WEST AFRICAN LEADERS

Press, Volume XCVIII, Issue 28950, 18 July 1959, Page 11

WEST AFRICAN LEADERS

Secret Talks In Liberia

(N.Z. Pres* Association—Copyrtqht) MONROVIA (Liberia), July 16. Stronger ties among West Africa’s only three independent countries—Liberia, Ghana and Guinea—are considered certain to emerge from the four-day meeting of their leaders opening at isolated Sannlquellen, 200 miles north of Monrovia today. African problems in general and West African problems in particular will be on the agenda at the secret conference of Dr, Kwame Nkrumah, Prime Minister of two-year-old Ghana. Mr Sekou Toure, Premier of Guinea, which became independent of France last October, and their host, Mr William Tubman, president of the 102-year-old Republic of Liberia. The West African “Big Three,” who dined together at President Tubman’s palatial executive mansion last night, are due to drive to Sannlquellen today to get down to detailed talks tomorrow. In spite of the secrecy surrounding the talks, these specific questions are known to be on the table: the Ghana-Guinea union, a long-term concept already announced by the leaders of the two newly-independent States and France's forthcoming atomic tests in the Sahara. Even before the conference opens, there is known to be a basic difference of opinion between Ghana and Guinea on the one hand and Liberia on the other on the term which would be used to describe the form of West African co-operation they all desire. Dr. Nkrumah and President Toure favour the word “union,” while President Tubman prefers ‘association.”