This is a significant memoir on at least two counts. First, it is revealing on the twin
levels of biography. Here it sensitively and successfully combines the autobiographical
reflections of Kwame Nkrumah's private secretary (fem.) from 1955 to 1966
(and for three years before that Miss Powell had been personal secretary to the
Governor of the Gold Coast. Sir Charles Arden-Clarke) with numerous genuinely
informative biographical insights into the modus vivendi of the Ghanaian President
himself. Secondly, it is a further contribution - and if these have been scarce in the
past, they are now gathering the momentum of a tropical hail-storm - to that
important genre of Colonial Service writing whose absence we have noticed in earlier
reviews in these pages, namely the story of Colonial Service experience as viewed and
written from the woman's angle.
There is much to enjoy in every chapter. Towards the end. however, one begins to
sense and share the real perils inherent in what Paul Scott has subsequently categorised
as "Staying On". There is a sense of cumulative doom, almost of relentless and
unpropitiatable Furies, as Miss Powell is unwillingly. unwittingly and quite unjustifiably
sucked into the maelstrom of suspicion and intrigue which built up around the
latter Nkrumah culminating in the paralvsing shock of the President receiving a
report from the Security Service accusing her - of all loyalists! - of possibly being a
paid foreign intelligence agent, in post-colonial Africa, one must be doubly careful
not to outstay one's welcome. However rapturous and reassuring it may initially seem
to be.
Erica Powell's book is the unusual memoir of an unusual woman in a very unusual
post at an unrepeatable moment in history, namely of being private secretary and
confidante to that supremely lonely man (cf. p. 30). the first - and the most
charismatic - President of Ghana. She is conscientious, too. over personal names, so
critical in any worthwhile autobiography, with one understandably discreet silence
over a district commissioner who apparently fell from grace (p. 35) and. less
explicably over her noble hostess 'the wife of the Establishment Officer' (p. 5). While
her earlier part in helping to ghost Kwame Nkrumah's so-called autobiography and to
make sure that it saw the light of day in time for its launching on 6 March 1957 has long
been suspected, here is the real autobiography which many have long been waiting
for. But for Nkrumah's vain anxieties about the tone of earlier drafts, we would have
had this memoir a decade or more ago. Professional historians of the Gold Coast and
the transfer of power as well as general readers will be grateful to author and
publisher alike that we do at least have it available. It is to be hoped, too, that one day
Miss Powell's unique correspondence with Kwame Nkrumah will be safely deposited
for posterity to benefit from.
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