Sunrise on the Gold Coast

(See Cover]

The only way to learn to play the harp is to play the harp.

--Aristotle

Through the streets of Accra, capital of the Gold Coast, Democracy ran joyously wild.

The women in the parade were slim and graceful, furled like striped umbrellas into acres of cotton cloth--some green, some plum, some crimson, and all decorated with patterns of elephants, tropical fish, signs of the zodiac and portraits of the late King George VI. The men, short, square and knobbly at the knees, wore Palm Beach shirts, open at the neck and hanging, like Harry Truman's, outside their shorts; a few had flowing togas, draped off one shoulder so that they looked like British soccer players decked out as Romans. Everyone in the procession was black, and proud of it.

Through the streets they pranced, gorgeous and irrepressible, beating drums, blowing horns, hopping over the open sewers to the tune of the Third Man Theme played by a marching Dixieland band, sometimes dancing a quaint, shuffling samba, some balancing trays of chewing gum and candies on their heads.

To a handful of visitors from outside, the spectacle was a near thing to a combined operation of the Shriners, the Mardi Gras and a chorus of the Metropolitan Opera. In fact, the paraders were "We the people" of the most wide-awake land in tropical Africa: the British Gold Coast. They had gathered to cheer their leader on the third anniversary of National Liberation Day.

Suddenly, like the Red Sea parting before the Israelites,the noisy crowd opened. Through a forest of waving palm branches, an open car bore a husky black man with fine-sculptured lips, melancholy eyes and a halo of frizzy black hair. The Right Honorable Kwame Nkrumah (pronounced En-kroom-ah), Bachelor of Divinity, Master of Arts, Doctor of Law and Prime Minister of the Gold Coast, waved a white handkerchief to his countrymen as they fought to touch the hem of his tunic. Then, as the band hit the groove, he jigged his broad shoulders in time to the whirling rhythm, and passed on, exalted. "You see," cried a delirious Gold Coaster, grabbing the arm of a wondering white man, "it is real--REAL! Real democracy. He is one of us. A man of the people. Now that you have seen, you must understand: we can govern ourselves."

Creative Abdication. The "we" are 4,500,000 tribesmen who speak such languages as Dagomba, Akan, Ewe and Ga and are scattered across a rectangular patch of jungle, swamp and bushland that juts into the westward bulge of Africa, north of the coast that was once called the "White Man's Grave." Seven out of ten are illiterate, more than half believe in witchcraft, yet the happy-go-lucky Gold Coasters have been chosen by Imperial Britain to pioneer its boldest experiment in African home rule. In 1951 the British gave the Gold Coast its first democratic constitution; last year they designated as Prime Minister a histrionic radical who had once openly flirted with Communism: Kwame ("Show Boy") Nkrumah. Today, in the Gold Coast cabinet, only three of eleven members are British civil servants, and in Nkrumah's words, they are cooperating in making themselves expendable.

In Colonial Office jargon, this is known as "Creative Abdication": by showering concessions on the Africans instead of passing them out piecemeal, as in Malaya, the British hope to gain a friendly new Dominion. Nkrumah's attitude is: "Get out quick--but thanks for the memory."

The Land. Twice as big as Louisiana, and watered by the crocodile-haunted Volta River, the Gold Coast includes: 1) the Crown Colony proper, a strip of steaming forest along the surf-beaten coast; 2) the Kingdom of Ashanti, astride the interior plateau; and 3) the Northern Territories. The North is a sun-baked wasteland, many of whose primitive people live in holes in the ground; their women go naked, with a tuft of leaves before and behind.

