Nkrumah Wins

Last week British civil servants in the prosperous Gold Coast presided over their own eventual extinction. Nearly a million lively, well-behaved but largely illiterate Africans voted for their first all-African government (the three ex-officio British Cabinet ministers will surrender their portfolios). The results surprised no one.

Premier Kwame Nkrumah, 45, the Gold Coast's U.S.-educated African wonder boy (TIME, Feb. 9, 1953), and his Convention People's Party won a thumping victory.

The CPP won more than half the seats in the new 104-man Parliament. Nkrumah's bitterest opponent, Dr. Joseph Danquah, failed to win a seat. At this unhappy news his supporters wept and rolled on the ground. Dr. Danquah's former wife, now an ardent Nkrumah partisan, was the only woman elected to Parliament.

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