Before dawn the recorded radio beat of tom-toms sounded out across the cocoa plantations and straw-hut villages of the Gold Coast, awakening hundreds of African officials and thousands of voters, the tribal cry of darkest Africa summoning everybody to an election. All day the voters calmly queued up outside the polling huts, picked up their ballots, had their thumbs smeared with indelible ink to prevent duplicate voting, walked into the huts and dropped their ballots into boxes.
The boxes were marked with party symbols—a rooster for the Convention Peoples Party of Kwame...