Ghana: On to Dictatorship

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It was as if Britain's Queen Elizabeth II had never made her royal visit to Ghana. Scarcely a week after her departure, all signs that Kwame Nkrumah would seek closer relations with the British Commonwealth and ease the repressive measures against his opponents had vanished. Still in jail, with little hope of release, were more than 1,000 Ghanaians rounded up during the visit, ostensibly for the Queen's security. Decorations praising the Queen were quickly struck, and newspapers abruptly dropped any mention of the tour.

Both impressed and appalled by the wild acclaim that Ghana's people gave the Queen, Nkrumah and his advisers were toning down a violently anti-British White Paper that accused British interests of fomenting and financing rebellion against the Ghanaian government. But criticism of the "foreign press conspiracy" reached fever pitch. Ousted from Ghana for "false, tendentious and obnoxious" reports were two British journalists.* Their crime: stating the obvious fact that Ghana is drifting toward an oppressive, Red-lining dictatorship.

Censored Scholarship. As long as the Volta River loan still hung in the balance. Osagyefo (The Redeemer) is willing to court the favor of the U.S. Opening the U.S. Trade Fair in Accra last week. Nkrumah ogled an array of exhibits from tractors to a U.S. Negro bathing beauty, made a great show of comparing Ghana's present stage of development with that of the early American colonies. Actively playing the neutrality game, however, he asserted that "capital and technical knowledge have no respect for political frontiers," and insisted that he had no reason to apologize for "the steps we have taken recently to strengthen our trade and economic relations with the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, and China."

Meanwhile, Nkrumah continued to tighten his control over the country, had himself installed as chancellor of the University of Ghana.

At the same time, Osagyefo supervised the drafting of a new education act that would give the state firm control over all Ghanaian education. Under the provisions of the new bill (which is certain to pass the rubber-stamp Parliament), government-appointed school board governors will exercise censorship over textbooks and teaching methods so that they hew closely to the government's chosen line. Even Nkrumah's leftist neighbor, Guinea's Sekou Touré, was put off by this action. Refusing to come to Accra for the installation of Nkrumah, Touré said to a visitor: "Who ever heard of a politician and head of state taking over the direction of all a country's higher education so blatantly? It's too obvious."

The Man from Jerusalem. No less obvious was Osagyefo's growing Messiah complex. Apparently Nkrumah really believes that he is the "Saviour of Africa." To associates, he said recently: "I am like the man who walked into Jerusalem 2,000 years ago and got the people to follow him." A newspaper has published a new lexicon of titles for Nkrumah that make royal rankings seem pale by comparison. Among the titles:

∙Ahuna Bo Birim—He whose presence electrifies.

∙Atenka Suro—He whose fame is dreaded far and wide.

∙Bre Nsem Ase—He who is able to han dle unmanageable events.

∙Katamanto—He who never breaks an oath.