HERE AND THERE
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that South Africa is more distasteful to a lorry driver in the West African
bush than Cuba is to a United Fruit shareholder in Miami Beach.
Perhaps what is coming isn't tropical Marxist-Somebodyism, but
a society closer to Mussolini's. Comparisons will be easy and will teach
us nothing.
I do not know what Ghana will be in five years, or five months,
but I have lived here during the period it became a police state-when a
large number of civilian police officials were dismissed or arrested and
their authority effectively assumed by the army. Although for some time
now
Time, Newsweek,
and the British newspapers have had issues banned
for carrying unfavorable pieces about the country or about Dr. Nkrumah,
at this writing it appears that outside publications may be prohibited
altogether. A taxi driver was sentenced to three years for shooting off
his mouth about the President in front of some soldiers. Men have been
arrested for having advised their friends to vote against the Government
in the recent referendum. And Dr.
J.
B.
Danquah, whom Dr. Nkrumah
overwhelmed in the 1960 presidential elections, has been detained for the
second time in three years.
Although Anglo-Saxon political practice has been as rare in Ghana
as
in
most of the rest of the world, the police state is new. Its beginnings
are in the attempt on the President's life in August, 1962, from which
he escaped with eleven pieces of grenade shrapnel in his back. The
rightist United Party, which had advocated a semi-tribal federal state
rather than the existing unitary state before it was outlawed, was accused.
Within two weeks, Tawia Adamafio, the Minister of Information, and
two other Government personalities were arrested. (Suddenly the Soviet
Ambassador, a man named Sidenko who had been extremely friendly with
the Minister, returned to Moscow ; and the U.S.S.R. Showroom shut down
for a while.) More grenades were thrown in Accra, not at the President
but at his supporters, and confidence in the Government and the Conven–
tion People's Party began deteriorating until January 13, 1963, when a
coup d'etat by two dozen Togolese soldiers destroyed the United Party's
base of operations in Lome, Togo's capital 500 yards from the Ghanaian
frontier. Somehow Ghana obtained from the new Togolese Government
certain U.P. documents which had been seized the night of the coup,
and within a week a terrorist was arrested in Accra who led the police to
his colleagues.
Except for the police who continued to lounge at the blockades
on the roads leading into the city and at the entrance to the airport, but
who left the trains alone, Accra became its old self again. During this
period when calm was restored the major event in Africa was the found–
ing of a somewhat amorphous Organization of Mrican Unity at Addis
