Abstract

The campaign period is one of the busiest periods for candidates contesting for various positions because everyone is trying to sell themselves by positioning themselves as the right candidates for the position being contested for. This period is marked by excessive use of persuasive language. Proverbs, being persuasive and reuseable in various new contexts, are favoured by politicians during political campaigns. The study therefore sought to find out how proverbs were used by Saulos Klaus Chilima henceforth SKC, one of the 2019 presidential candidates, as one of his campaign tools and whether people were able to interpret the proverbs that he used.The researcher made use of concept mapping, recontexualisation and resemiotisation to analyse how proverbs were repurposed to create new meaning and how they were reused to campaign for himself and decampaign others. Additionally, an interview guide helped the researcher assess if people were able to interpret the proverbs that SKC used. Findings indicate that SKC used an extensive number of proverbs in his political campaign speeches ranging from old known proverbs to newly coined proverbs.... Most of the proverbs were used to campaign for himself and decampaign his opponents through advising, warning, critising and ridiculing them. The study findings also indicate that most people were able to interpret the proverbs that SKC . However, lack of knowledge on political and current affairs, lack of background cultural knowledge and unclear political context made proverb interpretation hard for some people. The thesis concludes that both context of production and the political context in which the proverbs are (re)produced are important to finding the meaning of the proverbs as a political campaign tool. A proverb cannot be interpreted politically if the political context is either insufficient or missing despite having a rich cultural context. The thesis also concludes that the choice of proverbs has a bearing on understanding by the audience. If a proverb is out of fashion, it becomes difficult to interpret as the users lack cultural context to refer to despite the political context being rich.

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School	: School of Humanities and Social Sciences
Issued Date	: 2021

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