The sturdy Ashantis, 900,000 strong, grub for gold and diamonds in the forest fastness of their hereditary King: Nana Osei Agyeman Prempeh II, a dignified man in his 60s who plays golf, keeps several dozen wives, and uses as the symbol of his office a glistening Golden Stool.*

But the life and wealth of the Gold Coast is in the teeming South, especially in Accra (pop. 150,000). The streets of Accra look as if half the professional junkmen in the world had set up business there. On the crowded verandas of tumbledown houses, barefoot boys work at sewing machines. The "shops" are mostly tables ranged along the sidewalks, and heaped high with kerosene lamps, loaves of bread, shoes, shirts and suitcases, earrings and patent medicines (a favorite is "brain pills"). There is no color bar in the Gold Coast: its 4,000 Britons (mostly civil servants) dance and drink with the Africans, sometimes intermarry.

The Boom. The foundation of the Gold Coast's high spirits is its burgeoning prosperity--the gift of the cocoa plant, which grows more than 20 feet tall in the dark, rain-drenched forests. Last year the Gold Coast's plantations, all owned by Africans, grew a third of the world's cocoa. And with prices at $10 a load (60 lbs.), the growers are crowding their mud huts with radios, sewing machines, bicycles and even TV sets (though there is no TV station to tune in to).

"God is growing cocoa," say the easy-going Gold Coasters. Their job is to cut the pods and lay the blue-green beans out to ferment and dry in the midday sun. The retail trade is handled by the "mammy-traders"--fat old market women, usually illiterate but smart enough to own and operate fleets of heavy trucks. Day & night, the "mammy-trucks" thunder down to the sprawling shantytown ports where fishermen put to sea in dugout canoes. The trucks bear striking legends: "The Lord Is My Shepherd--I Don't Know Why"; "Accra to Takoradi--With God's Help Anything Is Possible."

Magic & Machinery. It is barely 50 years since Britain conquered the Ashantis; in that time, Gold Coasters have spanned centuries of progress. African girls, not long ago bartered for cattle, are studying to become doctors and nurses. Bulldozers are digging the foundations for a 500-bed hospital close to the spot where the British, in 1896, found a huge brass pan that was used to collect the blood from human sacrifices.

This incongruous overlap of civilization and savagery, magic and machinery, makes many Britons doubt whether the Gold Coast is ready to rule itself. When African political parties march past the European Club in Accra, members raise their voices and go on discussing polo and trade as if the apparition outside were in hopelessly bad taste. Yet Britain's Colonial Office takes the Gold Coast dead seriously. Major James Lillie-Costello, the monocled press officer who handles Nkrumah for the British government, treats the Prime Minister as if he were Winston Churchill, manages to inject half a dozen "Sirs" into every conversation.

Black & White. The object of this unaccustomed British deference is a 43-year-old bachelor who likes to say: "Every woman in the Gold Coast is my bride." Last week he was paying a state visit to Liberia's President Tubman (see NEWS IN PICTURES).

Prime Minister Kwame Nkrumah was born at the jungle's edge in the mud-hut village of Nkroful, where his father, a Twi (pronounced Twee) tribesman, hammered out gold ornaments for local woodcutters. A Catholic mission taught him the three Rs, and the Fathers sent him up to the Gold Coast's Achimota College. Achi-mota crackles with black & white brains (its crest is a piano keyboard, with black & white keys playing together in harmony). Nkrumah graduated (in 1931) with an itch to teach.

He did, but not for long. An uncle who was a diamond prospector offered the money for a passage to the U.S., and Nkrumah jumped at the chance. He enrolled at Lincoln University, a college for Negroes at Oxford, Pa., stayed there for eight years and three degrees. He earned modestly average grades and these written comments from his teachers:

Biology: Strongly individualistic.

History and Philosophy: Ace boy.

German: Loved controversy.

Sociology: Purposive.

Physics: Noticeable but not spectacular.

When he graduated (1939), Nkrumah's classmates voted him "Most Interesting," and composed a little ditty for the Class Yearbook:

Africa is the beloved of his dreams; Philosopher, thinker, with forceful schemes, In aesthetics, politics, he's "in the field," Nkrumah, "tres interessant," radiates appeal.

