Word: accra
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...election was a landslide. When the ballot boxes were opened (with 700 screwdrivers especially imported from Britain), C.P.P. had won 80% of the vote, and Nkrumah-still in jail -had swept Accra...
...life and wealth of the Gold Coast is in the teeming South, especially in Accra (pop. 150,000). The streets of Accra look as if half the professional junkmen in the world had set up business there. On the crowded verandas of tumbledown houses, barefoot boys work at sewing machines. The "shops" are mostly tables ranged along the sidewalks, and heaped high with kerosene lamps, loaves of bread, shoes, shirts and suitcases, earrings and patent medicines (a favorite is "brain pills"). There is no color bar in the Gold Coast: its 4,000 Britons (mostly civil servants) dance and drink...
...usually illiterate but smart enough to own and operate fleets of heavy trucks. Day & night, the "mammy-trucks" thunder down to the sprawling shantytown ports where fishermen put to sea in dugout canoes. The trucks bear striking legends: "The Lord Is My Shepherd-I Don't Know Why"; "Accra to Takoradi-With God's Help Anything Is Possible...
This incongruous overlap of civilization and savagery, magic and machinery, makes many Britons doubt whether the Gold Coast is ready to rule itself. When African political parties march past the European Club in Accra, members raise their voices and go on discussing polo and trade as if the apparition outside were in hopelessly bad taste. Yet Britain's Colonial Office takes the Gold Coast dead seriously. Major James Lillie-Costello, the monocled press officer who handles Nkrumah for the British government, treats the Prime Minister as if he were Winston Churchill, manages to inject half a dozen "Sirs" into...
...British moved fast to repair the damage. A Parliamentary Commission hustled out to Accra, chastised the colonial administration for denying Negroes a voice in the government. The upshot was a brand-new constitution, with popular elections...