Word: togolands
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...French charge d'affaires in Accra, it seemed that Ghana's Foreign Minister Kojo Botsio was only trying to be helpful. The Foreign Minister had called him in especially to warn the French of a sinister plot about to take place in neighboring Togoland, which the French have run under trusteeship since World War I. Botsio's intelligence seemed detailed; he knew what roads were to be seized and at what hour, what communications lines would be cut, just who in the Togoland government would be arrested. It was all very convincing, even though the French diplomat...
...story ended there, it would have had its share of irony. The Premier of Togoland, Sylvanus Olympic, against whom the plot was presumably directed, has long been a thorn in the French side. A graduate of the London School of Economics and a top African executive in Unilever (Lever Bros.), Olympio lobbied so successfully in Paris and at the U.N. that he wangled from a reluctant Paris the promise of independence...
Nevertheless, compared to the youthful hotheads of Togoland's vociferous Juvento Party, Olympic had turned out to be a moderate. The Juvento demand ouster of the French and union with Ghana. It was strange, of course, that the Ghanaians, who had so much to gain from Togoland's Juvento and so much to lose with Olympio, should be the very ones to warn of a Juvento plot against him. But the French apparently did not take time to think about that...
...Federation of Nigeria-itself on the edge of independence within the British Commonwealth-observed that the Ghana-Guinea union of 7,000,000 Africans would hardly be a realistic basis for a larger union of the 60 million people of French West Africa, French Equatorial Africa, the Cameroons, Togoland, Sierra Leone, Gambia and the Federation of Nigeria...
...Guinea's Marxist-trained Premier Sékou Touré told cheering crowds in his capital of Conakry that the union was merely the beginning of "the dream of all African democrats-that of a United States of Africa." The enthusiasm was not unanimous. Premier Sylvanus Olympic of Togoland, a French U.N. trusteeship slated for independence in 1960; would like to join "an eventual federation," but was careful to add that this "will certainly not be easy." Poor Togoland could all too easily end up as a Ghana province, and some of its politicians do not like the sounds...