From Lincoln, Nkrumah sailed for England to take a law degree at London University. He fell in with the left-wing crowd and became so engrossed in their Marxist dithyrambics that he failed his bar examination. He became a spellbinder instead.

"The Fifth Pan-African Congress," Nkrumah told a group of hot-eyed students in 1945, "calls on the workers and farmers ... to organize . . . the masses. Colonial and Subject Peoples of the World, Unite!" He was 36 and broke, a lonely colored man living in shabby lodgings in London's East End.

Secret Circle. Then came the call from home, where African nationalism was on the march. Nkrumah got a job as secretary general of the United Gold Coast Convention (U.G.C.C.), which was barnstorming the colony demanding Home Rule. There were riots over cocoa prices, and one February day in 1948, a band of Gold Coast veterans of World War II marched on the British governor's palace. In the street fighting that followed, police shot two Africans, wounded many more; a berserk mob looted every store in sight, and 29 people were killed.

The British moved fast to repair the damage. A Parliamentary Commission hustled out to Accra, chastised the colonial administration for denying Negroes a voice in the government. The upshot was a brand-new constitution, with popular elections.

Gold Coast leaders were stunned. Dr. James B. Danquah, the portly boss of U.G.C.C., frankly admitted that "it took India 25 years to gain what we are about to gain in less than two years." But Kwame Nkrumah was not satisfied. Boring from within (a technique he probably learned from London's Marxists), he enticed the younger members of U.G.C.C. into a secret "Circle" of his own. Danquah and the moderates had called for "self-government in our time"; Nkrumah went one better: "Self-Government NOW."

One May day in 1949, Nkrumah broke with Danquah at an open-air meeting in the village of Saltpond. It was not his own idea. His "young men" threatened to ditch him if he did not grab the leadership from Danquah's "fuddy-duddies." Nkrumah got scared. He leaped on to a table and shefuted, "My life is in danger ... If I refuse to lead them, they will kill me!" At that, a girl disciple jumped up alongside him and started singing Lead, Kindly Light. The audience joined in, and Nkrumah suddenly knew that his hour had struck. His Convention People's Party (C.P.P.) was under way.

"The Man." It was youthful and radical, full of hotheads and hooligans who christened Nkrumah "The Man" and lapped up his oratory. A typical Nkrumah harangue: "Youth of our country, wake up for redemption ... to make the Gold Coast a paradise so that when the gates are opened by Peter, we shall sit in Heaven and see our children driving their aeroplanes, commanding their own armies ..."

The new constitution is a "fraud," he cried, and demanded Positive Action ("strikes based on perfect non-violence") to prevent its being accepted. Positive Action was a flop--and Nkrumah went to jail. Police who arrested him found in his pocket an unsigned membership card of the British Communist Party.*

Jail was probably the best thing that ever happened to Kwame Nkrumah. It made him a martyr. The British sent out sound trucks to introduce the illiterate Gold Coasters to the intricacies of voting. They got a tremendous reception, especially when word got around that the trucks had a juju that could forecast betrothal dates for the village girls. But C.P.P. did even better. They provided the Gold Coasters with a slogan ("Free-DOM"), a salute (a raised forearm with all five fingers outspread to denote the Five Freedoms), and a vision of Utopia. They also had a hero: Nkrumah, "rotting in jail." Outside Jamestown prison, where Nkrumah sat mending fish nets in Cell No. 9, demonstrators sang:

Kwame Nkrumah's body lies amold'ring in the jail. . . But his soul goes marching out.

P ... G ... The election was a landslide. When the ballot boxes were opened (with 700 screwdrivers especially imported from Britain), C.P.P. had won 80% of the vote, and Nkrumah--still in jail --had swept Accra.

