Founding of the Organisation of African Unity
Thirty-two African heads of state signed the charter of the Organisation of African Unity at Addis Ababa on 25 May 1963. The founding argument was about how much unity. The Casablanca group around Nkrumah wanted a political union with a common government, a single army and a shared citizenship, on the reasoning that fifty weak states would be picked off individually. The Monrovia group, larger and more cautious, wanted cooperation between sovereign states. The Monrovia position won, and the charter that resulted enshrines sovereignty, non-interference in internal affairs, and — decisively — the acceptance of colonial borders as they stood. That last principle was confirmed by resolution in 1964 and is the OAU's most consequential act. The borders were arbitrary, drawn in European capitals across languages and peoples, and the founders judged that opening any of them would open all of them. It largely held: Africa has had remarkably few interstate border wars and a great many internal ones. The organisation's real work was decolonisation and apartheid. Its liberation committee funded and armed movements in the Portuguese colonies, Rhodesia, Namibia and South Africa, and it coordinated the diplomatic isolation that eventually told. Its failure was everything else. Non-interference meant silence on Amin, Bokassa, Mobutu and Mengistu, and the organisation was widely called a dictators' club. It was replaced by the African Union in 2002, whose constitutive act asserts a right to intervene in cases of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity. Haile Selassie hosted the founding conference and Addis Ababa has been the headquarters since, which is why the African Union sits in the capital of the one African state that was never colonised for long. Twenty-one of the fifty-four current members did not exist as independent states in 1963.
- Year: 1963 CE
- Category: Diplomacy
