Word: kwame
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...Kwame is sprightly for his age. When I first met him in April last year, he was wearing loose-fitting gold-colored trousers, a gold shirt and a small gold skullcap, all made from the same embroidered fabric. He welcomed me into his modest rented home on the eastern edge of Accra, Ghana's capital, pumping my hand with the energy and strength of a man 20 years younger. The living room was painted electric blue, and a gold vase of plastic flowers sat on the coffee table. There was a small television in the corner and a telephone that...
...were successful. Bitter civil wars erupted, some of them tribal struggles for natural resources, some of them prompted by foreign powers. By the 1970s, Africa had become one of the hottest fronts in the cold war. "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...
After leaving school, Kwame trained as a sculptor. Working from a photo supplied by grieving relatives, he would mold the face of a mother or father or child for a 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 Afua, another girl in the village, instead. Within months they married, beginning their lives together...
...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 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, the army seized power. "We all waited to see if the military could...