Pride of Africa

"Look at him, the white liberator of Africa," cracked an aide as Kwame Nkrumah (pronounced En-kroo-mah) poked his lathered dusky face out of a Blair House bathroom. Laughing lustily, the irrepressible Prime Minister of Ghana (pop. 4,800,000) finished his shave, draped on one of his $300 tribal robes of kente cloth, plunged into three days of red-carpet treatment in Washington. Fresh from a dignified state visit in Canada, he carefully controlled the spellbinding flamboyance that made him the "show boy" hero of the Dark Continent, but his warm humor hid just under the surface of his talk about somber problems.

Counterbalance? Seldom was a guest from a small country more welcome. The State Department saw the nationalism of his year-old country and the promise of his African leadership as a possible future counterbalance to rampant nationalism spreading from the Mideast. Beyond such practical prospects, the vigorous, fit-at-48 African leader seemed to give his Nasser-stung hosts a timely, personal reassurance that they have not become the world's abominable rich uncle. He knew all there was to know about the evils of U.S. segregation because, as a young student just in from Africa's Gold Coast, he had waited tables and taught classes to pay his way through seven years (1935-42) at Pennsylvania's Negro Lincoln University--and later at the University of Pennsylvania. He knew Communism for its imaginary best when he studied Karl Marx's writings more carefully than most Russian apologists. Yet his outspoken policy of "positive neutralism" leaned clearly toward the West's patient methods.

Careful to keep his in-between position clear to one and all ("Nasser is a friend of mine"), the Prime Minister laid down at the National Press Club one tough-minded neutral's way out of the Mideast impasse: "1) the substitution of a United Nations force for the American troops now in Lebanon, 2) the holding of free elections under U.N. supervision, and 3) the subsequent establishment of Lebanon as a free and independent state with the status of neutrality internationally guaranteed on the analogy of Austria."

Oil Pool? "If I had my way," he went on, "I would like to see the whole Middle East quarantined and the sovereignty of each and every one of the states guaranteed by the great powers." His practical preference for economic solutions rather than political revolutions came clearest in his proposal that "the oil resources of the area be brought under international control and used for the benefit of the local people."

Not since the visit of Robert Briscoe, Jewish Lord Mayor of Dublin, had a foreign visitor so quickly found a role in domestic politics. Some Deep South Democrats boycotted his speeches to Congress. Negro Congressman Adam Clayton Powell, crowded for reelection, made much of him when at week's end Nkrumah began his tour of the U.S. in Harlem. For his part, Nkrumah, laughing with a strong man's sympathy, hoped that he had given American Negroes a cause for pride by personifying the new Africa's promise of dignity in world affairs.

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