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Before a cheering Gold Coast Assembly, the governor announced last March that Her Majesty the Queen had been pleased to approve Kwame Nkrumah as full Prime Minister. But sweet as it was to Nkrumah, imperial praise is bitter gall to Gold Coast extremists, who accuse Nkrumah of selling out to the British. They say he likes his job too well to risk antagonizing Whitehall, and that his British advisers remain the real though hidden power in Gold Coast affairs.
The Importance of History. In the air-conditioned privacy of his Accra office, Nkrumah stoutly maintains that he should be called a "Marxian Socialist," and gives this account of his intellectual development:
"I read many books. There are many books on philosophy." He pauses a moment, then says triumphantly: "There was Hegel. Yes, Hegel. When people ask how did I come to study Marx, I tell them, from reading Hegel. And Kant, of course. The Bible, too. And the French Revolution . . . Then there is history. I have read Professor G. D. H. Cole's History of the Labour Party. And I have studied Asian history. There is much that is important in Asian history."
As for "imperialism," a word that Nkrumah once used in every other sentence, it is beginning to bore him. "I think I have the confidence of the masses," he says. "But about self-government, they must not make me go too fast—and I must not go too slow. If I tried to stop their urge to be free, they would turn on me. My job is to keep things level and steady . . ."
Road to Chaos. Whether Nkrumah—or anyone else—can keep things steady in West Africa is anybody's guess. There are plenty of doubting Thomases, especially in the Gold Coast, where the tribal chiefs call Nkrumah a city slicker, out for his own ends. South Africa's stern old Prime Minister Daniel Malan (see below) calls the Gold Coast experiment "ridiculous" and "a disastrous step for Africa." "How can illiterate people with so little civilization . . . govern themselves?" he asks. "It can't be done. It leads to chaos, and chaos leads to dictatorship or return to barbarism." Malan's dour prediction: "If other African native territories demand with the same success what the Negroes in the Gold Coast have gained, it means the expulsion of the white man from everywhere between South Africa and the Sahara."
East African whites, holding tight little islands of privilege in a sea of black tribesmen, agree with Malan. They fear—with good cause—that the Black Continent, so long the slave of other continents, is rediscovering a long-lost pride in being black. South of the Sahara, the black man is everywhere coming awake.
¶ In East Africa, the fanatic Mau Mau (TIME, Sept. 1 et seq.) terrorizes the whites, threatens to turn fertile Kenya Colony into another Malaya.
¶ In Nigeria (see box), nationalist hotheads ponder the strange prophecies of U.S.-educated Dr. Nnamdi (Zik) Azikiwe, the man who may one day become Prime Minister. Zik's theme: by 2944, Black Africa will have destroyed the armies of Europe, brought the U.S. to the "verge of extinction"; black missionaries will be preaching the arts of peace in "darkest Europe."