View of the World (14 page)

T
HE IMPORTANT THING
to bear in mind when visiting what was once the Gold Coast and is now Ghana is that the advice liberally proffered by old Gold Coast hands in retirement will be designed to perpetuate a nostalgic legend. You are warned to prepare yourself for a scarcely tamed White Man’s Grave, where you do not omit to take Sensible Precautions, stick to sundowners, keep your possessions in an ant-proof metal box, and wipe the mildew off your boots at regular intervals. I fell a victim to this propaganda to the extent of buying a pair of mosquito boots before I left London. They were made of soft, supple leather, fitted very tightly at the ankle, and they reached almost to the knee, beneath which they could be drawn tight with tapes. I put them on once only, in the privacy of a hotel bedroom, noting that worn with khaki drill shorts they made me look like some grotesque Caucasian dancer. After that I packed them away. It was a symbolic act. I had observed that in Accra, Europeans in these days seemed to make it a point of honour to go bareheaded in the noonday sun. The sundowners seemed to have gone out with sola topis. You popped into a bar and drank a pint of good German or Danish lager whenever you felt like it. It was hot in Accra, but not so hot as New York at its worst and – in the dry season – not so humid either, and down by the shore there was usually a cool breeze blowing in from the Atlantic.

Accra turned out to be a cheerful, vociferous town with an architectural bone-structure of old arcaded colonial buildings – some of them vaguely Dutch or Danish in style. The streets, in the English manner, had been cut in all directions. There were corrugated-iron shack warrens right in the
heart of the town, a wide belt of garden suburbs, and isolated slabs of modern architecture looking like enormous units of sectional furniture. As usual, the English had thrown away the chance – always seized by the French in their colonies – of turning the sea-front into a pleasant,
tree-shaded
promenade. The surf crashing on the beaches was out of sight behind the warehouses, put up at a time when trade was all and the merchants were content to put off their gracious living until they had made their pile on the Coast and could get away with it back to England before malaria or the Yellow Jack finished them off. The streets were crowded with a slow-moving mass of humanity: the men in togas, the women in the Victorian-and Edwardian-style dresses originally
introduced
by the missionaries but now transformed by the barbaric gaiety of the material from which they are confected. The designs with which these cottons are printed demand some comment. They are produced in Manchester, in Brussels and in Paris, from African originals, and
although
they recall the most striking Indian saris, there is something fevered and apocalyptic in the vision behind the drawing itself, that seems to be purely African. The best results are supposed to be produced by West African artists as the result of dreams, and the artist may mix abstract symbols and careful realism in a single design, with a result that often has a drugged and demonic quality, like a descriptive passage from
The Palm Wine Drinkard
. Dark blue birds flit through an ashen forest of petrified trees; silver horses with snake-entwined legs charge furiously into a sable sky; huge metallic insects glint among the lianas of a macabre jungle; the black bowmen of Lascaux pursue griffins, fire-birds and tigers over fields of gold, with autumn leaves the size of shields tumbling about their shoulders. Why do European women rarely if ever wear these materials, although there are a few out-of-the-way shops in London and Paris where they are stocked? Perhaps because to do so would be to risk extinguishing themselves.

Amazingly an Englishman can be at home in this atmosphere, which somehow, in defiance of the genial African sun, the colour, and the seething vitality, succeeds in reproducing a little of the flavour of life in England. The African citizen of Ghana, for example, is reserved in his
manner compared, say, with his counterpart in Dakar. It is hard to believe, in fact, that a century of independence will be long enough to expunge the essentially British odour of life in the Gold Coast: the cooking (Brown Windsor soup and steak-and-kidney pie), the class observances, the flannel dances, the tea-parties, and the cricketing metaphors in the speech. Even the paint on the fences in a suburb of Accra is of a kind of sour apple green never found outside Britain and her dominions. The middle-class African of Accra, too, lives in home surroundings indistinguishable from those favoured by his equivalent in the London suburbs. There is the same affection for whimsy and humorous pretence: china ducks in flight up the wallpaper, Rin-
Tin-Tin
book-ends, toby jugs, telephones disguised as dolls, poker-work mottoes, and jolly earthenware elves in the back garden.

