African Unity, like the Arabian Bird

The forty-three Heads of State and Government of the Organization for African Unity (OAU), who met on 9-10 September in Syrtis, Libya, have decided to give new impetus to the project for the United States of Africa. In Lomé next year, the platform arranged by the Abuja Treaty should be rediscussed; it anticipates "an African common market, a common parliament, a central bank and a federal court". The idea of the United States of Africa represented not only a dream, but a political project for many of the founding fathers of the new Africa, liberated from colonialism, including Julius Nyerere, Léopold Sédar Senghor, and Kwame Nkrumah. It is on the basis of that ideal, it must not be forgotten, that the OAU was born in 1963, a petty compromise modelled upon the ineffective United Nations Organisation.

The debate on African unity now resumes at a moment when Africans are apparently very far from those ideals, after the tragic events in Somalia, Rwanda and Liberia, and the permanent tensions in Sudan, Ivory Coast, Togo, Angola and many other countries. Maybe it is precisely because of these new disasters, and of those that appear imminent, that the ideal of a united Africa, pacified and independent, able to talk on an equal level with the other world powers, may revive. This can be perceived in Muammar Qaddafi’s remark, who, in greeting his guests in Syrtis, was hoping for "a seat for united Africa in the Security Council of the United Nations". The disintegration of the USSR and the crisis of the international order have created a vacuum in world power which is certainly not filled by American monopolarism, and which pushes peoples in every continent to look for a new role in the world. In some cases, tendencies toward disintegration are prevailing, as Africa has sadly experienced. But there are also opposite pressures toward unification, both at continental and world level, passing through a suitable reform of the United Nations, as Qaddafi was hinting at. Of course a victory on the front of the European Federation could tilt the balance in the right direction, that is the one of peoples’ unity (g.m.).