The Soccer War Read Online Free

vacation. ‘In Harlem a friend and I would buy fish wholesale and spend the rest of the day trying to sell them on the street-corner.’
    So: he is a steward on the S.S.
Shawnee
, on the New York–Vera Cruz line. ‘The boss told me that I would be scouring pots until the end of the cruise. Later I advanced to washing dishes.’
    He has nowhere to live.
    In Philadelphia he is chased out of the train station by the police—he and a friend had been looking for shelter there—and spends the night in a park. ‘We found a bench and lay down, thinking that we would spend the rest of the night there until fate turned against us. We had just fallen asleep, when it started to rain.’
    He studies, attends meetings, works at self-improvement: ‘I became a thirty-second degree mason and remained one throughout my stay in the United States.’
    He is politically involved: ‘I began organizing the African Students’ Association of America and Canada. I wrote a brochure,
Towards Colonial Freedom.
’
    He becomes interested in scientific socialism, in the works of Marx and Lenin at the same time he is studying theology as well: ‘I devoted free time to giving sermons in the Negro churches. I was invited to this or that church almost every Sunday to preach.’
    When he leaves the USA in 1945, he has three years as a philosophy instructor at Lincoln University under his belt(Greek and Negro History). ‘I was named the most distinguished professor of the year.’
    He travels to London: ‘One pleasure was buying a copy of the
Daily Worker
, the one newspaper I really wanted to read, carrying it in the most ostentatious way, and watching how many pairs of eyes quickly fixed on me.’
    To heat the headquarters of the Union of West African Students, of which he is vice-president, he collects lumps of coal as he walks the streets.
    At the same time, he is writing a doctoral dissertation in philosophy—on logical positivism.
    He formulates his famous doctrine of the peaceful boycott, a doctrine of African socialism, based on tactics of constructive action without resort to force.
    Kwame returns to Ghana.
    It is 1947.
    There might be five people here who know him personally. Perhaps a dozen. Not more. But it is this small group of people who head the newly established United Convention of the Gold Coast, a liberation movement but a movement that is very broadly based, highly undefined and without a programme. The members of the group pass as a collection of thinkers. They need somebody to do the dirty work. They bring in Nkrumah to do it.
    This work is everything he has. ‘In those days all my possessions fit into a small suitcase.’
    A year later, he takes part in peaceful demonstrations and marches towards the governor-general’s residence, towards Christianborg palace. Second World War veterans join in with a petition demanding autonomy for the Gold Coast. The police fire a few shots, and two are killed. Today, beautiful flowers grow on this spot. They show me this place a hundred times: two people died here for the freedom of Ghana. I stand there and lower my head.
    Kofi Baako, a government minister, asks: ‘Did anyone die for the freedom of Poland?’
    Riots, arson and looting begin in Accra. The leadership of the United Convention of The Gold Coast lands in jail. Nkrumah is transported to the north, to the savannah. ‘I was placed in a small hut there and kept under police supervision day and night.’
    They release him, and when he starts back to work he sees that he has nothing in common with the leaders.
    They want to make deals with the English in government offices.
    He also wants to make a deal with the English, but, when he is doing so, he states, there must be an angry crowd outside the window.
    Those Oxford men want to travel the road of legality. But Kwame has read Lenin. Lenin guides him on to the streets: Look, he says, there is power.
    Power? Kwame wonders.
    Crowded streets, the shouts of hawkers, children sleeping