ABSTRACT
This chapter analyzes how metaphor interacts with other figures of speech, linguistic features, and rhetorical strategies in the creation and promotion of the Unite or Perish myth. Using the Unite or Perish myth, this chapter illustrates how metaphor offers politicians a persuasive mechanism to characterize the challenges they face in the strongest possible terms and to ingratiate themselves with the citizenry. The chapter demonstrates how the integration of metaphor and other rhetorical tropes resulted in metaphorical juxtapositions, creating mythic parallels such as good and evil, attack and defense, law and lawlessness, and life and death, which helped to define and shape Nkrumah’s narrative about a Union Government of Africa vis-à-vis the political situation in Africa in the 1960s. Four key metaphors (metaphors of war and conflict, metaphors of religion and morality, journey metaphors, and personification) that contribute to the Unite or Perish myth are discussed.
