Identity and representation in the political discourse of Jerry John Rawlings

Abstract

This study examines the political discourses associated with self-representation of Jerry John Rawlings, Ghana’s longest serving leader, in two regimes of his leadership: military and democratic regimes. By comparing both periods of Rawlings’ identity representation, the study intends to fill the gap in the research on the representation of individual socio-political actors in their performance of politics, which, to a large extent, has been concerned with North American and European, rather than the African, or even scarcely so the Ghanaian context and has mostly adopted a quantitative approach, investigating a large corpus of text, while paying less attention to the niceties of context-determined representations of self that derive from in-depth qualitative analysis of a single or a few text(s). The study employs the Discourse Historical Approach (DHA) to the analysis of two sets of data: political speeches produced by Rawlings in the military and democratic regimes. The findings reveal that the nucleus of Rawlings’ self-representation is a revolutionary identity constructed around core themes that were highlighted in his discourse. While it seems that his revolutionary identity in the military regime was framed by two main themes, nationalism and Pan-Africanism, portraying Rawlings as a reformist politician, a democrat and a nationalist who sought the welfare of his country and continent, in the democratic regime, the combined themes of leadership and the building of strong institutions constituted the ideological content that helped Rawlings to sculpt an identity of a noble revolutionary. The results also indicate that Rawlings used the same discursive strategies (referential-nomination, predication, argumentation and perspectivation strategies) to construct the thematic discourses associated with his identity across the regimes, except for intensification strategy which was additionally used in the military regime. Although the study further finds that three legitimation strategies (authorization, rationalization and moralization) were used by Rawlings to validate his identity in both regimes, it seems that the strategies of historicization and the claim to sacrifice were exclusively used in the democratic regime. The findings show how politicians utilize almost identical forms of discourse to produce opposite accounts of reality. It further sheds light on how the use of legitimations, which can be shaped by culture-specific politics, can reveal ideological leanings of politicians and how this can contribute to public perceptions of them.