72
JASON THATCHER
Ababa, but in Ghana it was the return from London of Otumfuo the
Asantehene, Nana Sir Osei Agyemang Prempeh II, K .B.E., paramount
chief of the Ashanti Confederacy, whose divine office had once attached
to its rule the title "Osagyefo," which means something like "he who
has redeemed his people from paying tribute to another people." (Kwame
Nkrumah is now called Osagyefo the President.) The cocoa-rich Ashantis
had never been altogether disciplined by the British during Gold Coast
days, and when Nkrumah opened the road to independence the Ashantis
organized the National Liberation Movement to restore their own tribal
sovereignty outside Nkrumah's designs for a non-tribal nation, one and
indivisible. In their capital, Kumasi, they used terrorism to obstruct the
C.P.P., and when Parliament outlawed tribal politics, they united with
smaller tribal and religious parties to form the United Party. Finally
Otumfuo himself was exiled, in December, 1961 , to London for "medical
treatment."
No government of Ghana can long endure without a t least token
compliance from the Ashantis, and the President has been canny enough
to neutralize them and even gain support among them with pork-barrel
bribes, education, and intimidation. After an anti-Government strike in
September, 1961, however, which started among the industrial workers
in coastal Takoradi and followed the railroad workers to Kumasi
in
the
interior, the Government, which had been astonished by it all, blamed the
U.P. (not wholly without cause ) and detained several prominent Ashanti
oppositionists. Then the Government generously provided for the Asante–
hene's medical care.
The detainees were released in December, 1962, and at last in
May, 1963, Otumfuo sailed to Ghana and spent a week in Accra. I was in
Kumasi when he flew back to his people. The police platoons at Kumasi
Aerodrome could scarcely manage to restrict the crowd in the welcoming
area to holders of a special pink card issued for the arrival.
I'd Rone with three Americans, Julius, a lecturer at Kwame
Nkrumah University in Kumasi, his wife Barbara, and their weekend
guest, Judy, a graduate student from Columbia University. As we left the
airport, his blue Volkswagen diminished the pageantry of a traffic jam
that looked like an assembly line at Mercedes-Benz. (In Kumasi, even
the taxis are Mercedes-Benz.) Lining the road to the Asantehene's Palace
were school children in the cowboy and cowgirl uniforms of the Ghana
Young Pioneers, waving their toy Ghanaian flags, red, gold, and green,
composed around a central black star. Everyone seemed to be giggling
at the
abruni,
the white people, who, they must have thought, had
accidentally caught themselves in this tedious African procession honking
and creeping into the city.
