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WHAT HAPPENED IN GHANA?    DU BOIS

disillusion and unhappiness, that the people were crying out for a "liberator"-such allegations and lies. Any resemblance to a revolt on the part of the people of Ghana had to be manipulated and fabricated by skillful, directed intelligence from the outside.

We have described how the coup struck before dawn on Thursday morning. By nightfall a silent patrolled Accra crouched in the darkness. Nobody knew what had happened or was happening outside Accra, Communications were cut off and traffic stopped. But the next morning, the two regular morning papers were delivered to my house. Knowing that all editors and leading journalists had been arrested I was surprised by the smart appearance of the newspapers. I was amazed as I read. The editorials hailing Ghana's liberation were masterpieces. Here was first class journalism! Arresting beginnings - short, clipped sentences, well turned and telling phrases. And words never seen in a Ghanaian newspaper before!

Throughout the day as bulletins, "news flashes" and congratulatory commentaries were broadcast by the radio this same discrepancy was very clear. The voice was the voice of the Ghanaians, but the unfamiliar words, the glib expressions, the turn of phrases, caused the voices to hesitate, grope and falter. Later when "celebrating" university students and "rejoicing workers" paraded across the television screen (unrecorded soldiers with drawn bayonets and placards bearing slogans and cliches which few of the gaping bystanders could understand.

Clearly the editorials, commentaries and slogans had been written by experts trained in "overthrowing undesirable governments," but who knew little about the African way of thinking or expression.

It was only after the news had flashed round the world that president Nkrumah had landed in Guinea, three hundred miles from Ghana's border, proclaiming his determination to return to Ghana, that the real hate and vilification campaign was launched. This was whipped into a frenzy! His books, speeches, and papers were torn from libraries, schools, bookshops and private homes, dumped into the square and set afire. To the blaze were added newspapers, magazines from socialist countries, CPP pamphlets, other books and anything pointed out as "socialist propaganda". School children were brought out at night to sing and dance around the leaping flames - all creating a scene from Dante's Inferno in Accra's celebrated Black Star Square. 

Africans as a whole and friends abroad have been appalled and

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