Word: volta
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...Kwame Nkrumah broke into dance and then spoke of a dream finally realized. "Today, from now on, there is a new African in the world," he declared. "At long last the battle has ended. Ghana, our beloved country, is free forever." In Fodome, a small village in the eastern Volta region of the new nation, Kwame Deh, 22, and his family and friends gathered around a radio and listened through crackling static. "I felt very happy," remembers Deh. "The future was ours...
...Kwame Deh of a mud hut. His parents divorced before he reached school age, and it was his father--a bricklayer and farmer--who raised him. Kwame means Saturday, the day he was born; Linus is his Christian, or colonial, name. At school, in the lush hills of the Volta region--an area that was colonized by the Germans but later came under British rule--the young Kwame sang God Save the King and saluted the British flag. "That's the training for discipline," remembers Kwame...
...floor of a mud hut. His parents divorced before he reached school age, and it was his father - a bricklayer and farmer - who raised him. Kwame means Saturday, the day he was born; Linus is his Christian, or colonial name. At school, in the lush hills of the Volta region - an area that had originally been colonized by the Germans, but later came under British rule - the young Kwame sang God Save the King and saluted the British flag. "That's the training for discipline," remembers Kwame, now 72. Along with discipline, the British brought some measure of modernity...
...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 would later rear its ugly head in places such as Nigeria and Rwanda, was already...
...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 dam hydroelectric project, another of Nkrumah's grand schemes. "Life was still difficult," he remembers. "But you were working and getting some money...