GHANA: White Eminence

Ghana’s motto, writ large on the gleaming white Independence Arch that overlooks the Atlantic in Accra, is “Freedom and Justice.” Last week, scarcely six months after Ghana, under Prime Minister Kwame Nkrumah (Lincoln University, Pa. ’39), became a free nation amid high hopes, both freedom and justice seemed to be in retreat.

Now that he was asked to practice democracy instead of demanding it, Nkrumah seemed a little less in favor of it. Faced with opposition to his rule from back-country Ashanti tribesmen, Nkrumah tried to deport two of their leaders even though they were Ghana citizens. Challenged in court for such behavior, he rushed a special law through Parliament (where he controls 71 of 104 seats) to expel the two. When Correspondent Ian Colvin of the London Telegraph arrived and reported these doings, Colvin was hauled into court for contempt. And then, when London Lawyer Christopher Shawcross, a distinguished Queen’s counsel and brother of Laborite ex-Attorney General Sir Hartley Shawcross, flew in to defend Reporter Colvin, the Interior Minister declared him persona non grata for “attacking the Ghana government in court” and refused to let him back into the country to finish his case.

Outside the local bar society, which has some feelings about the rule of law, none of this seemed to distress many Ghanaians. But it raised outcries all over Britain, which having launched this “Pilot Plant of African Democracy” to show South Africa’s Racists how well the blacks could govern themselves, at first sought to minimize its misgivings (TIME, Sept. 2). What particularly raised British hackles was an awareness that actions in Accra were not just the doing of a headstrong Nkrumah but were shrewdly encouraged by a white eminence, Ghana’s recently appointed Attorney General, Ulster-born Geoffrey Bing.

Bing, 48, is a stocky, Oxford-educated lawyer who made a name as one of Britain’s most left-wing Laborite M.P.s after the war. But even before his Essex working-class constituents got fed up with his specious defenses of Communist grabs in Czechoslovakia and Korea and turned him out of office, Bing had begun commuting to West Africa to take profitable legal cases for several men later prominent in Ghana politics. By the time Ghana was set to go it alone, he was already established as an intimate adviser to Prime Minister Nkrumah, reportedly not only drafting bills, but also arranging for the champagne supply for last March’s independence ceremonies.

Those who were most offended by the trend in Ghana were not British ex-colonial types, who might be expected to say I-told-you-so, but liberals and leftists. One of them, Socialist M.P. Fenner Brockway, an honor guest at Ghana’s independence celebrations, last week let out an anguished cry of betrayal: “What evil genius has gained the ear of the Prime Minister of Ghana? His friends in Britain are shocked to find Ghana adopting some of the worst practices of colonial rule. This is not Kwame Nkrumah. I beg him to free himself of his advisers.”