THE GOLD COAST: The New State of Ghana

Before dawn the recorded radio beat of tom-toms sounded out across the cocoa plantations and straw-hut villages of the Gold Coast, awakening hundreds of African officials and thousands of voters, the tribal cry of darkest Africa summoning everybody to an election. All day the voters calmly queued up outside the polling huts, picked up their ballots, had their thumbs smeared with indelible ink to prevent duplicate voting, walked into the huts and dropped their ballots into boxes.

The boxes were marked with party symbols—a rooster for the Convention Peoples Party of Kwame Nkrumah, 47, for four years the self-governing colony’s Prime Minister (TIME, Feb. 9, 1953); a cocoa tree for the National Liberation Movement, meant to dramatize charges of graft in the Nkrumah government’s Cocoa Marketing Board. “What you need is an honest government,” cried the leader of the N.L.M., “one whose hand is not always in the public pocket.”

But Kwame Nkrumah, born a Twi tribesman in a mud-hut village, graduate of Pennsylvania’s Lincoln University (’39), leader since 1947 of his country’s surge to get independence from the British, struck a higher note: “Do not listen to these madmen who talk to you of cocoa and corruption,” he argued. “They simply hide the fact that they do not want independence for our country.”

Winning Ways. Kwame Nkrumah had a particular reason for wanting to win decisively. Should he win “a reasonable majority in a newly elected legislature,” the British Colonial Office had promised, the Gold Coast would get “a firm date” for independence, become the first black nation in the Commonwealth. Nkrumah, onetime dabbler in Marxism, now talks of “self-government in an atmosphere of peace, order and respect for the law.” And for all the burblings of Blimps about the blacks, British colonialism has a stake in Gold Coast progress. “That’s for you chaps to decide,” the colony’s able Governor Sir Charles Arden-Clarke tells British Africa’s first all-black Cabinet. “After all, you’re the government.”

Through the four weeks of campaigning, tensions heightened. Nkrumah’s opposition stumped upcountry Ashanti and the Northern Territories. The Territories, on the edge of the Sahara, are mostly Moslem; the center region of Ashanti is run by tribal chieftains who recognize that the city slickers down in the capital of Accra threaten ancient tribal ways. The new N.L.M. party talked up a federal system with decentralized powers. The Gold Coast is only about as big as Nebraska, however, with only 4,500,000 people, and Nkrumah argued that “regionalism must not replace nationalism.”

Nkrumah’s enthusiastic “P.G.s” (for Prison Graduate—an inestimable political advantage in a British colony) soon drowned out all others with loudspeaker-car cries, to a calypso-style rhythm, of “FREEDOM, NKROO-MAH, FREEDOM, NKROO-MAH.” When the votes were counted, Nkrumah got 71 seats out of 104. Despite the loss of ten seats in Ashanti he had got his “reasonable majority.”

New Name. The Colonial Office would like to delay full dominion status for the Gold Coast until 1958, on the ground that a responsible opposition is as necessary to developing true parliamentary spirit as a good administration. But there was no question of reneging on independence. The Commonwealth Prime Ministers stand ready to admit the Gold Coast under its own chosen name of “Ghana.”* Nkrumah is in no mood to wait so long. Already pennants and bright lights for a big Independence Day blowout are on order from British manufacturers; and new currency, bearing Nkrumah’s head and the name GHANA, and millions of new postage stamps, have been printed and lie waiting in warehouses.

*After an ancient (A.D. 200-1200) West African empire of blacks. Thus by local fiat the Gold Coast, like such other colorful names as Siam, Persia, Constantinople and Smyrna, will disappear from the map.