Rhetorical Analysis of the Use of Metaphor in Ghana’s First and Former President, Dr. Kwame Nkrumah’s Political Speeches

Abstract

In the late 1970s, linguists such as George Lakoff, Mark Johnson, and Michael Reddy began to realize that metaphor was extremely common and related to thought and action. Indeed, they claimed that “our conceptual system…is fundamentally metaphoric in nature” (Lakoff and Johnson, 1980). Owing to this, metaphor is used in all-out endeavours: socially, economically, politically, etc. From this perspective, this paper analyzes the use of metaphor in a corpus of speeches delivered by a prominent figure in Ghanaian politics. This is none other than one of the pioneers of African emancipation, the former and first president of the Republic of Ghana Dr. Kwame Nkrumah, in his fight for Independence for Ghana and African unity. It portrays the use of metaphor as a powerful tool to convey information, thereby making it more convincing to serve its intended purpose. It also reveals how Dr. Kwame Nkrumah (Ghana’s first president) used rhetoric to achieve his political aims. It unravels the metaphors used in his speech delivered on 10th July 1953, which is collected from samples of his speeches published online. Secondly, this paper adopts the use of MIPVU (which is a systematic and transparent procedure for identifying linguistic metaphors). It achieves inter-coder reliability and does not identify conceptual metaphors. By adopting MIPVU, lexical units of the sentences will be examined and then the contextual meaning of the unit will be established to determine more basic meaning. If the contextual meaning contrasts with the basic meaning but can be understood in comparison with it, then the unit will be marked as a metaphor. When the metaphor was identified, I used critical discourse analysis (CDA) methodology for data analysis. This paper's findings clearly demonstrate that the metaphor is predominant in political discourse and can actually trigger social action.