70
"Only pray," the Ambassador said.
"Mr. Mahoney, I am kneeling."
JASON
THATCHER
Six weeks later a man with a rifle fired five shots at the President of
Ghana and missed.
The first Englishman I met when I arrived in Ghana in 1962 said
that "if Stalin were running this country maybe he could organize the
chaos into anarchy." The Government had just announced it was draw–
ing up plans to have Ghanaians-in the interests of African unity-drive
down the right side of the road, as in the former French colonies, instead
of the left; expatriates were saying with due cause that the plan was to
start off with a six-month period when the Government would legalize
driving on either side. In 1963 the Government's compulsory savings
scheme was dropped on the advice of a Ghanaian economist who
claimed that the people didn't like anything that was compulsory; it was
replaced by an income tax. Before Parliament unanimously passed the
bill extending the period of confinement under the Preventive Detention
Act from five years to ten, a good many MP's protested strenuously,
arguing not that the P.D.A. was unjust or undemocratic, not that five
years was quite enough time for a man to be held without trial, but
that it was humiliating to be cooped up. A village tailor succeeded in
beating a murder rap because he convinced the judge that his victim had
called him silly. Finally, after the referendum in which Ghana was voted
a one-party state, an MP from the United Party, which was banned a
long time ago, told Parliament that Ghana was not a one-party state
no matter how much the Government said it was.
Dr. Nkrumah's Convention People's Party proclaims that the country
is Marxist-Leninist, or else Marxist-Nkrumaist. Recently when someone
said in Parliament that Ghana was socialist, the parliamentarians had a
good laugh; but perhaps soon they'll be glad their laughter wasn't record–
ed in the minutes.
In Ghana, this most prosperous country on the continent north
of the Witwatersrand, something is shaking loose for which Europe and
America have no descriptive literature. Maybe because white intellectuals
have had their affairs, congenial or hostile, vicarious usually, with
the Soviet Left, it hasn't yet been taken for granted that the world's
new revolutionaries are apathetic to Russian Marxism. But just as we
don't judge African
~rt
from our own culture's esthetics, we had better
not judge African politics from our own culture's political experience. We
must understand that to most Africans Mau Mau was as worthy a cause
as Loyalist Spain, that the CIA is more menacing than the
K.G.B. ,
and
