The world has known many tyrants, but few were as reckless, as demanding, as pretentious, as noisy and, at the end, as rejected as Kwame Nkrumah. He was the founder of his country and had been the very symbol of black African independence. Yet last week when he was overthrown, scarcely a tear was shed for him in Africa or anywhere else in the world.
The end came while Nkrumah was flying toward Peking on a self-appointed, self-inflated peace mission. Like the Nigerian coup six weeks earlier, it was led by Sandhurst-trained officers who knew precisely what they were doing. At 4:30 a.m. in the predawn darkness of Accra, two brigades of Ghanaian troops quietly took over the airport, the cable office, all government ministries and the government radio station. While early-morning market mammies stared, Jeeploads of soldiers moved into the suburban gardens of government Ministers and tanks deployed around Nkrumah's presidential compound itself.
White Handkerchiefs. There was little resistance. Nkrumah's presidential guard, dug in behind the four concentric walls surrounding the compound, held out for several hours; but by noon, downtown Accra was jammed with jubilant Ghanaians, dancing in the streets, cheering, singing, many of them wearing white handkerchiefs around their heads and white clay on their faces as a token of victory. "Fellow citizens," announced Colonel E. K. Kotoka, one of the coup leaders, in a broadcast over Radio Ghana, "I have come to inform you that the military, with the cooperation of the police, have taken over the government. The myth surrounding Nkrumah has been broken."
It was quite a myth while it lasted. In his 15 years as Ghana's Prime Minister, Founding Father, President, Commander in Chief and Osagyefo (Redeemer), Francis Nwia Kofie Kwame Nkrumah, son of a village goldsmith, had striven with some success to make himself all but synonymous with God. His face appeared on Ghanaian stamps and coins, statues of him littered the country, and his name flashed in neon in Accra. Ghanaian schoolchildren began each day by reciting that "Nkrumah is our Messiah, Nkrumah never dies." Among his official titles were Victorious Leader, the Great Messiah, His Messianic Majesty, the Pacifier, the Aweful, and His High Dedication.
Maginot Hilton. Ghana used to be known as the Gold Coast, and independence, in 1957, came with a silver lining. With cocoa exports thriving and the beginnings of a modern industrial plant, the country had $560 million in foreign currency reserves, boasted one of Africa's highest per capita incomes. Nkrumah squandered it on such expensive status symbols as an international jet airline, which loses almost twice as much money as it earns, and a $20 million international conference site which includes a bulletproof, bombproof, twelve-story apartment hotel that Accra wags call "the Maginot Hilton." To promote his image abroad, he opened 61 foreign embassies; his entourage to Peking last week numbered no fewer than 71 persons.