At this point, Sir Charles Noble Arden-Clarke, Governor of the Gold Coast and a wise old Africa hand, took the gamble of his career. The governor had put Nkrumah in jail; now he let him out and appointed him Leader of Government Business, with most of the powers of a Prime Minister. Whitehall approved, but the Director of Gold Coast Prisons emphatically did not. "I am not prepared to take orders from one of my former inmates," he snapped, and resigned in a huff.

Arden-Clarke's gamble seems to be paying off. Prison life sobered Nkrumah, who was never a glutton for punishment; responsibility awed his adolescent party. Nkrumah could not resist wearing a Nehru-style cap with the letters P.G. (for Prison Graduate) embroidered on the side, but he pumped the governor's hand and agreed that since the constitution has made him the virtual boss of the Gold Coast, he might as well give it a trial. "I am a friend of Britain," he piously announced in his first big speech. "I desire for the Gold Coast the status of a Dominion within the Commonwealth . . ."

The British were delighted. "Only a fellow with a real understanding of statesmanship could have done it," said a Colonial Office man. All the same, Whitehall reserved the three vital ministries of Defense, Finance and Foreign Affairs for the white British members of the cabinet.

The Government. At first, the black man's habit of deferring to the white impeded business: instead of making up their own minds, the black ministers looked to the governor for decisions. But Arden-Clarke soon put a stop to that. "That's for you chaps to decide," he told Nkrumah. "After all, you are the government."

Nkrumah caught on fast, and was soon hedging and weaving like an old Tammany pro. C.P.P. had promised to revoke a government order which compelled cocoa growers to destroy diseased plants; in power, Nkrumah found that to do so would ruin the industry. He simply swallowed his words and let the order stand.

Before a cheering Gold Coast Assembly, the governor announced last March that Her Majesty the Queen had been pleased to approve Kwame Nkrumah as full Prime Minister. But sweet as it was to Nkrumah, imperial praise is bitter gall to Gold Coast extremists, who accuse Nkrumah of selling out to the British. They say he likes his job too well to risk antagonizing Whitehall, and that his British advisers remain the real though hidden power in Gold Coast affairs.

The Importance of History. In the air-conditioned privacy of his Accra office, Nkrumah stoutly maintains that he should be called a "Marxian Socialist," and gives this account of his intellectual development:

"I read many books. There are many books on philosophy." He pauses a moment, then says triumphantly: "There was Hegel. Yes, Hegel. When people ask how did I come to study Marx, I tell them, from reading Hegel. And Kant, of course. The Bible, too. And the French Revolution . . . Then there is history. I have read Professor G. D. H. Cole's History of the Labour Party. And I have studied Asian history. There is much that is important in Asian history."

As for "imperialism," a word that Nkrumah once used in every other sentence, it is beginning to bore him. "I think I have the confidence of the masses," he says. "But about self-government, they must not make me go too fast--and I must not go too slow. If I tried to stop their urge to be free, they would turn on me. My job is to keep things level and steady . . ."

Road to Chaos. Whether Nkrumah--or anyone else--can keep things steady in West Africa is anybody's guess. There are plenty of doubting Thomases, especially in the Gold Coast, where the tribal chiefs call Nkrumah a city slicker, out for his own ends. South Africa's stern old Prime Minister Daniel Malan (see below) calls the Gold Coast experiment "ridiculous" and "a disastrous step for Africa." "How can illiterate people with so little civilization . . . govern themselves?" he asks. "It can't be done. It leads to chaos, and chaos leads to dictatorship or return to barbarism." Malan's dour prediction: "If other African native territories demand with the same success what the Negroes in the Gold Coast have gained, it means the expulsion of the white man from everywhere between South Africa and the Sahara."

East African whites, holding tight little islands of privilege in a sea of black tribesmen, agree with Malan. They fear--with good cause--that the Black Continent, so long the slave of other continents, is rediscovering a long-lost pride in being black. South of the Sahara, the black man is everywhere coming awake.

