Word: kwame
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...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...
...Accra and passed the initial selection process easily. But after acing her exams, the senior officer refused to let her start training, apparently because she didn't have the money for a bribe. "If I had been there in Accra, I could have contacted the big man," says Kwame, who was traveling a lot at the time. "These days, when you pass the exam but don't get in, you can challenge that. But in those days, you were afraid. Who are you to go and make noise? In those days when you go, the big men will boot...