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In Colonial Office jargon, this is known as "Creative Abdication": by showering concessions on the Africans instead of passing them out piecemeal, as in Malaya, the British hope to gain a friendly new Dominion. Nkrumah's attitude is: "Get out quick—but thanks for the memory."
The Land. Twice as big as Louisiana, and watered by the crocodile-haunted Volta River, the Gold Coast includes: 1) the Crown Colony proper, a strip of steaming forest along the surf-beaten coast; 2) the Kingdom of Ashanti, astride the interior plateau; and 3) the Northern Territories. The North is a sun-baked wasteland, many of whose primitive people live in holes in the ground; their women go naked, with a tuft of leaves before and behind.
The sturdy Ashantis, 900,000 strong, grub for gold and diamonds in the forest fastness of their hereditary King: Nana Osei Agyeman Prempeh II, a dignified man in his 60s who plays golf, keeps several dozen wives, and uses as the symbol of his office a glistening Golden Stool.*
But the life and wealth of the Gold Coast is in the teeming South, especially in Accra (pop. 150,000). The streets of Accra look as if half the professional junkmen in the world had set up business there. On the crowded verandas of tumbledown houses, barefoot boys work at sewing machines. The "shops" are mostly tables ranged along the sidewalks, and heaped high with kerosene lamps, loaves of bread, shoes, shirts and suitcases, earrings and patent medicines (a favorite is "brain pills"). There is no color bar in the Gold Coast: its 4,000 Britons (mostly civil servants) dance and drink with the Africans, sometimes intermarry.
The Boom. The foundation of the Gold Coast's high spirits is its burgeoning prosperity—the gift of the cocoa plant, which grows more than 20 feet tall in the dark, rain-drenched forests. Last year the Gold Coast's plantations, all owned by Africans, grew a third of the world's cocoa. And with prices at $10 a load (60 lbs.), the growers are crowding their mud huts with radios, sewing machines, bicycles and even TV sets (though there is no TV station to tune in to).
"God is growing cocoa," say the easy-going Gold Coasters. Their job is to cut the pods and lay the blue-green beans out to ferment and dry in the midday sun. The retail trade is handled by the "mammy-traders"—fat old market women, usually illiterate but smart enough to own and operate fleets of heavy trucks. Day & night, the "mammy-trucks" thunder down to the sprawling shantytown ports where fishermen put to sea in dugout canoes. The trucks bear striking legends: "The Lord Is My Shepherd—I Don't Know Why"; "Accra to Takoradi—With God's Help Anything Is Possible."
Magic & Machinery. It is barely 50 years since Britain conquered the Ashantis; in that time, Gold Coasters have spanned centuries of progress. African girls, not long ago bartered for cattle, are studying to become doctors and nurses. Bulldozers are digging the foundations for a 500-bed hospital close to the spot where the British, in 1896, found a huge brass pan that was used to collect the blood from human sacrifices.