P: In East Africa, the fanatic Mau Mau (TIME, Sept. 1 et seq.) terrorizes the whites, threatens to turn fertile Kenya Colony into another Malaya.

P: In Nigeria (see box), nationalist hotheads ponder the strange prophecies of U.S.-educated Dr. Nnamdi (Zik) Azikiwe, the man who may one day become Prime Minister. Zik's theme: by 2944, Black Africa will have destroyed the armies of Europe, brought the U.S. to the "verge of extinction"; black missionaries will be preaching the arts of peace in "darkest Europe."

P: Northern Rhodesia's underpaid black miners recently struck back at their startled employers with a 20th century weapon: a strike that lasted for months.

P: In Jim Crow South Africa, Africans and Indians have united in a Passive Resistance Movement that has frightened the whites to the point where Prime Minister Daniel Malan seeks powers of dictatorship.

Land of Surprise. Black Africa's awakening is spotty and inconclusive--more a blind, biological ferment than a self-conscious surge of nationalism. Africa is still a land of weirdness and surprise: of seven-foot giants like the Watussi, the world's champion high jumpers; dwarf antelopes no bigger than a terrier, and goliath beetles the size of a dove; Pygmy hunters with humplike buttocks, and the society of Leopardmen, whose ferocious devotees riutilate their victims with tiny knives that leave marks like a leopard's claws. Across Africa's unplowed ranges roam herds of big game, more numerous even than the buffalo that fed the North American Indians.

Education in Tragedy. But though the face of Africa has changed but little, its people are changing fast. The white man's 20th century has shattered the crude, tribal world which once gave meaning and sanction to the black man's life. In forests where 50 years ago there were no roads because the wheel was unknown, no schools because there was no alphabet, no peace because there was neither the will nor the means to enforce it, the sons of slaves dig for the raw material (copper, uranium, vanadium) of the Atomic Age.

The tragedy is that the educated few who climb from darkness to light are, at this point, more of a problem to the white man than are the jungle savages. Seeing for the first time the glitter of the white man's world, stirred by his literature (the Bible, Rousseau, Jefferson) but stunned by the gap between precept and practice, often shunned because of their color, impulsive and impatient, they are likely to become the dupes of Communism. Writing from South Africa recently, Michael Ardizzone, a British journalist, reported a conversation with his Negro office messenger--a grown man named Cigarette, who had managed to pass his Junior Certificate examination, roughly the equivalent of graduating from junior high school.

"What are you going to do now, Cigarette?"

"Study for Matriculation."

"And after you get that?"

"I shall do what I do now. What else is there for me?"

Weeks later, wrote Ardizzone, "I found Cigarette absorbed in a translation of Karl Marx . . ."

Great Hope. There are hundreds, perhaps thousands of Cigarettes who turn to Moscow for answers to their perplexity. But in Africa, Communism is not yet a mobilized alternative, as it is in Malaya or Iran; there is still time. It is in the jubilant, blossoming Gold Coast, and in its hero Nkrumah, that some of Africa's awakening millions see the early light of freedom dawning over the continent. "In Africa today," said Nigerian Commerce Minister A. C. Nwapa in a BBC broadcast, "the sun is rising not in the East but in the West . . ." The Colonial Office agrees: "The Gold Coast is talked about with surprise in Johannesburg slums, among tribes outside Nairobi longing for more land, and in Uganda where men nurse secret grievances and suspect every . move we make. If it fails, a great hope will die in Africa. If it succeeds, then we may begin the addition of a new continent to the political world that can be our friend."

* The Stool, which Ashantis say was plucked from heaven by a priest, has the significance of the Crown in other monarchies. Gold Coast newspapers headlined the U.S. election: EISENHOWER

*Nkrumah's explanation: he carried the card because it admitted him to Communist meetings, which he attended "to learn their technique." He denies that he was ever a party member, and the British believe him. "He's always used Communist technique," says the Colonial Office, "but he's not a Communist in the way he thinks or talks."

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