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FREEDOMWAYS    THIRD QUARTER 1966

to make some improvements in the lot of the "natives." Mission schools, where the young were taught to fear God and the white man, were encouraged. Mission "boys" made the "best" servants. The sons of subdued Chiefs of once powerful hereditary dynasties and a selected few from among those who, for some reason, were "especially deserving" were given secondary or even university education—the brightest being sent to England. This small elite attained bourgeois status. They acquired bourgeois culture and values and regarded the "natives" in much the same light as did the whites. On a somewhat lower scale were those trained for the civil service which was exacting, efficient and completely regimented. Faithful civil servants were sure of a good job for life, with pay considerably higher than their fellows.(Of course, not approaching the salary paid white civil servants sent out from Europe.) Another group allowed some freedom of action by the colonial masters were the traders, who by means of controlled "privileges" extorted, cheated and bullied the mass of people without stint. Many of these original traders were women, forerunners of the market women of today. These market women, are well organized and had been an ever present problem in pre-coup Ghana. Skilled in cornering trade and forcing up retail prices, their aim in life was to get rich quick through "free enterprise." They are opposed to any form of economic control.

In colonial days Accra was a sprawling commercial and administrative town, with a number of imposing, white government buildings, one wide tree-lined street where large, comfortable houses set back in gardens, a polo ground, race track and sports club-trappings which made for pleasant, easy colonial life. The ubiquitous mosquito had prevented Europeans from permanently settling on large tracts of land as they did in East Africa. They came to the gold coast primarily to take out the riches which they found here. All roads led to the sea. Most of the native elite lived in Kumasi or Cape Coast. Those who did live in Accra occupied neat cottages tucked away on winding roads along with upper civil servants. There was plenty of available space but the "natives" who did not occupy servants' quarters in the yard, were crowded together in corrugated, thin huts near the waterfront, without sanitation or water.

Kwame Nkrumah returned to the Gold Coast in 1947 after an absence of fifteen years. He was not of the bourgeoisie. He belonged to a small tribe of hardy fisherfolk and artisans. Fathers of the Mission School which he had attended helped him through second-

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