Word: kwame
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...After leaving school, Kwame trained as a sculptor. Working off a photo supplied by grieving relatives, he would mold the face of a mother or father or child for their gravestone, or craft statues of Mary, Jesus and the saints for the many churches that were springing up across the country. Traveling from village to village, Kwame discovered a curious thing: people in the Volta region were underwhelmed by the idea of independence. Fearing that Ghana's bigger tribes would discriminate against them, many Voltans wanted independence to come in stages, or even the chance to secede altogether. Tribalism, which...
...Kwame himself longed for freedom. "I knew independence was very important for this country," he told me. "We needed jobs and employment to come to Ghanaians, to black people. The top administrative level was taken by the British." It wasn't just the colonial authorities Kwame chafed under. Around the time of independence, his father and stepmother chose a girl for him to marry. "But I didn't like her. You know, we didn't love each other," he says. Kwame started wooing Theresa Afue, another girl in the village, instead. Within months they had married, eager to begin their...
...Nkrumah embarked on an ambitious program, building schools, houses, roads, a new port, factories. Ghana, its new leader argued, must be weaned off trade and investment from Britain and the other colonial powers. The construction industry boomed. Kwame got a job with the state housing corporation, building barracks for the army. "People were happy, more people were learning trades, schools were opening all over the place, we were feeling fine." In 1961, he and Theresa had Suzzy, the first of four girls. Kwame began spending long periods away from home, working on houses for those displaced by the massive Volta...
...move that would be repeated by other African leaders in the decades to come, Nkrumah declared Ghana a one-party state and himself leader for life. The early optimism was gone, replaced by a deep sense of disappointment and lost opportunity. "There were a lot of problems," Kwame says. "People were getting hungry. Nkrumah was looking to the East for help. He kept paying everyone's salaries, but things were not working how he planned." In early 1966, with the President on a visit to China, soldiers seized power. "We all waited to see if the military could...
...dictators and forced their economic policies onto their struggling clients, both stoked corruption and graft, and both fueled internal struggles such as the hellish wars that followed independence in Portugal's colonies of Mozambique and Angola. "We had lots of fears. There was no freedom of speech," says Kwame, about the time of troubles. "You go about and you see the army. The economy was getting worse." By the late 1970s, Ghana was a mess: a drought had pushed up food prices, jobs had disappeared. "Bribery and corruption is all over the world, but where it is too glaring...