Election--and Jubilee

The white king across the seas had granted his 4,500,000 black subjects a new constitution. For the first time in the long history of British rule over West Africa's Gold Coast,* there would be general elections. Black voters would choose 38 members of an 84-seat parliament; the other 46 would be appointed by chiefs' councils and business groups; over all would be an executive council and British governor.

So it was decreed last year. But Gold Coast natives are mostly illiterate. First, there had to be an educational campaign.

Last December the colonial government sent out mobile vans with lecturers aboard equipped with loudspeakers, movie films, picture books, boogie-woogie records. From Accra, the capital, they beat through the bush for six weeks, covering 22,000 miles and 1,300 settlements. Usually the lecturers were welcomed with calabashes of palm wine, especially when word got around that they could forecast wedding dates for the girls. Here & there villagers greeted them with stones, for a rumor had also got around that the vans were after taxes or conscripts for war.

When the electoral system had been explained and 663,000 voters registered, a lively political campaign began. One hundred candidates ran for the 38 parliamentary seats. By election day last week, native excitement stood at a jubilee pitch.

One woman cast her vote, then burst into a tribal song & dance. Politicians could not come closer than 200 yards from the ballot boxes; at that distance they set up palm-leaf booths with a carnival air.

A chanting, jigging crowd gathered before Accra's town hall as the returns came in. Thirty-one of the 38 elective seats went to the Convention People's Party, an anti-imperialist group which preaches self-government. The loudest shout arose over the victory of the C.P.P. leader Kwame Nkrumah, 41, a firebrand orator who had attended Lincoln University in Pennsylvania. (A.B. 1939; Bachelor of Sacred Theology, 1942; M.A. 1942, University of Pennsylvania.) Nkrumah was not among the crowd; a year ago he had been clapped into Cell No. 9 in Accra prison (two-year term) for sedition and inciting workers to strike. At the time of his arrest, a blank Communist Party card and a paper calling for a West African soviet socialist republic were found in Nkrumah's belongings. Observers of the Gold Coast political scene said, however, that Nkrumah was "a mere student of Communism," rather than a party member.

This week, "as an act of grace on the inauguration of the new constitution," the Gold Coast governor ordered Nkrumah's release from jail.

*In the 17th Century English traders built a fort on the Gold Coast, competed fiercely with Dutch, Danes and Portuguese for slaves and gold. Early in the 19th Century the slave traffic was abolished. Today, in a jungle domain almost as large as Oregon, the leading enterprises are cocoa production, gold and manganese mining.

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