(See Cover]
The only way to learn to play the harp is to play the harp.
—Aristotle
Through the streets of Accra, capital of the Gold Coast, Democracy ran joyously wild.
The women in the parade were slim and graceful, furled like striped umbrellas into acres of cotton cloth—some green, some plum, some crimson, and all decorated with patterns of elephants, tropical fish, signs of the zodiac and portraits of the late King George VI. The men, short, square and knobbly at the knees, wore Palm Beach shirts, open at the neck and hanging, like Harry Truman's, outside their shorts; a few had flowing togas, draped off one shoulder so that they looked like British soccer players decked out as Romans. Everyone in the procession was black, and proud of it.
Through the streets they pranced, gorgeous and irrepressible, beating drums, blowing horns, hopping over the open sewers to the tune of the Third Man Theme played by a marching Dixieland band, sometimes dancing a quaint, shuffling samba, some balancing trays of chewing gum and candies on their heads.
To a handful of visitors from outside, the spectacle was a near thing to a combined operation of the Shriners, the Mardi Gras and a chorus of the Metropolitan Opera. In fact, the paraders were "We the people" of the most wide-awake land in tropical Africa: the British Gold Coast. They had gathered to cheer their leader on the third anniversary of National Liberation Day.
Suddenly, like the Red Sea parting before the Israelites,the noisy crowd opened. Through a forest of waving palm branches, an open car bore a husky black man with fine-sculptured lips, melancholy eyes and a halo of frizzy black hair. The Right Honorable Kwame Nkrumah (pronounced En-kroom-ah), Bachelor of Divinity, Master of Arts, Doctor of Law and Prime Minister of the Gold Coast, waved a white handkerchief to his countrymen as they fought to touch the hem of his tunic. Then, as the band hit the groove, he jigged his broad shoulders in time to the whirling rhythm, and passed on, exalted. "You see," cried a delirious Gold Coaster, grabbing the arm of a wondering white man, "it is real—REAL! Real democracy. He is one of us. A man of the people. Now that you have seen, you must understand: we can govern ourselves."
Creative Abdication. The "we" are 4,500,000 tribesmen who speak such languages as Dagomba, Akan, Ewe and Ga and are scattered across a rectangular patch of jungle, swamp and bushland that juts into the westward bulge of Africa, north of the coast that was once called the "White Man's Grave." Seven out of ten are illiterate, more than half believe in witchcraft, yet the happy-go-lucky Gold Coasters have been chosen by Imperial Britain to pioneer its boldest experiment in African home rule. In 1951 the British gave the Gold Coast its first democratic constitution; last year they designated as Prime Minister a histrionic radical who had once openly flirted with Communism: Kwame ("Show Boy") Nkrumah. Today, in the Gold Coast cabinet, only three of eleven members are British civil servants, and in Nkrumah's words, they are cooperating in making themselves expendable.