by Andrew Brown
Bernal’s fellow commissioners were from the USA, the USSR and Sierra Leone; he found them to be agreeable company and Mr Botzio, a Ghanaian government minister appointed to be commission chairman, was ‘genial and conscientious’. Following a formal dinner on their first evening together in Accra, Sage sat on a terrace under the stars, drinking brandy and coffee, talking and reflecting on the notion of ‘translating the spirit of Cambridge into the barbarities of the Gold Coast’.64 This was one of the few moments of relaxation in what would be three weeks of intensive work. Botzio made it clear from the outset that the two main government aims were to increase the numbers of students and to appoint more Africans to university staff positions.
Before visiting any universities, the commissioners went to two schools. The first, a middle school, reminded Sage of a village school in China: ‘bare walls and everything reduced to extreme simplicity.’65 He was impressed by the domestic science teaching – no nonsense about modern methods but an old cooking pot on three lumps of clay. They also went to Achimota College, which had very good staff and excellent buildings. It was a private school, whose alumni filled all the top technical and administrative positions in the country. Just as in Hong Kong, the influence of Christian missionaries was strongly in evidence, with hymn singing everywhere.
Thomas Hodgkin joined them for their first visit to Legon University, just outside Accra. Bernal visited the science departments, which were well staffed and equipped, but produced very few students. He was especially interested in the Geology Department, where two devoted English scientists had spent much time revealing the strange Precambrian rock strata underlying central Ghana. They were going to be supplanted by a team of thirty Soviet geologists, and Bernal was optimistic that soon ‘we really will get to know something about the country’.66 He wondered how the Ghanaians were going to convert from tribalism to socialism. At the medical school, he heard about high childhood mortality due to protein malnutrition; he had already seen a university farm, where, despite heroic efforts, the animal stock did poorly. Thinking back to his own boyhood at Brookwatson, he immediately grasped the impossibility of raising cattle where there was a severe water shortage and no way of making dry fodder such as hay.
New Year’s Eve found Sage improvising new dances in a packed ballroom at Kumasi, the capital of the Asanti region. He was impressed by the Kumasi College of Technology, where students could qualify with external degrees in engineering from the University of London, and there were also schools of pharmacy, architecture and building. On 3rd January, the commissioners flew further north and visited a tribal village. Sage noticed the cleanliness of the round huts. They were taken to see a sacred pool, where some boys were teasing a crocodile with a live chicken on a string. The crocodile eventually caught the chicken and swallowed it in one gulp. The American commissioner expressed her horror at this outcome, until Sage reminded her that she had eaten chicken for supper the night before, and from the chicken’s point of view, there was not much difference. It was a poor area, where boys were used to herd cattle and drive them south to the cities for sale. There was not much enthusiasm, Sage noted, for educating girls.
The commissioners visited the small, but relatively wealthy city of Ho, in the Volta region. In Ho, Bernal was encouraged to find some co-educational schools. The commissioners visited a juice bottling plant run by a woman, who told them ‘if you have been to the co-ed school, you can stare in the eyes of the boy and kick him out!’67 Back in Accra, they met Nkrumah for the first time, and he displayed a lively interest in the educational programme. The commissioners spent one day revising a draft report, which Sage had finished writing at 3.30am, and the final version was delivered to Nkrumah on 11th January.
The report’s central recommendation was to create two independent universities, one in Legon and the second in Kumasi, with a training college in Cape Coast. It also called for the Africanization of the staff as rapidly as was compatible with maintaining the quality of teaching and research. Nkrumah’s administration adopted it immediately and caused some ill feeling by sacking some lecturers without compensation, and abruptly discontinuing certain courses. Their radical approach found favour with the Ghanaian Times, which applauded the end of the reactionary, bourgeois university system. The newspaper told its readers that ‘Africa is in revolutionary ferment. Our institutions of higher learning cannot stand still.’68 Confident in the future, the editorial writer eagerly anticipated the teaching of economics and history from an African perspective, and the advent of socialist economic planning. Nkrumah persuaded Thomas Hodgkin to become the first Director of the Institute of African Studies at the University of Ghana in Legon, (although Hodgkin and the commission had called for the elimination of European staff). He also appointed an Irishman, Connor Cruise O’Brien, as the Vice-Chancellor, but soon came to regret this when O’Brien resisted Nkrumah’s crude attempts at increased state control of the University.69
In May 1963, Bernal was asked to advise on a new professor of physics for the University of Ghana. There were five candidates, and Bernal said that his top choice was Alan Nunn May, ‘a most distinguished physicist’.70 May had become a communist while a Cambridge undergraduate in the thirties; during the war, he worked as a member of the British nuclear research team in Canada. After the war, he was the first atomic spy to be unmasked and served six years hard labour for supplying secrets to the Soviets. In his recommendation, Bernal referred to this interruption to May’s career as resulting from an act of conscience against the misuse of science, and suggested that without it, May would have risen to the top in modern physics. With Bernal’s support, May was appointed and served the University well as professor and Dean until he retired in 1976.
