Uproot the Enemy

The regular policemen who were herded into the caravan of trucks one night last week knew nothing of their assignment: they were simply told that they were being moved out into the country. But as the trucks drove through the streets of Accra, the officers in charge would order them halted at certain houses, would declare that there was something strange going on inside, and would then march in and arrest the owner. Prime Minister Kwame Nkrumah's Voice of Ghana told his people just what the mysterious roundup was all about. A plot, by something called the "Zenith Seven," to assassinate the Prime Minister and to overthrow the government had been uncovered, and the government was out to get 43 ringleaders.

To the Association Wards. A curious silence settled over Ghana at the news. Prime Minister Kwame Nkrumah has been having trouble holding together his young country (which got its independence from Britain in March 1957). As eager foster parents of the new nation, the British have generally sided with Nkrumah's need to assert jurisdiction over tribal chieftains, and have made understanding noises about "growing pains." Only a fortnight ago the Mother of Parliaments appropriated $3,500 for a speaker's chair of "dignified design" to be presented to the Ghana Parliament. But was the child proving an apt pupil in democracy? For all his deportations and his juggling of the constitution (TIME, Nov. 17), Nkrumah had never before resorted to so drastic an action as the mass arrests--or trumped up a more questionable excuse. It so happened that the 43 included the entire executive committee of the Accra branch of the opposition party, and all but two of the 27 who opposed the government in the last municipal election. The exceptions: a man too old to make trouble, another already deported to Nigeria.

Bundled into "association wards" (i.e., cells) in St. James Fort prison, the prisoners were forbidden to see their relatives or even to receive food from them. At one point, Nkrumah's strong-arm Minister of the Interior, Krobo ("The Crowbar") Edusei, inspected them along with an escort of guards armed with truncheons. Over the radio the government insisted that it had no desire to curb the opposition, even proclaimed the end of a two-month-old ban on political meetings. But The Crowbar, a mug through and through, was not yet done with his work.

To the Slaughter. "What is coming is coming," cried Edusei in a street speech. "The job of the politician is to uproot his enemies. Others who are involved in the plot and have not been arrested will be, one by one." Those already in jail, added Edusei, would be kept there five years, and anyone visiting them more than four times would end up in prison too. Edusei then announced that the government was withdrawing the passports of members of the opposition, added that he had thousands of secret policemen at work watching for potential subversives. And what if the people had resisted the mass arrest? "I would have brought out my armored cars and slaughtered them like hell."

Such bawling tough talk was apparently a bit too much for Prime Minister Nkrumah; the government hastily declared that it had "not yet decided" to withdraw any passports (though in the past the buffoonish Edusei has often only been guilty of announcing news prematurely and a little too vigorously). Later the government announced that Edusei had been removed as Interior Minister, and that Nkrumah himself would take on his job. Taking advantage of the new freedom to hold public meetings. Opposition Leader K. A. Busia ridiculed the idea of a plot against the government: the 43 so-called conspirators, being politicians of many factions, were scarcely on speaking terms with one another, so, "how could they plot?" Later he laid down a moving challenge to the government. "I am a sick man," he told a hushed and tense audience. "I have no strength. I cannot fight even a schoolboy. I have never killed a fowl. But I am fighting Nkrumah with a weapon no police army or bomb can destroy. And we shall win!"

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