CENTREPIECE
Chaos and laughter in Nkrumah's Gold Coast
COLIN WELCH 0 n what would have been Klemper- er's 100th birthday, BBC2 re-broadcast a film of him, already 78, conducting Beet- hoven's choral symphony. For the most part Klemperer sat impassively beating time, bringing in new sections of the orchestra as unemphatically as one might pick a jar of jam off a shelf. The results throughout were stupendous. At times his gaze would rise far above the orchestra, as if he were seeing visions, exploring for the first time a virgin land of unimaginable splendours and beauty.
I found it all terribly moving, though well aware of the perils of building fanta- sies on facial expressions. Pater and others have concocted pages of purple prose out of what the Mona Lisa was thinking about. Veal for supper, D. B. Wyndham Lewis irreverently suggested, or fish?
I was once badly misled by the face of Geoffrey Bing — you remember, 'left- wing' MP for Hornchurch, later Nkru- mah's 'attorney-general', a sort of dilute Vishinsky, half Ulster by origin, half, I think, Vietnamese, in which case his name were perhaps better spelt Binh than Bing, with its sturdy English associations — Douglas ('put a rose in your hair, Mavis — there's a cabload of sailors at the door') and the Admiral shot pour encourager les autres (though he was Byng). 'You mean,' said Kingsley Amis, 'that he might just as well have been called, say, Bong?' Just so.
I was in the Gold Coast, as I still prefer to call it, for the Daily Telegraph, one of a series of correspondents each greeted with fiery denunciations of his predecessor, each to be denounced in his turn. My predecessor, Ian Colvin, had characterised the Asantahene's 'palace' at Kumasi as built of mud and corrugated iron, an observation which, true or not, gave no pleasure. I was denounced for having confirmed that a senior expatriate police officer had gone to Switzerland to investi- gate ministers' bank accounts.
Nkrumah was already Prime Minister. Above him presided like a ceremonial fig-leaf a British governor, whose relations with Nkrumah resembled Lafayette's in- dulgent subservience to the mob. Lafayet- te, said Heine, was like a tutor who accompanies his charge to dram shops lest he gamble, to gaming houses lest he whore, to brothels lest he duel and, when it comes to a duel, jumps up to second.
I stayed at the rambling ramshackle one-storey Seaview Hotel in Accra. Gha- na's hotels were not then of the faceless inter-continental variety, but of rich indi- viduality. At the Kingsway in Kumasi I had a room with shower. This last consisted of a cold tap on the fungus-stained wall, from which a rusty pipe ran up to and across the ceiling. I turned the tap. Distant gurgling, knocking and coughing sounds ensued, then silence. A large weird insect emerged from the pipe and peered irritably around, plainly annoyed at being disturbed. Of water no sign, and the insect huffily with- drew.
A welcome fellow-guest at the Seaview was Kingsley Martin, editor of the New Statesman, as ever friendly, bright, bird- like, 'progressive' and optimistic. Our rooms all opened, through half-doors like those of stables or school lavatories, onto a rough courtyard filled with rusting tri- cycles, debris of a failed ice-cream venture. Kingsley's bed was positioned diagonally in the middle of the room, like a battleship in the paper game Jutland. Against my advice, he moved it tidily into a corner. That night there was a terrific storm, with rain bouncing six feet and fireballs hurtling like flaming onions in all directions. Kings- ley was drenched; before it was moved, his bed had been in the one dry area. Moral for radicals: respect what seems irrational; it may serve some deep but hidden pur- pose.
The next night Kingsley had Geoffrey Bing to dinner, and kindly invited me. The meal itself was memorable. The menu announced 'Fish No.1' and 'Fish No.3'. These were monsters with eyes on stalks and vestigial legs, dredged up by the Colonial Development Corporation from depths hitherto unplumbed, for which no name had been found. They ate like lumps of coarse kapok, full of needles, on which a fish had expired and decayed, leaving behind a ghostly taste and noisome frag- rance. Kingsley asked for the.wine list. 'We have two waines, sah,' the waiter beamed: 'whaite and black.'
Even more unexpected were the affabil- ity and humour of Mr Bing. He talked mostly absolute nonsense about the Afri- can consciousness, Western exploitation and oppression, negritude, Ghana bled white by the British (actually it had been bled by the Cocoa Marketing Board, which Nkrumah, also partial to .a drop of blood, gratefully retained) and the 'hopeful ex- periment in democracy' which was taking place there. Mr Bing had a guttural Ger- man 'r', so that 'democracy' turned out something like 'demochrrracy'. Each tirade concluded with a broad grin, as if in self-mockery.
Not a bad chap after all, I thought: at least he can laugh at himself. I grinned too. Ever wilder grew Mr Bing's self-parodies, ever broader the grins. I laughed out loud. Kingsley laid a warning hand on my knee. Bing exploded. It dawned on me that they weren't grins at all, but a fearful involun- tary rictus, containing no trace of mirth. A fragile solemnity was with difficulty restored.
My first call in Accra had been on our Liberian stringer, proprietor and editor of the local paper, so lavishly inked that, after reading it, one's fingers and bedclothes were black. As in Peter Simple's Nerclley Clarion, the same block could readily have served to depict a smart wedding, a road smash or a massacre. The office, in a maze of open-drained side streets, was held aloft on seven-foot pillars, approachable only by a ladder which could be withdrawn against creditors, government narks and those who fancied themselves wronged. Against one of the pillars reposed a blind man — the ace parliamentary reporter, I was told, who, with that total recall which God sometimes confers on the blind and illiter- ate, could reproduce verbatim hours of rhetoric: 'And Mr Gbedemah, he say . . . .' The editor was at first reserved, thinking I had come to sack him. As it became clear I had no such intent or power, he cheered up and produced beer. He confided that he had had a real scoop for the Telegraph the other day, but, alas, the damn goat had abstracted the copy from the out-tray below and eaten it. Primitive and eccentric as his printing plant was, it must have been powered by elec- tricity. Rumour had it that he had once run the whole lot off a lead plugged into the nearest street-lamp.
Kingsley Martin had to fly to Lagos. I went to see him off. West African airways pilots were then mostly 'Wasps'. Towards the cockpit of Kingsley's aircraft, however, strode a gigantic Paul Robeson-like figure, covered in gold braid. Kinglsey blenched and fell silent. A test of egalitarian nerve was at hand. 'Hang it,' he cried, 'I've left my tickets at the Seaview. I'll have to take a later flight.' As he turned, his jacket swung open, revealing a BOAC wallet. 'They're in your pocket.' Thank God,' he sighed, without conviction. Remembering the three or four horrendous pile-ups we'd passed on our way to the airport, I could have bitten my tongue off.
Previous page
