‘I compare president Magufuli to Jesus Christ’: metaphorical analogy in Tanzanian parliamentary discourse

Abstract

This article examines strategic deployment of metaphorical analogy in argumentative discourse in the Tanzanian parliament when MPs attempt to support or attack a political action in the most effective manner. Data for the present article were collected from a corpus of the Tanzanian parliamentary Hansard transcripts in Kiswahili. The actual data selected for analysis include four debate segments from the annual parliamentary debates on the speeches by the then Finance Minister, Dr Philip Mpango, and the then Minister of State (Union), Ms Samia Suluhu Hassan. The data are analysed based on the pragma-dialectical theory of argumentation, incorporating insights from Garssen and Kienpointner’s (2011) versions of analogy argumentation. The findings indicate that most instances of strategic metaphorical analogy in Tanzanian parliamentary argumentation do not satisfy the dialectical norms of reasonableness and they are thus fallacious from the perspective of pragma-dialectics. Nonetheless, there are some more or less plausible uses of MPs’ strategic metaphorical analogy; Tanzanian MPs deploy strategic metaphorical analogy to support a political action or challenge a certain state of affair such as the structure of the Union of Tanganyika and Zanzibar. Metaphor research in parliamentary discourse could be extended to other types of data sets from the same parliament or another African parliament.

Keywords

• Analogy argumentation
• dialectical reasonableness
• metaphor
• metaphorical analogy
• pragma-dialectics
• rhetorical effectiveness