Ghana: Evil Spirits for Nkrumah

Kwame Nkrumah, who dreams of controlling all of black Africa, last week was scarcely able to control his own capital.

Accra was in a state of emergency. Thousands of steel-helmeted soldiers in full battle kit ringed the city while rifle-toting security cops raced from house to house in search of arms and explosives. By day, reconnoitering army helicopters whirred at treetop level. At night, the city was stilled by a dusk-to-dawn curfew. Censorship was clamped on outgoing dispatches. So grave was the situation that a long-scheduled visit by India’s Prime Minister Nehru was called off for the humiliating reason that Ghanaian police could not guarantee his safety.

Yam & Eggs. Osagyefo, the Redeemer, was in his worst jam since Ghana became independent in 1957. Over the past two months, 15 Ghanaians have been killed, more than 250 injured in a series of explosions, and terrorists have scrawled the words NKRUMAH ABDICATE OR MORE BOMBS on buildings in Accra. Nkrumah himself, while touring a border village in August, caught a shoulderful of shrapnel.

Striking back, he arrested scores of Ghanaians, including three of his top aides: Information Minister Tawia Ada-mafio, Foreign Minister Ako Adjei, Convention People’s Party Chief H. H. Cofie-Crabbe. In fat headlines, his controlled press demanded DEATH TO THE TRAITORS. The Evening News even printed their pictures upside down, an omen of doom in West Africa, and Nkrumah’s supporters burned effigies of the three in coffins. From all over Ghana came tribesmen who sought to exorcise the evil spirits plaguing Osagyefo by offering him concoctions of yams and eggs, sprinkling sheep’s blood on his feet, and presenting him with gifts of jewels and leopard skins.

But the evil spirits refused to do a fadeout. The last straw for Nkrumah was the bombing fortnight ago of a torchlight parade that was celebrating an event close to his heart—his own 53rd birthday. Osagyefo was nowhere near the blasts, but they jolted him into declaring a state of emergency “to rid Accra, and indeed Ghana, of such acts of savagery.” Troops with tommy guns and light tanks guarded the approaches to Flagstaff House where Nkrumah, afraid to appear in public, has made himself a virtual prisoner.

A Mighty Purge. Who was behind the campaign of terror? Shrill attacks in the progovernment press and radio blamed “the American imperialists” and their allies, but the blame clearly lay closer to home. Even the anti-Western Ghanaian Times spoke of the “urgent necessity for a mighty all-out effort to purge all government departments and party and state organizations.”

The fact was that Nkrumah could no longer trust anybody. When the Assembly last month voted to make him President for life, his foes apparently decided that bombs were now the only effective form of protest. Nkrumah’s special branch cops combed government offices, frisked members of Parliament for arms outside the Assembly building. Even the troops he had called in to guard the city were suspect. The bombs used in recent weeks. his police discovered, were of the type stocked by the Ghanaian army.