Dr. Kwame Nkrumah; A Quest Hero?

The quest story as a rhetorical analysis tool is one that is credited to Joseph Campbell. Campbell was a mythologist who came to believe that all myths, irrespective of culture or societal differences, have certain key threads running through them. Campbell's aim with this rhetorical tool therefore, was to show how in the different stories that are found in different cultures, there exist common key threads. This study took as its subject of analysis, a speech given by Dr. Kwame Nkrumah on the occasion of the inauguration of the Volta Dam project on 22 January 1966. Nkrumah is revered as one of the most influential people in the fight for the de-colonialization of Africa. This analysis aims to look at Nkrumah and using this specific speech as an example of his rhetoric, seek to judge whether he can be described as a Hero who embarked on and completed a successful quest by bringing the people of Ghana (a newly independent country) a boon . In other words, was Nkrumah a quest hero on a journey in search of progress and development for his newly independent, but underdeveloped nation?