The Masque of Africa_ Glimpses of African Belief - By V. S. Naipaul Page 0,67

a bit of luck. Once we were out on the squalling street next to Pa-boh’s car and the black water butts I felt free. We drove away, but not back to where we had come from. We followed the curve of the road in the other direction; and after a while we saw the other end of the green strip, the big shrine area, that had begun at the white palace.

We left Pa-boh to pick up the pieces. It wasn’t fair, but it was something he could do, and do well. He thought of himself as a man possessed; important spiritual forces guided him.

Twice in the next week he left messages for me at the hotel.

8

AT THE end of the year there was going to be a presidential election. Kojo took me to meet Nana, the man most likely to win. He was intelligent, full of charm and urbanity. His colour posters were everywhere in Accra.

There was another man, though, who couldn’t be a candidate, because he had been president twice before and constitutionally couldn’t run again. This man was Flight Lieutenant Jerry Rawlings. He had led two coups in two and a half years, nearly thirty years before, and had twice in that time returned the country to civilian rule. Later he had ruled Ghana for eighteen years. As revolutionary and ruler he would be a ghost-like presence at whatever new presidential feast was coming up.

There wasn’t much about him in the newspapers, but he was there. Richmond’s friends, when they spoke of this man, attributed extraordinary qualities to him; they said he was what the country needed; if he hadn’t done all that he might have done during his eighteen years in power it was because “bad” people surrounded him.

In this way Jerry Rawlings, even while he lived, with a pleasant house in Accra and another house in the country, was becoming mythical in Ghana, more mythical and more mysterious than Nkrumah could ever be; just as in Bengal in India in the late 1940s the nationalist Subhas Chandra Bose became mythical after his death: with many sightings reported, the man who could solve all the problems of Bengal and India, if only by some trick, some great act of faith, or prayer, or national penance, he could truly be returned to the living. It happens like this in some religions too: a great leader dies, and the grief generated by his loss turns to a widespread conviction that the great leader is not dead but only in “occlusion,” still watching from his new position on high, his vision greater than before.

The Rawlings story lent itself to myth. He was born in 1947, his mother Ghanaian, his father Scottish. He was a big and handsome man, and was the first man of mixed origin to become a political leader in Ghana. He had gone to good schools. Later he had joined the Ghana air force. He loved flying; he became a flight lieutenant. He came to power in a way that was full of romance and drama. As an air force officer he, greatly daring, had thrown in his luck with an anti-government coup. The coup had failed, and he was charged with treason. During his trial he made a remarkable speech about the corruption of the government. It was a brave thing to do; anything might have happened to him; institutions in Ghana, especially after Nkrumah, were still shaky. But in his speech he had spoken for much of the country; and his bravery on that day in court was his making as a politician. He was jailed on the treason charge, but he didn’t stay long in jail. In the very next month some junior officers successfully brought about a coup. They freed Rawlings, and he declared himself head of state.

For four months after that he sought to cleanse the country of its bad elements among officials, army people, business people. He then returned the country to civilian rule. It was his romantic idea: if you cleaned a country up, it looked after itself. But people and countries were more complicated than he thought; and a year later he led another coup against the people he had placed in power. This time he stayed in charge. Nine years later he gave Ghana a new constitution. He served for two terms as a constitutional president, and then was voted out.

He had been out of office for eight years, but his myth still held. He was the man