The World

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.