It is generally believed that fraternisation between whites and blacks is less complete in African territories colonised by the British than in those colonised by the French. This does not apply in West Africa. In Dakar the colour bar is officially non-existent, but it is extraordinary to see an African in a good hotel or a fashionable restaurant. The reason one is given is that they do not feel comfortable in such surroundings. The natives of Accra are not overawed in this way, and there is a fairly proportional colour representation – say ten Africans to one European – in all public places of entertainment. It was in fact quite the normal thing that my first experience of Accra night-life should be in the company of Africans.

This was in early March. Ghana was just about to receive its
independence
. There had been a week of celebrations, and the streets were awash with restless, slightly jaded revellers. My host was a minor political figure we will call Joseph, and he had brought with him his secretary, Corinne. We started the evening at the new Ambassadors Hotel, which is said to be one of the three best hotels in Africa. At this time there was no hope of staying there, as the Government of Ghana had filled it with foreign VIPs invited for the celebrations. We sat in the bar and admired the photomontage on the wall, which included a dancing scene from
Guys and Dolls
and the towers of the Kremlin. Behind the palms a pianist in tails was striking soft, rich chords on a grand piano. Joseph and Corinne ordered Pimms No. 1, which was currently
de mode
in Accra. I noticed that the VIPs present included firebrands from British Guiana and Tunisia – temporarily tamed and transformed in glistening
sharkskin
– and a berobed African chief who wore ropes of beautiful ancient beads, and who waved genially and said ‘Ta-ta’ as we came in. There was no hope of a table for dinner at the Ambassadors, so we went on to another restaurant, and there, in the sombre and seedy surroundings of an English commercial hotel in a small Midland town, we made the best of a highly typical meal of fried liver, tomatoes and chips.

After that we visited a night-club called A Weekend in Havana, outside which Joseph got into an altercation with a policeman over parking his car. There is often a fine Johnsonian rumble about such exchanges in Accra. ‘You were attracted by the glamour of your profession. Now you must work,’ was Joseph’s parting shot. Later in the evening when a cabinet minister offered him an extremely stiff whisky he said, ‘I am not, sir, a member of your staff, and am not, therefore, accustomed to more than singles.’ Still later when an enormous Nigerian emir, gathering his robes about him, joined our table, Joseph remarked, ‘I hear, sir, that your people reproduce at an alarming rate,’ and the emir, who took this as a compliment, grinned hugely and replied, ‘You have been correctly informed.’

A Weekend in Havana turned out to be an open-air place, with the tables placed round a thick-leaved tree that gave off an odour of jasmine. A white dove-like bird circled continually overhead as if attracted by the powerful fluorescent lighting. When we arrived the band was playing ‘It’s a Sin to Tell a Lie’, and the dancers were gliding round in a stately
Palais-de
-Dance manner. About half those on the floor were in national costume and the rest in evening dress. The few European women to be seen were outclassed by the African girls with their splendidly becoming gowns and their majestic carriage. Corinne sat happily commenting on the private lives of those present, and closing my eyes and listening to her remarks I could hardly believe I was not sitting in a similar night-spot in
London, although Corinne’s voice was somewhat richer and deeper than that of any conceivable English counterpart. ‘Good heavens! Isn’t that Dr Kajomar with Mrs Chapman? Had
you
any idea that show was still going on, Joseph?’ A girl swung past in the arms of her partner wearing one of the new slogan dresses with ‘
JUSTICE AND LIBERTY
’ printed across her ample posterior, and Corinne looking away as if pained said, ‘Do you know – I do think people should draw the line somewhere!’ Soon after this the band played a high-life – a dance of Gold Coast invention – which resembles a frenzied and individualistic samba. A party of British sailors from a naval vessel helped themselves to partners from the local girls and joined in this to the best of their ability, and were much applauded by the Africans. The trouble about the British – Corinne had just commented – was that they never let themselves go. Her ex-boss had been a Scotsman who had made her blood run cold by his habit of concealing his anger.

