Word: togoland
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Dates: during 1960-1960
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...Lome, sweltering capital of what was once the French Togoland, the French tricolor fluttered to the ground for the last time. Then two strapping Togolese soldiers smartly raised the new yellow-and-green-barred emblem of the free and independent republic of Togo as a French man-of-war in the harbor boomed a 101-gun salute and 20,000 Togolese, shouting "ablodé, ablodé" (freedom), snake-danced through the palm-lined streets behind a blaring brass band and native drummers. Thus last week was born the second of seven new African nations, due to join the world family...
...First colonized (and named) by Germany 76 years ago, Togoland after World War II was split into British and French mandates without regard to tribal boundaries. In 1957 the British portion was folded into Ghana, whose ambitious Prime Minister Kwame Nkrumah openly covets the French part he did not get. As late as 1958, France was still stubbornly rejecting any talk of Togo independence. Then under prodding from Togo's able pro-Western nationalist, Sylvanus Olympic, 57, the U.N. ordered an election in which Olympio's Committee for Togolese Unity swept two-thirds of the seats, and thereupon...
...figures on his neighbors' doing some surrendering too. Looking north, he saw that certain tribes in the Upper Volta Republic should remember their "common heritage" with Ghana and join up. To the east, he has used the sprawling Ewe tribe as a basis for suggesting that parts of Togoland, which becomes independent in April, be taken over as Ghana's "seventh province." To the west, where Ivory Coast's Premier Félix Houphouet-Boigny is having trouble with dissident Sanwi tribesmen, Nkrumah said he is "studying the possibilities of regrouping" the Sanwi people on that frontier...
...friends for Nkrumah. In big (pop. 35 million) Nigeria, Prime Minister Alhaji Sir Abubakar Tafewa Balewa refers to Ghana's leader with scarcely veiled contempt. "I do not know why you attach any importance whatsoever to what Mr. Nkrumah says," he recently snapped to touring British reporters. In Togoland, popular Premier Sylvanus Olympio is even blunter. "The man must be crazy," he says. "Does he really think he can absorb us with his puny bunch of tin soldiers and those two minesweepers he calls a navy...
...already established or imminent almost everywhere. There, independent Ghana, Guinea and Liberia will soon be joined by the rest of France's fragmenting African empire. At least seven new sovereign African states will come into existence in 1960. First on the timetable was Cameroon; soon to come: Togoland, the sprawling, wealthy Belgian Congo, the Mali Federation of Senegal and French Sudan, little Somalia, and Madagascar. On Oct. 1, the 35 million people of Nigeria, most populous of all, will get formal independence. By year's end, 180 million of the continent's 240 million people will...