A Consuming Fire

With a blare of bugles and a rattle of drums, indignant speakers mounted a platform in Accra one evening last week for an "emergency demonstration" by Kwame Nkrumah's Convention Peoples' Party and the Ghana Labor Congress against TIME. An Anglican parson besought God to "destroy those who print what is not true." Led on by vanguard activists ("Comrades recruited from among the most politically educated section of party leadership [to] become educators of broad masses, especially of our illiterate comrades," Nkrumah has called them), the audience shouted Nkrumah's slogans, and Ghana "market mammies" performed tribal dances. A pile of copies of TIME was set ablaze, and Tawia Adamafio, the new secretary-general of the party, cried, "TIME is a dirty, filthy paper, bankrupt mentally, fit to be kept in the toilet or pushed into the limbo of degradation." Adamafio warned: "If this happens again, we shall hold demonstrations, and we know the embassy to which we shall march."

The "imperialist cowboy propaganda" in TIME to which Nkrumah objected were articles in the Dec. 14 and Dec. 21 issues, particularly one story reporting the flouting of Nkrumah's wishes by Kenya's rising young (29) Tom Mboya, who formed a powerful new rival Pan-African labor group at a November meeting in Lagos, Nigeria, right in Nkrumah's own West Africa. As the evening progressed, it became clear that Mboya was what the vanguard activists were most upset about, and that TIME was guilty of capitalist intrigue when it "dared" compare Nkrumah and Mboya. "Through Kwame Nkrumah, Tom Mboya happened to be built up as an African nationalist leader," explained Labor Official John Tettegah. "Now Mboya has become so conceited he thinks he is God and the world is his." Added N. A. Welbeck, Nkrumah's Minister with Special Duties: "Mboya is an imp not fit to lick Nkrumah's boots . . . Nkrumah is a consuming fire. Anybody who tries to destroy him will be destroyed first." Everyone knows, concluded Party Secretary Adamafio, that "Nkrumah is a superman, master and god on his own scene. America had its Lincoln, Russia its Lenin, Britain its Nelson. Nkrumah is our god."

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