ABSTRACT
This introduction chapter presents key points discussed in this book. The book uses the socio-political discourse of Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana's independence leader and an influential advocate of Pan-Africanism, to investigate the notion of political myth-making in a context underexplored in the literature. It provides a general overview of how political mythology has been conceptualized in the linguistics and political science literature. The book proposes an integrated methodological approach to account for the complexities of mythic discourse within the domain of politics: a combination of critical metaphor analysis and discourse-historical analysis. It discusses various discursive strategies and pragmatic devices by which the Unite or Perish myth is framed by Nkrumah as a form of populist rhetoric, presupposing a homogeneous people or nation that is threatened by colonialism, imperialism, and neo-colonialism. The book summarizes the key findings of the study and discusses its contributions to the theoretical and methodological fields of mythology and critical discourse analysis (CDA) respectively.
