Not since the showy junket of Khrushchev and Bulganin three years ago had India staged such a gaudy welcome. At the New Delhi airport last week, crowds surged forward and nearly smothered their guest from overseas with garlands. Prime Minister Nehru hailed him as “the symbol of African independence.” From Ghana, Prime Minister Kwame Nkrumah had come for his first visit to Asian soil. “In Africa,” cooed Bombay’s Free Press Journal, “it is Dr. Nkrumah who wears the mantle of the Mahatma.”
Cheered and applauded wherever he went, Nkrumah was in his element. The enthusiasm of the Indians was topped only by that of his own publicity men, who showered the press with London-printed brochures, glossy photographs, canned biographies and the repeated injunction that the great man’s name is pronounced “En-Kromah.” Acknowledging his debt to the “inspiration” of Gandhi and the “superhuman efforts” of Nehru, Nkrumah talked glowingly of his own “parliamentary democracy” back home.
At a banquet in the President’s house, once the palace of the British viceroys, whose stiff portraits looked down upon them, the two Prime Ministers fell all over themselves singing the blessings of freedom. “Something big is happening in Africa,” said Nehru, playing his role as Big Brother of anticolonialism. Then Nkrumah rose to say that as a student in the U.S., he had read Nehru’s books and asked himself, “Why isn’t that man in Africa?” He called Ghana “the springboard for the final liberation of the African continent . . . Africa,” he cried, “must be free!”
In their full-blown encomiums of their distinguished visitor, Indian newspapers tactfully avoided carrying the latest news from Ghana, where Nkrumah’s cops had just arrested the general secretary of the opposition United Party, R. R. Amponsah, and another influential opposition M.P., accusing them (on flimsy evidence) of planning to assassinate Nkrumah. The two arrested M.P.s, like 38 other political opponents of Nkrumah picked up last November, are being held incommunicado..
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