Sage undertook his last great adventure at the age of sixty, when he travelled to South America in January 1962. He was invited to speak at a summer school at the University of Concepción on the rugged Pacific coast of Chile. It was, he soon found, a country where geology played a prominent role – there had been a devastating earthquake two years earlier, mining was the major industry, and the Andes range and numerous volcanoes were testament to the earth’s prehistoric upheavals. It was a landscape that excited him from the moment he saw the rising sun over the peaks of the Andes. After a breakfast discussion at his Santiago hotel about ‘the present state of the life-in-meteorites problem’, Sage was driven up into the mountains, where ‘the scenery became more and more grand’ as they ascended to 10,000 feet, and he caught sight of the snow-covered peak of a volcano at 21,000 feet.71 On his second day in Chile, he flew from Santiago south-west to Concepción and the bright weather afforded him ‘a magnificent view of the Andes as a set of more or less isolated peaks’. On arrival, he ‘plunged right into the business of the summer school, a large hall which was in the Institute of Jurisprudence, of course without any such things as blackboards or screens [but] with a very considerable audience’.72
The summer school finished after Bernal had been there for about a week. A philosophy professor from Santiago gave a closing lecture which ‘lasted an hour and a half and gave the most gloomy impression of civilization and its doom… I, luckily was chosen to express the views of the invited guests which I did more optimistically and forcibly in a quarter of an hour.’73 He was in a rush because friends had promised to take him on a hike in the volcanic region about seventy miles from Concepción. Travelling by bus and lorry along increasingly primitive and dusty roads, they passed through rich farmlands where they saw horsemen mounted on silver saddles; they also came across extremely poor peasants, who were using ox-carts with solid wooden wheels made exactly like those shown in paintings from Sumerian times.
Rising at 5.30 am the next morning, Sage was fascinated by the variety of hot springs close to the hotel – ‘some of mud, some of water, some with steam blowing through cold water, many of gas, largely sulphurous depositing sulphur salt, boracic acid and other chemicals along the holes, and always changing their position so that the whol
e ground was speckled in different colours, deep reds, blacks, purples, yellows, greens, by various effects of manganese, iron and, curiously enough, specific algae which only grew in the very hot water.’ The really serious climb of the day started after breakfast, emerging above the tree-line into hot sun, over ridges and down into valleys of spectacular beauty, with hot and cold streams running through them every few yards. Bernal had never seen such lush grassland that was not used by cattle, and everywhere there were flowers. The ground rose so steeply that every hundred yards or so they came across new kinds of flowers, gentians and an enormous number of bright species they could not identify. Working their way up towards the peak of the volcano, which although covered in parts with snow and ice was still steaming, they managed to get above the snow-line before turning back. Down at the hotel there was just time to take a cool bathe in a pool, from where they could see all the surrounding mountains, before the long trudge to the nearest town, Chilan. There, Bernal boarded a bus to Concepción and then Santiago. On eventually reaching his hotel in Santiago, he felt he had spent ‘a fairly complete twenty-hour day’.
He was up early the next morning to give a series of lectures at the Institute of Physics. After a delicious lunch in the shade of ilex trees, drinking Chilean wine and talking about the problems of Latin America and the native Indians, he returned to the university to give two more lectures, one on molecular biology and one on the origin of life. These ran over time so he was late for a talk to the Chilean Peace Committee.
This meeting lasted rather longer than I expected, in fact until well after 11 o’clock, after which I was driven across town to a hill… the last bit of the Andes which is still left in Santiago. There I went to the house of my old friend Pablo Neruda, the national poet of Chile who is still revered even when he is considered politically subversive. Pablo Neruda has built himself a fantastic house on this hill with all the rooms naturally on different levels, separated by stone staircases [and] through the garden with a little stream flowing through it making ponds with goldfish… I thought I had arrived, of course, long after they had had their dinner, but, after talking for about three-quarters of an hour, he said ‘I think it is about time we went down to dinner now.’ So we went down these staircases into another room where we were served a real Chilean dinner with lots of roast meat and other things, more wine and more conversation. I started making excuses that it was a bit late but I was not released until about one-thirty in the morning.
