The week before, from the Ghanaian embassy in Peking, he had delivered Kwame Nkrumah's unheeded message asking the army to return to its bar racks. Now, dapper and smiling in a grey checked suit, he was in Accra as the distinguished prisoner of the army, holding a press conference. Alex Quaison-Sackey, Nkrumah's trusted Foreign Minister and former president of the U.N. General Assembly, had deserted his master and flown home "to submit myself to the new government."The Redeemer, he said, "was a lost cause. I was not going to defend lost causes."
Lost cause or no, Nkrumah was doing what he could to recover his job from the army officers who had deposed him fortnight ago. Flitting from Peking to Moscow, he put in a plaintive demand for troops to restore him in command, then, in desperation, flew off to Guinea to see his friend Sékou Touré.
He was greeted by a 21-gun salute—and the ridiculous announcement that he had become "President and Party Chairman" of Guinea. "From today and even tomorrow and the day after tomorrow," declared Sekou, "whenever there is a heads-of-state conference, he who speaks in the name of Guinea can be no other than the comrade and brother Kwame Nkrumah."
It was all a mistake, of course. The appointment, it turned out, was only "honorary," based on a forgotten 1958 agreement to join their two nations. And in Accra, the whole affair was considered quite funny.
On the Bonfire. Throughout the nation, Ghanaians spent the week in one wild celebration after another. Strangers shouted "Happy New Year" to each other. Market mammies waddled through the streets in a boisterous procession. The Trades Union Congress spent one night piling socialist literature onto a giant bonfire in front of their headquarters, turned out the next day for a delirious march through town, chanting "Nkrumah, foolish boy!"
General Joseph Arthur Ankrah, chairman of the National Liberation Committee that now ruled Ghana, got work going on a new constitution that would eventually return the nation to civilian rule. "We do not want to have a dictatorship again," he said. In the meantime, all political parties would be banned. Ankrah also announced that new stamps and coins had already been ordered to replace those bearing The Redeemer's face.
Barricade of Boxes. Two days later, the general was back on the air with even better news. "Ghana's burden of taxation is the highest in Africa," he said, announcing a wide range of tax cuts on everything from basic foods to income. To spur the private enterprise that Nkrumah had always shunned, Ankrah pledged that private companies would no longer be forced to accept government "participation."