In the Limelight

Soaring back to Ghana this week, Kwame Nkrumah could reflect contentedly on the success of his trip. It had been limelight all the way. First there was his big speech at the U.N., in which he urged an all-African command for the Congo force and insisted that all foreign diplomats get out. Then President John F. Kennedy greeted him warmly at the White House, took him in to meet the family. Finally Ghana's beaming Osagyefo (Redeemer) sat down in London with all the other British Commonwealth leaders to soberly deliberate on South Africa's fate, and had a weekend at Chequers with Prime Minister Harold Macmillan. All in all, not a bad fortnight for Nkrumah, whose country may be small (6,700,000) but whose personal ambition is of the first magnitude.

Nkrumah's goal is to unite crumbling colonial Africa in a vast, new black empire under Ghana's banner. To spread the gospel, he employs the slickest public relations outfit in Africa, Accra's Bureau of African Affairs. The bureau was set up in 1957, when Africa was still largely in white men's shackles. But its efforts today seem aimed as much at upsetting black regimes that do not cooperate with Nkrumah as at white colonialism.

Unofficial Funds. Last week B.A.A.'s officials were hurling invective at Rhodesian Federation Prime Minister Sir Roy Welensky and pumping anti-white leaflets into apartheid-minded South Africa. But other agents were whittling away at the black regimes of the neighboring Ivory Coast and Togo, both of which Osagyefo (pronounced Oh-sah-jee-foe) would dearly love to annex. B.A.A.'s men were also active in the Congo, where Nkrumah sent top B.A.A. Agent Nathaniel Welbeck to guide Patrice Lumumba and advance his plan to bring the 14 million Congolese into Greater Ghana's political league. When Lumumba's death shattered this hope, Congo President Kasavubu cabled Nkrumah to stay out of the independent Congo's internal affairs, to which Osagyefo last week huffed in reply, "Every African leader is at liberty to express his views on problems that affect the destiny of the continent."

Operating from a dingy two-story building near the American embassy in Accra, B.A.A. turns out pamphlets by the ton on an official budget of $26,000 a year, which is probably bolstered by another $200,000 in covert funds. Close by is the African

Affairs Center, where sanctuary and Marxist lectures are given to rebels from other African territories, including countries run by Nkrumah's black rivals.

Bing & Crowbar. Both outfits are under the influence of the growing group of extreme leftists who now surround Nkrumah, pressuring the President toward accepting closer relations with Russia and imposing a Marxist stamp on Ghana's entire economy. "Long live the workers' solidarity. Down with imperialism, colonialism, capitalism and exploitation of labor," cried an article in a recent issue of B.A.A.'s widely distributed Voice of Africa. Its author was John Tettegah, Redlining boss of Ghana's Trades Union Congress, who has sold Nkrumah on the idea of Communist-style unionism, and is trying to muscle in on union movements in Nigeria and other African countries. Another leftist at the top: Minister of Transport Krobo ("Crowbar") Edusei, who made a deal with Moscow for six Ilyushin airliners. Swirling uncertainly among the blacks is British Marxist Geoffrey Bing, who, as Nkrumah's Attorney General, designed the Preventive Detention Act under which more than 100 opposition politicians have been jailed without trial.

The leftists, who struggle constantly to oust Cabinet moderates like seasoned Finance Minister Komla Gbedemah, derive most of their power from positions in the ruling Convention People's Party, which Founder Nkrumah has neglected as his official presidential duties increased. Sensing a squeeze, Osagyefo this month announced that he personally, was taking over the party's top job. Now he could plunge ahead with the main goal: "I see before my mind's eye," he declared resoundingly, "a great monolithic party . . . united and strong, spreading its protective wings over the whole of Africa from Algiers in the north to Cape Town in the south, from Cape Guardafui in the east to Dakar in the west."

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