This gave me an opening to indulge in a favourite pastime, when in regions that are slipping, or have slipped, through the colonialist fingers – that of carrying out a post-mortem on the relationship between the two peoples involved, in the full prior knowledge that the findings – allowing for local variations – will be the same. Getting right down to bedrock objections, Joseph said, it amounted to the fact that the Englishman had never learned to stop complete strangers in the street, shake hands with them warmly, and ask them where they were going, and why. What was even worse, they had almost succeeded in breaking the people of the Gold Coast of such old-world African displays of good breeding, inculcated in all the bush-schools before the European came on the scene with his version of education and his insistence on the formal introduction. I knew this to be true. Only a few weeks spent in Africa – especially if not too much time is wasted in big towns where the real flavour of the country is subdued – are enough to convince one of the extreme and innate sociability of the African. Africans, as one discovers them in travelling in the villages of the interior, are never stand-offish, rude or aggressive; always ready to receive the visitor in a courteous and dignified way. This is the tradition of the country, and even in such Europeanised areas as the Gold Coast, where a boy no longer spends four years or more under the
strict discipline of the bush-school learning the ideals of manhood, a stern semi-Victorian training is usually carried out in the home, with what to me are excellent results. It might even be reasonable to suggest that there are strong temperamental and emotional factors behind the façade of politics, which are in reality helping to strip the Briton of his colonies. Even in the Gold Coast, where the Englishman had learned to become a better mixer than his French neighbour, there remained a trace of that aloofness, that inability to get together with the African on a footing of absolute social equality, which makes it so difficult for him to be loved as well as respected. Here, as in India and in Burma, the European clubs defended their exclusiveness to the last ditch. The Englishman was received socially by the educated African without any reserve whatever, but the African’s civility was not fully returned, and there was an offensive flavour of patronage in this lack of reciprocity. The Accra Club admitted no African members or guests. At Cape Coast only two influential chiefs had ever succeeded in joining the white man’s club. The Kumasi Club underlined its determination to hold out to the last by posting a notice which informed the members that ‘due to the development of events’ they would be permitted on and after
Independence
Day to introduce guests of ‘any nationality’ – although the names of such proposed guests had first to be submitted to the secretary. To these pinpricks, to which Africans submit cheerfully and without rancour, more serious wounds are added when they come to England as students and find that under some dishonest excuse – since the colour bar in England has no admitted existence – 85 per cent of hotels and boarding houses will refuse to admit them.

No demonstration of the virtues of imperialism – the high-minded incorruptibility, and the like, of the white overlords – could quite compensate the new, nationalistic African for his being treated, whether overtly or not, as a member of an inferior race. Thus many Africans who have been hurt by the coolness of their reception in England have returned to Africa carrying the germ of a disease that is fairly new in that continent – anti-white racial feeling. Now the whites were on the point of surrendering their domination in the Gold Coast. The European
clubs would open their doors to all. Dr Nkrumah’s portrait would – despite the protests of the parliamentary opposition – replace that of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth, on both stamps and coinage, and shortly the British Governor-General, Sir Charles Noble Arden-Clarke, would be asked to surrender his impressive apartments in Christiansborg Castle to Dr Nkrumah, and to retire to the modest accommodation previously prepared for Dr Nkrumah in the State House. But already, on the eve of independence, the newspaper editorials sounded a little less dizzy with success. There would be no colonial scapegoats about, when things went wrong in the future. The Ghanaians would have only themselves to blame if the much-publicised corruption in their public men brought about their undoing as a nation, or if the disputes with the Ashanti and Togoland minorities were allowed to deteriorate until they exploded into civil war.

Many members of the newly freed colony regarded the victory of Kwame Nkrumah and his followers as the victory of an energetic political clique which had been able – sometimes by dubious means – to impose its will upon the politically lethargic general masses. Such disgruntled opponents of the regime, who did not expect to participate in the fruits of the victory, were on the whole unhappy to see their white rulers depart, and there were refusals in several parts of the country to put out flags. That the English could pull out as they did with so little apparent reluctance, and so many protestations of good will all round, is due to the nature of their stake in the country, which does not in reality demand their physical presence. Ghana has been saved from the tragic situation of Algeria, and the almost equally unhappy situations of Kenya and South Africa, by the fact that it has never been considered suitable for European settlement. West Africa as a whole has been protected from white
ownership
by malarial mosquitoes, an inexorable rainy season, and an absence of salubrious highlands where European farmers could have established themselves. When the demand for independence came, there was no reason not to accede to it. As things were, only British traders, technicians and colonial officials got a living from the country, and these would not be compelled to leave. The only conceivable losers might be certain
African underlings with a preference for the devil they knew to the devil they didn’t know and a suspicion they might be exchanging King Log for King Stork: these and the 300,000 small farmers of the Ashanti, who between them produce the cocoa that forms the country’s wealth, and who in the long run – and at present with little political representation – must foot the bills run up by the politicians at Accra.