The Rope that Hanged Nkrumah

That three-times-life-size statue of Kwame Nkrumah toppled on its back, broken and desecrated, with bits chipped off and carried away by cheering market mammies—there it was on the television screen. On the pedestal of the statue of Ozy- mandias, king of kings, were inscribed the words: “Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!” That statue, too, had fallen; and “Round the decay of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare, the lone and level sands stretch far away.”

Many strands were woven into the rope that hanged Nkrumah: the same rope that has hanged most of the dictators, tyrants, conquerors and usurpers the world has known— hubris. As schoolboys used to say, he got too big for his boots; or as Lord Acton more decorously observed, all power tends to corrupt; so Nkrumah, hag-ridden by a sense of insecurity, by fears for his own safety—he had survived two attempts on his life— and by the looming bankruptcy of his country, had withdrawn more and more into a fear-ringed privacy penetrated only by the sycophantic coo-ings of his intimates, not by the increasingly angry mutterings of the disillusioned public.

EH

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Elspeth Huxley

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That three-times-life-size statue of Kwame Nkrumah toppled on its back, broken and desecrated, with bits chipped off and carried away by cheering market mammies—there it was on the television screen. On the pedestal of the statue of Ozy- mandias, king of kings, were inscribed the words: “Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!” That statue, too, had fallen; and “Round the decay of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare, the lone and level sands stretch far away.”

Many strands were woven into the rope that hanged Nkrumah: the same rope that has hanged most of the dictators, tyrants, conquerors and usurpers the world has known— hubris. As schoolboys used to say, he got too big for his boots; or as Lord Acton more decorously observed, all power tends to corrupt; so Nkrumah, hag-ridden by a sense of insecurity, by fears for his own safety—he had survived two attempts on his life— and by the looming bankruptcy of his country, had withdrawn more and more into a fear-ringed privacy penetrated only by the sycophantic coo-ings of his intimates, not by the increasingly angry mutterings of the disillusioned public.