A Royal Visitor

All Accra turned out last week to greet Queen Elizabeth's husband, Prince Philip. Tribal chiefs sat under ceremonial umbrellas at the airport. Prime Minister Kwame Nkrumah was there, beaming, and 150,000 people lined the streets to shout "Akwaaba" (welcome). There were many kind references to Queen Elizabeth, whose pregnancy prevented her being there. But Prince Philip could hardly travel anywhere in the Commonwealth and find less evidence of her influence. His official cavalcade rolled slowly down Kwame Nkrumah Avenue and turned into Kwame Nkrumah Circle. A huge statue of Nkrumah confronted him at Parliament House. Before Prince Philip were massed miles of red-yellow-and-green Ghana flags, but scarcely a union jack. Not once did Philip hear God Save the Queen. Ghana's newspapers, its stamps and its currency show Kwame Nkrumah, not Elizabeth.

With Nkrumah at his side, Philip moved gamely through a six-day round of sightseeing. At Accra's Nautical College, he had the appropriate words of praise for the new 150-man Ghanaian navy, which last week got its first craft--two British minesweepers. Resplendent in his white field marshal's uniform, Philip stopped off to present new Queen's colors to the trim Ghana regiment's 3rd Battalion; he also visited the headquarters of the air force, which now numbers 17 cadets. Politely, the duke inspected the ambitious new harbor project at Tema, 18 miles east of Accra, and the site of Nkrumah's projected $600 million Volta River project.

As he prepared to leave the country, Philip assured his hosts that the Queen herself would be coming out in 1961 to pay a postponed visit. Though the thought was delicately left unspoken, everyone knew that by then Ghana would probably be the Commonwealth's third republic, recognizing Elizabeth, as India and Pakistan do, not as Queen but merely as symbolic head of the Commonwealth.

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