The Meddler

By common consent in Accra, President Kwame Nkrumah, 51, is far too big a man for a small (pop. 6,000,000) land like Ghana; all his admirers think that Osagyefo (Great Man), as he is known around town, should be shared with the rest of Africa. No one endorses this thesis more enthusiastically than Osagyefo himself, who has made almost a fulltime career of meddling in the affairs of other African nations.

Nkrumah's slogan is Pan-Africanism, but his neighbors have long been convinced that the main target is extension of Ghana's--and Nkrumah's--own realm. Early this year, he espoused the cause of the dissident Sanwi tribesmen in the Ivory Coast on his western border, with the clear aim of winning their territory over to Ghana; on his east, he tried the same tactics with the Ewe tribal groups in hopes of disrupting newly independent Togo.

Vanishing Respect. For his trouble, Nkrumah gained nothing more than the suspicion of African leaders who once respected Africa's first successful freedom fighter. Observed the Ivory Coast's urbane President Felix Houphouet-Boigny: "I must make it clear to Nkrumah that he has neither the right nor the means to annex the smallest piece of the Ivory Coast." Asked Togo's Premier Sylvanus Olympio: "Does he really expect to absorb us with his puny bunch of tin soldiers and those two minesweepers he calls a navy? The man must be crazy!"

Failing to extend his own borders, Nkrumah then turned to grandiose but empty schemes like the wildly trumpeted Ghana-Guinea "union," an unlikely alliance in which Guineans who spoke only French were expected to sit in on Accra Cabinet meetings with Ghanaians who spoke only English, and vice versa. When Guinea's Sekou Toure got the $11 million loan from Nkrumah 'that went with the deal, he contemptuously let the rest of the arrangement--one flag, common currency, customs union--slide into oblivion.

Try, Try Again. But the worst debacle was Nkrumah's clumsy intervention in the Congo's chaos. "Whenever in doubt, consult me, brother," wrote Nkrumah to Premier Patrice Lumumba in September. "We have been in the game for some time now, and we know how to handle the imperialists." (As a Commonwealth Prime Minister, Nkrumah delights in his status as a member of the Queen's Privy Council, but never loses a chance to belabor "Brit ish imperialists".) Last week, with Lumumba in a jail cell and President Kasavubu recognized by the U.N. as the Congo's legitimate ruler, it was clear that Nkrumah had bet on the wrong man in the Congo; his own Ghanaian charge d'affaires, ham-handed Nathaniel Welbeck, had been thrown out of Leopoldville in disgrace and the latest planeload of diplomatic replacements from Accra turned back and sent home. Once again, Osagyefo's foreign policy was in tatters.

Seeking to divert attention from this humiliation. Nkrumah fired off a note to U.N. Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjold charging the U.S., Britain and France with supporting a Belgian effort to regain control of the Congo. Then he advised the U.N. haughtily that he had proposed to nine other African nations* the formation of an independent African military command to handle such difficult assignments in the future. Since he had not invited such unsympathetic nations as Nigeria (most populous country in Africa) or those of the French Community (except for Mali), he avoided the risk of a mass rejection; but even most of the countries Nkrumah canvassed would doubtless give him a polite no.

In case this project did not come off, Nkrumah had another dazzler up his sleeve. Back from a trip to Bamako, capital of poverty-stricken, landlocked Mali (pop. 4,500,000), he proudly announced the formation of another union. Hence forth, he said, the Ghana and Mali parliaments would meet jointly, to promote the growing unity movement in Africa--though the two countries have no common border or language. It was onward and upward for Osagyefo.

* U.A.R., Morocco, Tunisia, Libya, Sudan, Mali, Ethiopia, Guinea, Liberia.

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