‘Burn! Burn!’ chant the activists pressing towards the pyre. Violent shouts, threats, snorts, the stamping of feet. Welbeck’s calls cannot be heard, although at this moment Welbeck has given the signaclass="underline" ‘Burn!’
They take handfuls of magazines and light them. The smoke billows out, because there is not a breath of air, and everyone rushes towards the fire, wanting to see.
Welbeck calls: ‘Don’t push! It’s dangerous!’
Nobody hears. Whoever has a piece of paper in his hand throws it on to the fire.
The pyre burns.
A fanfare sounds.
Charred shreds of pages float up into the air. People blow and the scraps of paper flutter in mid-air; they laugh as bits of paper settle upon their heads. They are joking, calm, in a good humour again. Children are dancing around the fire. Look: they’ll be able to bake bananas in it.
Welbeck has disappeared into a black limousine. His car flits through the lanes of Accra and out on to spacious Independence Avenue. The Minister is being driven to Flag Staff House.
To Nkrumah.
The Premier listens to Welbeck’s report of the rally. The Premier will laugh, because here laughter is the response to everything that turns out well. The rally was a test. They passed: the people revere their Kwame.
Kwame — he is family, a brother. That is how they talk about him. A woman shows me her baby.
‘What’s his name?’ I ask.
Kwame Nkrumah. She is wearing a dress with a print of the Premier’s countenance. Kwame on her chest, Kwame on her back.
Nkrumah jokes: ‘I would really like to know how many Kwame Nkrumahs there are in our country. I am afraid that I shall be remembered as a very prolific father.’
He himself married only recently. He likes to stress that throughout his life he has avoided women, money and compulsory religious obligations: ‘I believe that these three concerns should play a very small role in a man’s life, since as soon as one of them becomes dominant, a man becomes a slave and his character is broken. I fear that if I consented to a woman’s playing a serious role in my life, I would gradually begin to lose sight of the goal that I am trying to reach.’
Kwame establishes his goal when only a boy: the liberation of Ghana. In order to achieve it, he first has to make something of himself: that is his first task. In Ghana, a colony, a black man has no chance at a career. Kwame decides to study in the USA. His father — a goldsmith in a small town — has no money for his son’s education. But Kwame has already finished teachers’ college and is an instructor at the Catholic mission school in Elmina. He teaches for five years, saving, going hungry, hoarding every penny. He lives in terrible conditions, but he is scraping together the money for a ticket.
In 1935, at the age of twenty-six he travels to the United States. He is accepted at Lincoln University. How does he feel in that country?
‘I travelled by bus from Philadelphia to Washington. The bus stopped in Baltimore, for the passengers to refresh themselves. I was dying of thirst, so I walked into the station buffet and asked the white American waiter for a glass of water. He frowned and looked at me out of the corner of his eye: “You can drink there.” And he pointed to the spittoon.’
He studies, works, becomes politically active, makes money: ‘If I was not busy twenty-four hours a day, I was wasting time.’
So: there is the night-shift at the Sun Company, in the Chester shipyards. ‘Regardless of the weather, I worked from midnight until eight in the morning. Sometimes the frost was so severe that my hands froze to the steel. I studied during the day.’
So: he works in a soap factory. ‘In the factory yard stood a mountain of discarded, rotting guts and pieces of animal fat. Armed with a pitchfork, I had to load that stinking merchandise on to a wheelbarrow. It was hard to keep from vomiting.’
So: he goes to New York during the vacation. ‘In Harlem a friend and I would buy fish wholesale and spend the rest of the day trying to sell them on the street-corner.’
So: he is a steward on the S.S. Shawnee, on the New York — Vera Cruz line. ‘The boss told me that I would be scouring pots until the end of the cruise. Later I advanced to washing dishes.’
He has nowhere to live.
In Philadelphia he is chased out of the train station by the police — he and a friend had been looking for shelter there — and spends the night in a park. ‘We found a bench and lay down, thinking that we would spend the rest of the night there until fate turned against us. We had just fallen asleep, when it started to rain.’
He studies, attends meetings, works at self-improvement: ‘I became a thirty-second degree mason and remained one throughout my stay in the United States.’
He is politically involved: ‘I began organizing the African Students’ Association of America and Canada. I wrote a brochure, Towards Colonial Freedom.’
He becomes interested in scientific socialism, in the works of Marx and Lenin at the same time he is studying theology as welclass="underline" ‘I devoted free time to giving sermons in the Negro churches. I was invited to this or that church almost every Sunday to preach.’
When he leaves the USA in 1945, he has three years as a philosophy instructor at Lincoln University under his belt (Greek and Negro History). ‘I was named the most distinguished professor of the year.’
He travels to London: ‘One pleasure was buying a copy of the Daily Worker, the one newspaper I really wanted to read, carrying it in the most ostentatious way, and watching how many pairs of eyes quickly fixed on me.’
To heat the headquarters of the Union of West African Students, of which he is vice-president, he collects lumps of coal as he walks the streets.
At the same time, he is writing a doctoral dissertation in philosophy — on logical positivism.
He formulates his famous doctrine of the peaceful boycott, a doctrine of African socialism, based on tactics of constructive action without resort to force.
Kwame returns to Ghana.
It is 1947.
There might be five people here who know him personally. Perhaps a dozen. Not more. But it is this small group of people who head the newly established United Convention of the Gold Coast, a liberation movement but a movement that is very broadly based, highly undefined and without a programme. The members of the group pass as a collection of thinkers. They need somebody to do the dirty work. They bring in Nkrumah to do it.
This work is everything he has. ‘In those days all my possessions fit into a small suitcase.’
A year later, he takes part in peaceful demonstrations and marches towards the governor-general’s residence, towards Christianborg palace. Second World War veterans join in with a petition demanding autonomy for the Gold Coast. The police fire a few shots, and two are killed. Today, beautiful flowers grow on this spot. They show me this place a hundred times: two people died here for the freedom of Ghana. I stand there and lower my head.
Kofi Baako, a government minister, asks: ‘Did anyone die for the freedom of Poland?’
Riots, arson and looting begin in Accra. The leadership of the United Convention of The Gold Coast lands in jail. Nkrumah is transported to the north, to the savannah. ‘I was placed in a small hut there and kept under police supervision day and night.’