Birthday of a Nation

For months an army of architects and planners had been busy hiding the squalor of the teeming (pop. 200,000) British Gold Coast city of Accra behind a glittering fac,ade of chrome-plated supermodernity. In the last-minute bustle, newly imported foreign taxicabs tangled endlessly with native "mammy wagons" crammed with the smiling denizens of the back country come to town to see the show. Everybody stared proudly at the vistas of the future on every side:a new pagodalike Statehouse, an ornate new bank building, a government-run, air-conditioned hotel, and a great new department store, where African ladies with babies slung on their backs rode gleaming Escalators with proprietary aplomb.

In the middle of it all, charging about in his official Rolls-Royce to supervise every detail of the arrangements, was the tireless, 47-year-old, U.S.-educated (Pennsylvania's Lincoln University) Akan tribesman who was responsible for it all. Last week, as the church bells of Accra tolled midnight on the sixth day of March, the moment for which Dr. Kwame Nkrumah and his people had long waited at last arrived: on the flagpole atop the Parliament building of Accra, the Union Jack of Great Britain came fluttering down, and the red, yellow and green national flag of the new nation of Ghana was raised in its place.

"At long last," shouted Kwame Nkrumah to a crowd of 50,000 rapt Africans, "the battle has ended. Ghana, our beloved country, is free forever. Let us pause for one minute and give thanks to Almighty God." For 60 seconds the crowd stayed silent. Then a mighty roar shook the air: "Ghana is free!"*

Warmth & Hoopla. Next morning, before a packed audience of visiting dignitaries,* Ghana became a new and independent state (pop. 4,600,000) within the Commonwealth. Representing Queen Elizabeth and clad in a white chiffon gown topped by a dazzling tiara, Elizabeth's aunt, the Duchess of Kent, read the monarch's speech: "My government in the United Kingdom have ceased from today to have any authority in Ghana." "We part from the former imperial power," answered the equally dignified Kwame Nkrumah, first Prime Minister of Ghana, "with warmest feelings of friendship and good will."

That the transfer of power should be so warm and friendly was due in large part to the tact and imagination of the Gold Coast's governor for the past nine years, Charles Arden-Clarke, who boldly released Nkrumah from jail when Nkrumah's party won the Gold Coast's first general election. The governor met Nkrumah, trusted him; in a year Nkrumah was Prime Minister. In time Nkrumah's own suspicion and hostility disappeared.

This or That. After last week's official solemnities were over, Ghana and its guests let themselves go in a week of frolic. A bop concert by New Orleans Jazzman Wilbur de Paris vied with a Christian thanksgiving service in Accra stadium and a resplendent durbar in honor of the duchess. There were parades and reviews and garden parties and banquets, a flypast of R.A.F. jet bombers and a traditional sprinkling of gin on the ground to ward off evil spirits.

And to top it all, there was a gala independence ball in the marbled hall of the new Statehouse, where the Negro Prime Minister of Ghana, after assiduous practice beforehand, held the aunt of the Queen of England in his arms and danced a brief but sprightly pas de deux to the tune of Gotta Be This or That.

* Hard put to find a suitably African name for their new nation, the Ghanaians picked that of a black empire which flourished during the Middle Ages in the neighborhood of Timbuktu on the grounds that some of their ancestors probably came from there.

*Ranging from U.S. Vice President Nixon (see NATIONAL AFFAIRS) and Britain's Lord Privy Seal R. A. ("Rab") Butler to Red China's Marshal Nien Yung-cheng. Among especially invited U.S. Negroes: Dr. Ralph Bunche, Representative Adam Clayton Powell Jr., the Rev. Martin Luther King, A. Philip Randolph, president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, and Mrs. Louis ("Satchmo") Armstrong.

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