The next afternoon Bernal flew over the Andes to the neighbouring country of Argentina and stayed in Buenos Aires for the last few days of January. Buenos Aires he found to be a more chaotic and bustling city than Santiago, reflecting to some extent the Italian influence there versus the German heritage of Chile. Although he regarded Argentina as a police state, he was pleasantly surprised that he was able to go to the House of Deputies and have informal discussions with a number of politicians about the problems of Latin America, particularly the foreign policy of the new Kennedy administration that had just been unveiled at a conference at Punta del Este in Uruquay. He noted that political life in Buenos Aires was rather exciting because the military had just issued an ultimatum to the president to disavow Castro’s Cuba or be removed from office. Bernal was lionized by the illegal Argentine peace organization, who gave a four-hour dinner in his honour, attended by academics, trade unionists, students and representatives of women’s movements. The following night, he addressed a clandestine peace meeting, where he first had to listen to ‘four rather long and very flattering speeches from various kinds of delegates describing my capacities and virtues’. Feeling ‘extremely embarrassed’, he kept his own remarks short and then received ‘such prolonged applause that [he] had to stop it by saying that it would not be allowed in the Soviet Union because it would indicate a “cult of personality”’.74
The final stop on his South American tour was Rio de Janeiro, ‘an incredibly beautiful place’. While he had not seen a single African face in Chile or Argentina, in Rio ‘as a result of slavery which was only abolished in 1890, about half the population is black and, as it seems to be the case, despite the idea that there is no racial inequality, they seem to be doing all the rough jobs’. The whole trip had taken only two weeks, but during that time Bernal made some very astute observations about the conditions of the countries he visited. All three nations depended on American capital to such an extent that he thought they were all colonies of the new imperialism. Chile was the most extreme in both its geography and its economy.
Chile is a country with enormous material resources – minerals, water-power, agriculture, forests and fisheries – all largely unused, a development held back by local feudalism. Forty families own between them nearly all the good land, and foreign countries, largely the United States, own and export all the minerals. Ninety per cent of the resources of the country are foreign owned. On the peasant holdings, conditions are unbelievably primitive for the New World. There are few modern roads; transport is by ox-cart, some even have solid wheels which were out of date in the fourth millennium B.C. I saw peasants reaping with sickles and threshing the corn under ox hooves on a threshing floor.
There is little industry apart from mining. The coal mining towns along the coast are in a state of great depression and unemployment… the general depression is showing itself in the standard of living. Infantile mortality, which had fallen to 96 per thousand in 1953, now stands at 125.
These may seem fairly chronic conditions for a Latin American country and the conditions in Chile are better than in most; there is a higher degree of literacy, 80 per cent, a more democratic tradition and neither the army nor the church are as powerful as in other South American republics. What is new is the realisation, most vocal among the educated but spreading throughout the whole people, that all this is unnecessary and could quickly be changed.
American policy towards Latin America in the 1950s was driven by the doctrine of anti-communism, and in Chile, at least, had effectively supported the existing oligarchy. Castro’s revolution in 1958 heightened US concerns that the socially unstable countries on the South American continent might turn to communism. Kennedy decided on a more activist approach, the ‘Alliance for Progress’, under which the US administration would support social reform in Latin America, but in return would expect those countries to shun Cuba. This was the deal that had been pushed through at the Punte del Este conference, but Kennedy’s good faith was immediately beached at the Bay of Pigs. Castro, forced into the arms of the Soviets, declared himself a ‘Marxist-Leninist’.75
The military presence was especially obvious to Bernal in Argentina, where an army of 150,000 was needed to preserve the ruling class. He was sceptical about Kennedy’s overtures to the South American countries and his ability to bring down Castro.
The uneasy equilibrium that now exists here [Argentina] and elsewhere in Latin America, is between these vested interests and the popular forces demanding land reform and an end to foreign exploitation either by direct ownership or by the rigging of prices.
For all this Cuba is the touchstone. Those who have reason to fear the example of what Fidel Castro has done there, will support the United States policy of exclusion and embargo with the hope that this will bring about his collapse. But they do so without enthusiasm or much hope, for every step that they make along this path weakens their support from their own people, while military intervention against Cuba would bring about the most violent reactions.
The much boosted ‘Allianza per il progresso’ has not proved a very effective lever. The ‘progress’ part has been quietly dropped; there is no evidence of any land reform or diminution of foreign interests, while the promised money benefits have been slow in arriving and carry too visible strings, as Punta del Este showed. Crushing Castro will not solve the endemic problems, political or economic, of Latin America and Castro is as far as ever from being crushed.76
It seems that Sage just did not have the time to visit Cuba.
He received an invitation to go there in 1960 – Che Guevara, as President of the Cuban National Bank, wrote to ask him to come on a fact-finding tour and to give his ‘frank opinion’ on the problems to be faced. He said that Castro’s government could arrange to use his ‘valuable services’.77 Bernal replied that he was ‘most encouraged by the resurgence of popular liberties in Cuba and by the way in which the Cuban people, together with their leader, are determined to redress the economic misery of their country’.78 He said that he would be privileged to help, but ultimately nothing came of the exchange of letters.
Bernal’s brief but penetrating observations of life in Latin America at the beginning of 1962 would inform his view of the Cuban missile crisis, just as his deeper contacts in China and the USSR gave him a unique perspective on the developing rift between Khrushchev and Mao Zedong.
20
