An Examination of Legitimation in Kwame Nkrumah’s Anti-colonial Resistance Discourse

Abstract

This article analyzes the strategies employed by Kwame Nkrumah, a pioneering pan-Africanist and Ghana’s independence leader, to legitimize his resistance discourse against colonialism. The findings show that Nkrumah used authorization, moral evaluation, and rationalization to formulate a conviction rhetoric intended to expose the iniquities of the colonizers and place a moral responsibility on Africans to vehemently oppose the continent’s saboteurs. These legitimation strategies enable Nkrumah to construct himself as a courageous, selfless leader with noble intentions who will rescue Africa from the perils of colonialism and safeguard the welfare of the continent after independence. This paper extends research on legitimation in a context underexplored in the literature and demonstrates that the discourses of African leaders are a valuable interventionist resource needed to decolonize political processes, decenter hegemonic structures, and divest power. It also builds on understandings of political discourse analysis outside the Euro-American canon, thereby centering Global South perspectives that have received little attention in the political discourse analysis literature.