THE GOLD COAST: A Date for Ghana

Just as the opposition was heating up a parliamentary griddle on which to roast him because of graft in the Cocoa Marketing Board, Prime Minister Kwame Nkrumah broke into the debate and read off a dispatch just received from British Colonial Secretary Alan Lennox-Boyd. “I have the honor to inform you,” the dispatch said, “that Her Majesty’s government will at the first available opportunity introduce into the United Kingdom Parliament a bill to accord independence to the Gold Coast, and that, subject to parliamentary approval, Her Majesty’s government intend that independence should come on March 6, 1957.”

That ended the censure debate. Nkrumah’s black supporters threw papers in the air and shouted “Ghana! Ghana!”—the name of an ancient West African black empire which Nkrumah has chosen for the new state (TIME, July 30). Then the Nkrumah supporters broke into their party’s battle song, Victory for Us. Men representing the country’s Ashanti and Northern Territories opposition sat silent. Their acting leader said, however, that his side welcomed the announcement, and next day the opposition parties agreed to join Nkrumah in working out a new constitution reconciling their “regional aspirations” with his centralizing policy. The British were delighted. Having decided on the big gamble of granting the Gold Coast independence within the Commonwealth, they were keen to get things moving quickly at a time when others were damning them as colonial-minded over Suez.