Welcoming the Guests

"I am here to see and learn," said Britain's Harold Macmillan carefully as he stepped off his plane in humid Accra to begin a month in Africa. This was the thing to say, for Prime Minister Kwame Nkrumah, his host for the first lap of the trip, was clearly in a teaching mood.

Although there were few banners up for the occasion and Nkrumah's own party paper launched a bitter attack against "British imperialism" on the eve of Macmillan's arrival, Nkrumah himself was cordial enough to his guest, treating him to lunch at a picturesque spot, high on a river bluff, carefully cleared of snakes and insects in advance. The two also got on famously at a statehouse banquet with fine wines and pheasant flown in from Britain, and later at a stag dinner given by the British Governor General. But the formal business between the Premiers of Britain and Ghana could be dispatched with brevity; in 5 1/2 days Macmillan and Nkrumah spent only two hours in serious formal discussion, and conversation languished, not out of any antipathy but because neither could think of much that needed saying.

For Macmillan and Lady Dorothy, the fun came in strolls through Accra's colorful street markets, where mobs of merchant "mammies" screamed "Akwaaba" (welcome) and jovially spread bright kente cloth on the streets for the Macmillans to walk on. Showered with gifts, Macmillan gingerly examined a preferred smoked fish, retorting, "What, no chips?" Natty in a grey tropical suit, the Prime Minister even mounted a surf craft to be paddled briefly out to sea by a team of Accra's skillful boatmen.

The Macmillans tactfully stayed home when Nkrumah addressed a huge crowd at Accra's main arena to celebrate the tenth anniversary of Nkrumah's independence campaign against Britain, begun back in the days when Ghana was the Gold Coast colony. "I wish to sound a note of warning," shouted Nkrumah, as the throng shrieked "eee-yah" in approval, "that the enemies of African freedom, namely the colonial powers and their imperialist collaborators, are planning hard to sabotage African unity . . . They are prepared to grant political independence, but are also planning to dominate the African territories in the economic and technical fields."

Next night at a formal banquet, Nkrumah, unworried by any possible inconsistency, turned to Macmillan and voiced the hope that Britain "will consider favorably any request for further assistance that we may make in the future, particularly in connection with the Volta River project," a $170 million hydroelectric scheme for which Nkrumah would like Britain to lend Ghana half the money. Macmillan's bland response: Britain would follow Ghana's economic needs "with sympathetic interest." He added an oblique comment on Nkrumah's performance the day before: "If we cannot cooperate, but sit down in opposite camps shouting slogans at each other, we shall all suffer grievous harm."

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