Guinea: Parlor Games at the Villa Sily

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As far as President Sekou Toure is concerned, French-speaking Guinea and English-speaking Ghana have been "one country" ever since he and Kwame Nkrumah swore their eternal togetherness in 1958. When Nkrumah was toppled from power, therefore, it seemed the honorable thing to call for 50,000 Guinea volunteers to march into Ghana and restore "the Redeemer" to his throne. Trouble was that to get there, Sekou's soldiers would have had to march 250 miles through an entirely different country, the Ivory Coast, whose President Félix Houphouet-Boigny called out his own 3,000-man army to repel the "Guinean hordes."

That was a fortnight ago, and not a shot has yet been fired. For all his threats, Sekou Toure apparently has neither the intention nor the manpower to march anywhere. A few scraggly lads from his Revolutionary Youth Movement answered the call to arms and were sent upcountry to drill with brooms and wooden, guns, but Sekou has not dared to call up the 30,000 Guineans who once served in the French army—for fear that they would turn their weapons on him instead. What with West Africa's current epidemic of military coups (five since December), Sekou has not even seen fit to take his 3,000-man regular army away from its current assignment: building roads in the interior.

And what of Nkrumah, the man on whose behalf the "invasion" was supposedly planned? His ex-Messianic Majesty, still the guest of Sekou Toure, has been installed in a well-guarded seaside house called "Villa Sily." He whiles away the hours indoors playing parlor games with his private secretary.