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: The ad hoc and wavering Pan-Africanist train of thought began to consolidate itself through the scholarship of W.E.B. Du Bois, a staunch advocate of African culture and history, who propounded the idea that colonialism lay at the heart of Africa’s economic, political and social problems. Building on this, Marcus Garvey, a Black nationalist, further urged the return of Africans to the continent, which he attempted to facilitate through the establishment of a shipping company, the Black Star Line, aimed at transporting Black Africans back to Africa. This venture was unsuccessful due to obstruction by both the US and British authorities concerned with the future of their colonies. On the continent itself, a number of prominent intellectuals and heads of state such as Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, Julius Nyerere of Kenya, Sékou Touré of Guinea and Kenneth Kaunda of Zambia took up the cause of advancing the Pan-African ideal. A series of Pan-African Congresses were convened to further the interests of African peoples and discuss methods to achieve unification, and at the fifth Congress held in Manchester, England and attended by Nkrumah, among others, a number of significant aspirations and concerns were voiced. The Congress advocated for the “complete independence of the African continent and total rejection of colonialism and exploitation in all its forms,” and called for the unification of Africa through regional blocs and the adoption of democracy. The Congress also voiced the importance of economic regeneration to replace colonial economies geared towards primary resource extraction and exploitation resulting in a phenomenon that would later be termed ‘Dutch disease’. Of security matters, the Congress preferred to assume a stance of “positive neutrality” or non-interference, for which the OAU would later come under scrutiny. It was these concerns that had formed the basis of Ghana’s post-independence foreign policy, and Kwame Nkrumah (Ghana’s post-independence leader) categorically linked Ghana’s independence to the continent’s own, recognising that “the independence of Ghana is meaningless unless it is linked up with the total liberation of the continent.” Nkrumah therefore established a series of conferences hosted in Accra between 1958 and 1960 with the aims of assisting countries still under colonial rule, fostering cultural and economic ties between countries and considering the issue of world peace.