Its Liberation Committee, based in Dar es Salaam (the Tanzanian commercial capital), donated weapons and funds to the insurgencies in South Africa, Zimbabwe, Namibia, Angola, and Mozambique. It contributed herculean diplomatic lobbying and sanctions to achieve this. The OAU was committed to decolonisation, including the end of apartheid in South Africa and the settler regime in Southern Rhodesia (Zimbabwe). This followed the precedents of the UN United Nations, the Arab League, and the Organisation of American States, and would soon be followed by the Association of South-East Asian Nations (ASEAN). It was an inter-governmental organisation whose charter pledged it to not interfere in the internal affairs of its member states – even in the event of massacres. So the OAU, formed on, was instead modelled on the Organisation of American States.
He was hugely outvoted by other presidents refusing to give up their sovereignty. Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana’s president, in his Africa must Unite speech, argued the pan-African case for continental federalism, for a Union of African States, with one continental diplomatic corps, one department of defence, and a common market. There were two competing visions lobbying at the founding. The anniversary begs the question: How much of the vision of the OAU’s founding fathers has been realised 60 years on? What would not be there but for the efforts of the organisation and its successor the African Union? Africa Day this year marks 60 years since the founding of the Organisation of African Unity (OAU).
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