Word: accra
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...week before, from the Ghanaian embassy in Peking, he had delivered Kwame Nkrumah's unheeded message asking the army to return to its bar racks. Now, dapper and smiling in a grey checked suit, he was in Accra as the distinguished prisoner of the army, holding a press conference. Alex Quaison-Sackey, Nkrumah's trusted Foreign Minister and former president of the U.N. General Assembly, had deserted his master and flown home "to submit myself to the new government."The Redeemer, he said, "was a lost cause. I was not going to defend lost causes...
...mistake, of course. The appointment, it turned out, was only "honorary," based on a forgotten 1958 agreement to join their two nations. And in Accra, the whole affair was considered quite funny...
...Chief and Osagyefo (Redeemer), Francis Nwia Kofie Kwame Nkrumah, son of a village goldsmith, had striven with some success to make himself all but synonymous with God. His face appeared on Ghanaian stamps and coins, statues of him littered the country, and his name flashed in neon in Accra. Ghanaian schoolchildren began each day by reciting that "Nkrumah is our Messiah, Nkrumah never dies." Among his official titles were Victorious Leader, the Great Messiah, His Messianic Majesty, the Pacifier, the Aweful, and His High Dedication...
...Africa's highest per capita incomes. Nkrumah squandered it on such expensive status symbols as an international jet airline, which loses almost twice as much money as it earns, and a $20 million international conference site which includes a bulletproof, bombproof, twelve-story apartment hotel that Accra wags call "the Maginot Hilton." To promote his image abroad, he opened 61 foreign embassies; his entourage to Peking last week numbered no fewer than 71 persons...
...made to assassinate him. Nkrumah's answer was to crack down even further, increase his security guard-and to retreat behind the four walls of his palace. He reportedly took to wearing a bullet-proof vest, nervously kept five bullet-proof Rolls-Royces ready to carry him around Accra, waiting until the last minute to choose the one he would ride...