect, classification, and critical analysis styles. The study reveals that Mr. Mandela manages to deftly use these styles to establish his credibility and reliability as a transformational leader, on the first hand, and well serve the purposes of the speech, on the other hand.