Title: Organisation of African Unity (OAU) | South African History Online
Headings: Organisation of African Unity (OAU)
Organisation of African Unity (OAU)
Context: The Emergence of a Pan-African Rhetoric
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Content: Nkrumah also hosted the All African People’s Conference which convened liberation groups and African nationalist organisations, attended by the African National Congress (ANC) . The vision of a United States of Africa was, per contra, not supported by all, and not as radically as Nkrumah, Sékou Touré of Guinea and Modibo Keita of Mali would have preferred it. Despite a common vision, differing ideological commitments and diverging opinions regarding strategy and structuring of a continental organisation soon divided and obstructed the pursuit of unity. The division led to the emergence of three ideological blocs on the African continent, split between the Casablanca Group (consisting of Ghana, Guinea, Mali, Libya, Egypt, Morocco and Algeria) which advocated for radical and full continental integration, the Monrovia Group (consisting of Nigeria, Tunisia, Ethiopia, Liberia, Sudan, Togo, and Somalia) which proposed a moderate approach to unification to be undertaken in incremental steps, and the Brazzaville Group (consisting of Francophone countries and led by Senegal and the Ivory Coast) which remained tied to the interests of France. A number of African leaders, including Kenya’s Julius Nyerere and Nigeria’s Abubakar Tafa Balewa, were supportive of the ideal of African unity, but many felt that Nkrumah’s grand vision for a United States of Africa was overreaching and ran the risk of dissolving sovereignty and territorial integrity – a point of particular contention among countries who had recently gained independence and hard-fought-for sovereignty. Perhaps Nkrumah naively pursued a single-minded Pan-African ambition with the assumption that other leaders would be of a like-minded predisposition. Nkrumah nevertheless underestimated the support for a continental union which would require the surrendering of sovereignty to gain a common monetary, foreign and defence policy, and by the time the OAU was established it presented itself as a diluted version of its former envisioned grandeur. The turbulence of the early 1960s pressed the notion of African countries presenting a united front in the hopes of being taken seriously on the world stage, although the newfound OAU disappointed many of its founding members. Formation
Thus, between 22 and 25 May 1963, delegates from 32 African countries convened in the Ethiopian capital of Addis Ababa to establish the Organisation for African Unity (OAU), intended to form the continental base for pan-Africanism but resulting in a watered-down compromise between competing ideological blocs. At the outset, then, complete unification seemed unattainable.