A South African Views Ghana:

...On the pan-African level, Phillips portrays Nkrumah and Tom Mboya of Kenya as close friends...

...either active or latent in Nkrumah" are the qualities of "personal reliability, a soundlybalanced political sense and a measure of "sweet reasonableness.'" Phillips feels that the Ghanaian President "is not anxious to exacerbate the troubles in South Africa...

...Despite the inherent interest of the subject matter, Phillips' awkward sentences, clumsy metaphors and fuzzy logic are a continual source of irritation...

...His comments on Nkrumah's attitudes toward such questions as the role of the trade unions or academic freedom and university autonomy are similarly naive...

...Considering the increasing radicalization of Ghana's pan-African policy and Nkrumah's recent efforts to reorganize University College, it appears that the author left Ghana none too soon...

...In the summer of 1960, the Government of Ghana asked all South Africans applying for Ghanaian visas to declare their opposition to apartheid...

...Phillips' work lacks any kind of critical evaluation of recent developments in Ghanaian politics...

...Yet Phillips himself is clearly committed to a philosophy which is completely opposed to Nkrumah's...

...Contrary to Phillips' assertion, Guinea left the franc bloc last March...

...The author, a South African by birth, is a well-known botanist who was invited in 1951 to establish a Faculty of Agriculture at the University College in Ghana (then the Gold Coast...

...Phillips' naive notion of South African patriotism is peculiarly combined with uncritical hero-worship of Nkrumah and, in the irritating autobiographical editorializing which accompanies his analysis, this confusion of point of view often has curious results...

...Indeed, because of its high level of material prosperity and large middle class, Ghana is one of the few areas where democracy is possible in Africa today...

...Phillips has virtually nothing to say on the first topic—he seems unaware of the significance of the Soviet entrance into African politics...

...Reviewed by Paul Sigmund Research Fellow in Government, Harvard University At a time when the accession to independence and UN membership of 16 new African states has stimulated American interest in Africa to an unprecedented degree, a work which combines an evaluation of the controversial President of Ghana with a prognosis of likely developments in African politics should be a welcome addition to the meager literature on the subject...

...His book is about evenly divided between an analysis of Nkrumah's character and policy, and a territoryby-territory review of recent developments in what he calls "TransSaharan Africa," i.e., all of Africa except the five Arab states of the North...

...He criticizes Alan Paton and the Progressive Party in South Africa, attacks Reverend Michael Scott for his efforts to assist Southwest Africa, defends Portuguese policy in Angola and Mozambique and supports the Governor of Nyasaland against the criticisms of the Devlin Commission Report...

...It is difficult to overlook Phillips' literary deficiencies...

...Yet despite Phillips' relative ignorance of the subject (no works in French are cited in the bibliography), his book is more satisfactory in summarizing the current politics of French-speaking Africa than any existing work in English...

...It is a measure of the swift tempo of political change in Africa that the central section of the book, which is devoted to a review of developments in other parts of Africa, is already out of date...

...Nkrumah has lately come in for criticism in this country on two grounds: his increasingly neutralist line in foreign policy and the sharp increase in authoritarian measures in Ghana...

...Kwame Nkrumah and the Future of Africa attempts this task, but it cannot be said that the attempt is successful...

...Phillips refused—not because of any sympathy with racial segregation (to which he is opposed), but because he could not "make a declaration tantamount to an attack upon, if not a repudiation of, my country...

...In discussing the question of the viability of democracy in Africa, Phillips is somewhat critical of such measures as the Preventive Detention Act, but he tends to justify Nkrumah's actions on the grounds that Western forms of democracy cannot be transferred to an African setting since "authoritarianism is traditional in African society...

...He was not permitted to return to University College, and, as of August, 1960, was living in Salisbury, Southern Rhodesia...

...Much of the book is written in secondary-school style, particularly in the more lyrical sections devoted to praise of Nkrumah...

...While this is also the opinion of many African leaders (with the notable exception of the Nigerians—for example, in Chief Awolowo's autobiography, the idea that the African cannot practice democracy is dismissed as another example of a patronizing attitude by the West), criticisms of Nkrumah's recent efforts to censor the press and muzzle the opposition often come from those most familiar with Ghana...

...Nkrumah is praised for his leadership and administrative capacity...

...The politics of Dahomey and the Cameroon have been radically altered since Phillips described them, in the one case by party reorganization and new elections, and in the other by the mysterious poisoning of Felix Moumie in Geneva...

...in fact, they are bitter rivals for leadership in Africa...

...For one who has not visited the country, he understands remarkably well the human ecology of the Union...

...In sum, Kwame Nkrumah and the Future of Africa fails to fill the need for a good popular account of contemporary African politics...

...No mention is made of the tensions between Leopold Senghor in Senegal and Mobido Keita in Soudan which led to the breakup of the Mali Federation last August...

...It is difficult to understand how the author could have spent eight years in Accra and yet not deal with the relation of the Trades Union Congress to the Convention Peoples Party, or allude to the anti-Nkrumah feeling prevalent among professors and students at University College...