HERE AND THERE
75
President announced
a
Constitutional referendum for that purpose, among
others.
The Evening News
in a giant front page box quoted Franklin D.
Roosevelt on the dangers of a Supreme Court politically hostile to the
elected government.
On January 2, 1964, a member of the Presidential guard fired
five shots at Dr. Nkrumah and killed his security chief. The official
version of what happened is that no others guards were in the vicinity and
that the killer stalked Dr. Nkrumah around the compound at Flagstaff
House until the President jumped from behind a door and subdued him.
This isn't impossible. But one halfway plausible and nationwide rumor
has it that the guard wanted to kill only his boss, the security chief, for not
having approved his application for study in U.K. At the time of this
writing the Government is preparing to prosecute a case which will
name a recently arrested Police Commissioner as a key figure in an
assassination plot which involves "a foreign power." (Another recently
arrested police official was a prominent prosecution witness in the
Adamafio
trial.)
I don't know how strongly, but President Nkrumah definitely
suspects the C.I.A. of wanting to kill him. Lloyd Garrison has written in
The New York Times
that Dr. Nkrumah has distributed among his
colleagues 500 copies of Andrew Tully's
CIA-The Inside Story,
an ac–
count of the overthrows of Jacobo Arbenz, Mohammed Mossadegh, and
Patrice Lumumba, of CIA machinations in Indo-China, of CIA involve–
ment in the Generals' Plot against Charles de Gaulle, and of the failure
of the CIA against Cuba. To the list of deposed or murdered political
figures, the Ghanaian press adds Felix Moumie of Cameroun, Abdel
Kassem, King Farouk, Ngo Dinh Diem, and Dag Hammarskjold.
The shooting didn't deter the voting. On January 5, a special
Sunday edition of
The Evening N ews
declared "class war" in Ghana, and
the referendum was designated the major battle of that war.
The Ghana–
ian Times
for January 24, in a front page editorial in boldface, warned
that "those who think they can hide under the so-called 'secrecy' of the
polling booth to fool us must know that the days when we could be
fooled are gone. And those fence sitters who prefer to stay at home must
likewise know that the people's wrath is apt to descend without mercy on
those who are not with us." The second page of that issue, however, began
an editorial by proclaiming in extra-large boldface: "When you stand in
the polling booth today, and get ready to cast your vote, thank God that
you live in a land where each citizen can freely express, without fear
or favour, his political views, and the basic democratic right to vote
in secret according to his conscience."
After the Government announced that over 98 percent of all
