People Vilify Nkrumah

Press, Volume CV, Issue 31009, 15 March 1966, Page 17

People Vilify Nkrumah

(N.Z.P.A. Reuter—Copyright) ACCRA, March 14. The revenge of the Ghanaian people on their ousted president, Dr. Kwame Nkrumah, continued relentlessly—and it is a revenge terrible in its completeness.

Mock burials went on throughout the country yesterday, symptomatic of a vilification which has been even

Manual Work.—China has placed 160,000 writers, performers, artists and musicians in manual jobs on farms, factories, mines and military units in the last 18 months, says Peking’s official “People's Daily.” Western experts call it the most drastic purge of Chinese intellectuals since 1958.—(Hong Kong, March 14.)

greater than the traditional dethroning of a paramount chief to which it bears a resemblance. For centuries in this part of West Africa, the people have had the right to depose their chiefs for misrule or dissipation, and the special ceremony involves the removal of the chief’s sandals. I This is the most deadly insult which can be offered because a chief’s bare feet must never touch the ground. He may even be struck across the face with a sandal, and is then hooted and derided out of town into oblivion. But the degradation of “Emperor Nkrumah" has been more spectacular. Cheap coffins supposedly containing his remains have been drummed and hooted through streets, and rejected at cemeteries on behalf of the dead. In West Africa, where the dead are held in awe and their spirits worshipped, this has a dreadful significance—traditionally, it means he has no soul. He is a men who never was.