Duchess Arrives For Ghana Celebrations

Press, Volume XCV, Issue 28217, 4 March 1957, Page 9

Duchess Arrives For Ghana Celebrations

(Rec. 10 p.m.) ACCRA, March 2. The Duchess of Kent arrived by air today to take part in celebrations to mark the transformation of the Gold Coast into the independent State of Ghana within the Commonwealth. She was accompanied by the Home Secretary, Mr R. A. Butler, and the Minister of State at the Colonial Office, Lord Perth. A salvo of 21 guns and the cheers of scores of thousands greeted the Duchess as she stepped from the special 8.0.A.C. Stratocruiser, Centaurus. She was received by the Governor of the Gold Coast, Sir Charles Noble Arden-Clark, who is to be the first GovernorGeneral of the new Commonwealth State of Ghana. Flag - bedecked standards, colourful bunting and streamers and police in their vivid escort garb of khaki shorts, blue jerseys, red cummerbunds and red-tassled fezzes greeted the Duchess. Tribal chiefs from all over the country, dressed in coloured robes, sat in a special section near the Royal dais. At the dais the Union Jack and the red, green and gold tricolour of Ghana fluttered side by side. After the airport ceremonies the Duchess a State drive in a nine-car convoy to Accra’s municipal building. The formal ceremony of wel-

come began with the pouring of a libation, a unique local form of prayer in which spirit is poured on to the ground as an offering to the gods, to ask their blessings on the Duchess. Three Gold Coast Church leaders had asked for this ceremony to be dropped as the Duchess’s welcome is a qivil and not religious affair. But the Accra municipal council refused to cancel it, saying the libation was an integral part of tradition and the welcome to the Duchess was civil and traditional.

The High Commissioner (Sir Clifton Webb) and Lady Webb have left London to represent New Zealand at the Ghana independence celebrations at Accra. Sir Clifton Webb said he was particularly pleased to be going, for, while he was Minister of Island Territories, the plan was evolved for conferring self-gov-ernment on Western Samoa. “The Gold Coast is a stage or two ahead of Western Samoa in its constitutional development, and I shall be interested to see whether any useful things can be gathered from their experience. My wife is specially interested in Plunket Society work in New Zealand and she is looking forward to seeing what developments in infant welfare and mothercraft are in train or in contemplation in the Gold Coast.”