Solidarity Forever?

"Stop distributing those papers!" roared Ghana's Information Minister Nathaniel Azaroc Welbeck, banging his gavel as if it were a shoe. Before him, in the auditorium of the Kwame Nkrumah Ideological Institute at Winneba, a fishing village west of Accra, the Fourth Afro-Asian Peoples Solidarity Conference sat assembled in sober splendor. But not in unity. Despite Nkrumah's keynote speech calling for brotherhood among all "anti-imperialist, anticolonialist, anti-neocolonialist and anti-racialist" movements, Conference Chairman Welbeck admitted sadly: "Some of the delegates are quarreling among themselves."

Nor did they stop. Pakistan, backed by Red China, passed out leaflets accusing India of imperialist aggression in the Rann of Kutch. A flood of Indonesian papers described Malaysia as a stooge of British imperialism. One Angolan exile movement accused another Angolan exile movement of being "imperialist-supported." And, to top it all off, Chinese Communist Party Central Committee Member Liao Cheng-chih accused Russia of "collaborating with the United States to dominate the world." The fact that most of the 50 delegations present also managed to get in some licks against Washington did nothing at all for the cause of solidarity. "How boring they are with their constant repetition of U.S. imperialism," remarked one Russian observer.

For Nkrumah, who had hoped to use the conference to promote his own grandiose plans to entertain the chiefs of state of all African nations at the Organization of African Unity meeting in September, the whole affair approached disaster. Although such notable Afro-Asian lands as Cuba and Cyprus sent representatives to Winneba, the conference was pointedly ignored by all of Nkrumah's neighbors, and most of Africa's moderate states dis trust him. There was, in fact, only one redeeming event: to mark the conference opening Nkrumah unveiled a 75-ft. monument of himself. The work of a Polish sculptress, it is the biggest, solidest Nkrumah in the world.

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