Britain’s world-weary, unflappable new prime minister, Harold Macmillan, did things very differently – with a dance.
BURNING SPEARS: KENYATTA, NKRUMAH AND BARACK OBAMA (SENIOR)
On 18 November 1961, the first independent ruler of British Africa asked an English woman to dance the ‘high life’ shuffle at a ball held at Ghana’s State House – formerly the slave castle Fort Christiansborg. The occasion, the location, the characters could not have been more fitting for this moment, which marked a new era in the relations between Europe and Africa. She was Queen Elizabeth II, aged thirty-five, beaming in a bare-shouldered dress; he was the fifty-one-year-old president, Dr Kwame Nkrumah, exuberant in black tie.
He was a Marxist, pan-Africanist autocrat and yet he admired the ‘young girl’. When her visit had been cancelled on a previous occasion because Elizabeth was pregnant, he exclaimed, ‘If you told me my mother had died, you couldn’t have caused greater shock.’ As Nkrumah drove a restless Ghana towards a one-party state, seeking a Soviet alliance, Macmillan worried that the queen could be killed. ‘How silly I’d look if I was scared to visit Ghana and then Khrushchev went,’ she grandly told the prime minister. ‘I’m not a film star. I’m the head of the Commonwealth – and I’m paid to face risks.’*
The dance was the last act in a long movement between Britain and African independence leaders. Until Suez, London had counted on keeping many colonies and imprisoned African leaders and repressed rebellions, though its rule was increasingly undermined by energetic African resistance. But, with Britain bankrupted by world wars and now focused on European defence against Russia, Macmillan released them and allowed elections. This process was very different from what had gone wrong in South Africa. In Cape Town, on 3 February 1960, Macmillan had pointedly welcomed the ‘winds of change’. But South Africa was now ruled by white Afrikaners through a racist system of apartheid. Africans had never had the vote there under British rule, but in 1948 the Afrikaner National Party, campaigning on the slogan die kaffer op sy plek (‘the African in his place’), won power with the backing of the three-million-strong white electorate and proceeded to segregate thirteen million black Africans, to disfranchise mixed-race peoples and to ban interracial sex, measures similar to Jim Crow laws in the southern US states.
Four years earlier, the British had handed Ghana to Nkrumah; ten years before that, he had been in a British prison. An Akan goldsmith’s son who had attended the British Prince of Wales School in Accra as a boarder, then qualified as a teacher before studying in the US and Britain, Nkrumah regarded himself as a philosopher and historian. On his travels, he embraced Marcus Garvey’s dream of a one-state Africa and had met W. E. B. Du Bois.* Winning elections in 1951, becoming premier of the newly independent Gold Coast in 1957, he renamed his country after the kings (ghanas) of medieval Wagadu. Attacking ‘tribalism’ and sidelining the Asante kings,* Nkrumah, a lonely, isolated man, quickly instituted a one-party dictatorship with a semi-messianic cult (taking the title Osagyefo – Redeemer) and launched a crusade to make himself president of the united states of Africa.
At the London School of Economics, where he studied anthropology, he had encountered the other great African inspired by Du Bois, Johnstone Kamau, who changed his name to match his country.
Jomo Kenyatta, the strapping son of a Kikuyu farmer, was larger than life: educated by missionaries, he had studied in Moscow – where he disliked Marxism – and the LSE where he dazzled fellow students with his fez, cloak and silver-topped cane, and defined a new Kenyan nation in his anthropological study Facing Mount Kenya. After spending the war raising chickens in Sussex (where he was nicknamed Jumbo in the local pub) he went home. The British had carved several new-fangled entities out of British East Africa: one was Uganda but the largest was Kenya, named after its largest mountain. Farmed by 80,000 British settlers, famed for their cocktail-fuelled swinging (and occasional socialite murders), Kenya could have become a settler state like South Africa, but British land grabs fatally offended the Kikuyu, sparking an insurgency in 1952, called the Mau Mau uprising by the British, that killed thirty-two settlers and 2,000 Africans. The British crushed the rebels, killing 11,000, hanging 1,000, in their last colonial war in 1952, and they arrested Kenyatta – wrongly accused of leading the Mau Mau. He was in prison for seven years.
Kenyatta – known as the Burning Spear – was aided by a charismatic labour leader, Tom Mboya, a Luo, who was arranging scholarships for Kenyan youngsters. In 1960, Mboya helped send an exceptional Luo economics student named Barack Obama to study at Hawaii University.
His father, Hussein Onyango Obama, was a Luo farmer, elder and medicine man, living in western Kenya, near Uganda, so restlessly intelligent the villagers joked he had ‘ants up his anus’. But he had a son, Barack, by his fourth wife, Akumu. Educating himself, Hussein moved to Zanzibar, served in the British King’s African Rifles in Burma and returned at fifty with a gramophone. ‘How can the African defeat the white man,’ he asked, ‘when he can’t even make his own bicycle?’ Arrested and released by the British during the Mau Mau rebellion, he became friends with Mboya. Hussein adored Barack ‘because he was so clever’ but could not tolerate his independence, beating him when he was expelled from school. Barack married a local girl, Kezia, but hated the clerk’s job his father arranged for him in Mombasa. After his father threw him out, he attend independence rallies, was arrested and released. He became close to Mboya, who had just got back from America, where he had been welcomed by the American Committee on Africa, led by Eleanor Roosevelt, meeting Sidney Poitier and Martin Luther King and, at the family compound at Hyannis Port, a young senator and Democratic candidate called Jack Kennedy, who agreed to fund student exchanges.
Mboya chose Obama, who left for Hawaii; Kennedy won the presidential election.
NIKITA AND JACK, MIMI AND MARILYN
Joe Kennedy was still pulling the strings but he had faced unbearable blows: his eldest son Joe had been killed in the war; his daughter Kick perished in a plane crash; and Jack was (secretly) cursed with ill health, suffering back pain, Addison’s disease and hyperthyroidism, treated with steroids, amphetamines and hormones.
His father guided him into Congress straight after the war. In 1953, just after Jack’s election as senator, he married an elegantly ice-cool socialite, Jackie Bouvier, with whom he had a boy and a girl, but soon after his marriage he underwent massive back surgery. Ill health and Kennedy machismo encouraged a life of risk taking and womanizing; he often joined his friend Sinatra – supercool maestro of Swing – and his Rat Pack of actor pals, including Kennedy brother-in-law Pat Lawford and African-American Sammy Davis Jr – in Vegas, where singer and senator shared girls and jinks. Kennedy was already the best-prepared candidate for the presidency: a Harvard graduate who had studied at the LSE, travelled all over the world and met everyone, war hero and Pulitzer-prize winning author. Yet he had never run anything, his sex life was recklessly priapic, his health dubious, and his career had been funded by his rich father. He was already running for president when he first encountered Khrushchev.