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Jail was probably the best thing that ever happened to Kwame Nkrumah. It made him a martyr. The British sent out sound trucks to introduce the illiterate Gold Coasters to the intricacies of voting. They got a tremendous reception, especially when word got around that the trucks had a juju that could forecast betrothal dates for the village girls. But C.P.P. did even better. They provided the Gold Coasters with a slogan ("Free-DOM"), a salute (a raised forearm with all five fingers outspread to denote the Five Freedoms), and a vision of Utopia. They also had a hero: Nkrumah, "rotting in jail." Outside Jamestown prison, where Nkrumah sat mending fish nets in Cell No. 9, demonstrators sang:
Kwame Nkrumah's body lies amold'ring in the jail. . . But his soul goes marching out.
P ... G ... The election was a landslide. When the ballot boxes were opened (with 700 screwdrivers especially imported from Britain), C.P.P. had won 80% of the vote, and Nkrumah—still in jail —had swept Accra.
At this point, Sir Charles Noble Arden-Clarke, Governor of the Gold Coast and a wise old Africa hand, took the gamble of his career. The governor had put Nkrumah in jail; now he let him out and appointed him Leader of Government Business, with most of the powers of a Prime Minister. Whitehall approved, but the Director of Gold Coast Prisons emphatically did not. "I am not prepared to take orders from one of my former inmates," he snapped, and resigned in a huff.
Arden-Clarke's gamble seems to be paying off. Prison life sobered Nkrumah, who was never a glutton for punishment; responsibility awed his adolescent party. Nkrumah could not resist wearing a Nehru-style cap with the letters P.G. (for Prison Graduate) embroidered on the side, but he pumped the governor's hand and agreed that since the constitution has made him the virtual boss of the Gold Coast, he might as well give it a trial. "I am a friend of Britain," he piously announced in his first big speech. "I desire for the Gold Coast the status of a Dominion within the Commonwealth . . ."
The British were delighted. "Only a fellow with a real understanding of statesmanship could have done it," said a Colonial Office man. All the same, Whitehall reserved the three vital ministries of Defense, Finance and Foreign Affairs for the white British members of the cabinet.
The Government. At first, the black man's habit of deferring to the white impeded business: instead of making up their own minds, the black ministers looked to the governor for decisions. But Arden-Clarke soon put a stop to that. "That's for you chaps to decide," he told Nkrumah. "After all, you are the government."
Nkrumah caught on fast, and was soon hedging and weaving like an old Tammany pro. C.P.P. had promised to revoke a government order which compelled cocoa growers to destroy diseased plants; in power, Nkrumah found that to do so would ruin the industry. He simply swallowed his words and let the order stand.