GOLD COAST: White Metal & Black Men

In troubled Africa, a 50-50 bet for the future is the Gold Coast, a British dependency the size of Wyoming, scooped out of the continent's equatorial west. Since last year the Gold Coast has had 1) a written constitution, 2) a Legislative Assembly of 75 elected Negroes and nine whites, 3) a Negro Prime Minister, the first in any British colony, Dr. Kwame Nkrumah. Dr. Nkrumah disturbs some people in Downing Street, since he is a Marxian-Socialist who got his schooling at Pennsylvania's all-Negro Lincoln University and had to be let out of a British jail when his fellow Negroes elected him. Nevertheless, last week the British felt that their experiment in native self-government looked promising enough for it to plan spending $400 million in a Gold Coast industrial project.

The plans call for 1) damming of the Volta river to provide a continuous 560,000 kilowatts, 2) building smelters to extract an annual 120,000 long tons of aluminum from local bauxite, 3) building a new harbor at Tema, 20 miles east of Accra. A government commission will work out an agreement between the British and Gold Coast governments, and British and Canadian aluminum companies; after that, the British will put up $121 million. The aluminum will replace about one-third of British purchases from dollar areas.

In the Gold Coast, some feared that Britain's bold investment was really just a trick to exploit cheap native labor. Said Prime Minister Nkrumah: "Until I am fully convinced that the interests of the Gold Coast are fully covered, my cabinet will not sign the agreement."