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The figure of Nkrumah no longer looms so large as it did, for Nkrumah's highhanded suppression of those who oppose him has offended other leaders. "Ghanocracy," snorts Premier Mamadou Dia of Senegal, "does not interest us." And Premier Sylvanus Olympio of Togoland, on Ghana's border, wants to delay his own country's independence until Nigeria gets its in 1960, on the simple theory that Nigeria's 34.7 million people would never bow to Nkrumah's 4,800.000.
Nevertheless, however impractical it may sound at times, the yearning for a United States of Africa is real. Last month's creation of the Mali Federation —loosely encompassing the four former French territories of Senegal, the Voltaic Republic and the Republics Dahomey and Sudan—seems likely to be the pattern of things to come. The tide now running in Black Africa is toward independence, regional groupings, and a sort of African authoritarianism that pays its respects to Western democratic forms but rests on older habits of strong rule.
Though Toure's own constitution for Guinea carries a special article authorizing "the partial or total abandonment of sovereignty in the interest of African unity," he himself has not made up his mind to join the Mali Federation. Yet, as the man who cut loose from France and has so far avoided the disaster that seemed bound to follow, he could well be the figure about whom an increasingly independent French West Africa would rally.
Africans are impatient at having their history written by others. Guinea's Minister of Education is already planning new textbooks to paint such heroes as Samory not as bloodthirsty savages, but as the Caesars and the Charlemagnes of Africa. Future texts will hardly be able to ignore the man of whom the jigging, clapping Guineans sing:
Everybody loves Sékou Touré. Independence is sweet; Nothing is more beautiful than to be independent chez soi. Vive Sékou Touré! Vive éekou Touré, our clairvoyant chief!
* Roughly, the area south of latitude 20° north. * One of the "rules" was that no nation could set up a "sphere of influence" in Africa unless it had effectively occupied the area. Some immediate results: the Germans rushed into the Cameroons, driving the British merchants out; the British hastily set up the Oil Rivers Protectorate on the Niger Delta to keep the Germans out; the French sent garrisons into West Africa, occupied Conakry in 1887.