The Sunday News
Saul Gwakuba
Some five years and one month after the first conference of independent African states was held in Accra (on 15 to 22 April 1958), a much larger one was convened in Addis Ababa in Ethiopia from 22 to 25 May 1963, and it resolved to found a continental body, the
Organisation of African Unity, OAU.
The 1958 Accra conference was attended by eight heads of state whereas the Addis Ababa summit brought together 32 presidents and a large number of leaders of African political parties fighting for their respective countries’ freedom from colonial domination.
Zimbabwe (Southern Rhodesia by then) was represented by Joshua Nkomo who was accompanied by Joseph Bruno Msika and James Robert Dambaza Chikerema. Their party, the Zimbabwe African People’s Union, Zapu, had been banned in September the previous year, and its leadership had been restricted for three months.
They had resolved before Zapu was outlawed by the Rhodesian administration headed by Sir Edgar Whitehead that should Zapu be proscripted, they would defy the ban by operating as an undersound organization. Outside the Southern Rhodesia, Zapu was of course, free to function, hence Nkomo’s and his colleagues’ attendance of the Addis Ababa heads of state meeting, as petitioners on their country’s behalf.
The Zapu delegations traditional fur hats generated a great deal of attention at the historic summit. The Zimbabwe African National Union, Zanu, was not yet formed but there was dissatisfaction in some parts of the country about Nkomo’s leadership. Zanu came into existence on 8 August 1963, two months and two weeks after the historic Addis Ababa conference.
The conference adopted document known as the OAU Charter. It was a compromise mainly between the pan-Africanist Casablanca group headed by Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah, and the gradualist micro- nationalistic Monrovia bloc whose virtual leader was Liberia’s William Tubman.
There was, however, also a slight difference of opinion between Nkrumah and Tanganyika’s Julius Kambarage Nyerere on how to achieve African unity.
Nkrumah was for “union now” among all the 32 independent African states, and he used the Ghana, Guinea, Mali union as a model. His slogan was: “Independence today! Union tomorrow!”
To him, Guinea’s Sekou Toure, and Mali’s Modilo Keita, the Ghana, Guinea, Mali come-together known as the Union of African States, UAS, was the nucleus of what the African continents should achieve sooner than later.
Tanganyika’s Nyerere’s opinion was that African unity must be achieved through, first, regional groupings. He explained this at the Cairo conference, terming it regional socio-economic co-operation. He was strongly against the immediate creation of a United States of Africa, USA, Nkrumah’s life’s political passion.
Nyerere was obviously looking at the issue in the then existing East African Commission, EAC perspective, a loose socio-economic grouping comprising Uganda, Kenya, and Tanyanyika. These three had agreed to share the administration of Posts and Telecommunications, a Uganda responsibility; Railways and Habours, a Tanganyikan duty; with Kenya handling the East African Airways.
We should note here that Tanzania was not yet formed as Zanzibar was still a British protectorate. It became independent on 10 December 1963 with Sultan Sayyid Jamshid ibn Abdullah staying as its constitutional monarch to represent the British crown as the island had joined the Commonwealth.
On 12 January 1964, a group of about 500 to 600 armed men led by a Ugandan who liked to refer to himself as “field marshal” (John Okello) stormed the government offices and residences, killed several hundreds of Arabs, and sent ibn Abdullah fleeing to Oman or Saudi Arabia.
The group proclaimed what it named a “people’s republic” with Sheikh Abeid Karume as its president. On 26 April 1964, Karume and Nyerere signed an “Act of Union” bringing the two countries together as “Tanzania”.
That occurred 11 months after the formation of the OAU. Its capital, Dar es Salaam, was to play a vital role in the liberation of Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Namibia, Angola, South Africa and Indian Ocean islands, the Comoro and the Seychelles.
The 32 African presidents unanimously agreed to co-ordinate and concert their actions and other efforts to accelerate the decolonisation of Africa.
They declared that the forcible imposition of settlers by colonial powers to control the governments and administrations of those territories still under colonialism was a flagrant violation of the inalienable rights of the legitimate inhabitants of the concerned territories.
They called on colonial powers, particularly the United Kingdom, with regard to Southern Rhodesia, not to transfer the powers and attributes of sovereignty to foreign minority governments imposed on African people by the use of force and under cover of racial legislation; transfer of power to settler minorities would amount to a violation of the provision of United Nations resolution 1514 (XV) on independence, they said.
They declared their support for the Southern Rhodesian (Zimbabwean) African nationalists and “solemnly declared” that if power in Southern Rhodesian were to be usurped by a racial white minority government, state members of the conference would lend their effective moral and practical support to any legitimate measure which the African nationalist leaders may devise for the purpose of recovering such power and restoring it to the African majority.
The leaders also undertook there and then to concert the efforts of its members to take such measures as the situation demanded against any state according recognition to the minority government.
It was a rather curious development that following this summit and the above quoted declaration on Southern Rhodesia, Britain announced that it would not grant independence to Southern Rhodesia before majority African rule (Nibmar), a policy position by the British Government throughout the 15 years that followed the Smith regime’s unilateral declaration of independence on 11 November 1965 and the signing of the Zimbabwe independence constitution at Lancaster House in London on 22 December 1979.
There is a difference of opinion on whether the founding of the OAU and its declaration on Southern Rhodesia as quoted above influenced or caused the British Government to adopt the “no independence before majority African rule”, policy or whether that was caused by the Smith regime’s intransigence as exhibited by Ian Smith himself during his meeting with the British Prime minister, Harold Wilson, aboard the freighter, Tiger, off Gibralter in the Mediterranean Sea in December 1966.
However, it came about, the OAU meant precisely Nibmar in its declaration on Southern Rhodesia at its inaugural conference in Addis Ababa in May 1963. Britain might have taken a cue from that declaration three years later.
The Addis Ababa summit reaffirmed that South- West Africa was under international mandate and any attempt by South Africa to annex it would be regarded as an aggressive act.
The meeting undertook to pursue the South-West Africa issue at the International Court of Justice at The Hague, and asserted the right of the people of that country to self determination.
On the Portuguese-ruled African countries, the meeting appointed a four-nation committee to represent African UN members at a UN Security Council meeting that examined a UN report on the situation in the Portuguese African colonies.
The four nations were Liberia, Sierra Leone, Tunisia and Madgascar. Foreign ministries of the same four states were tasked to inform the UN Security Council about the “explosive” situation in South Africa.
Liberation movements were urged to co-ordinate their efforts by establishing common action fronts wherever necessary. A special committee to co-ordinate and harmonise aid from OAU member states was set up. Its members were Algeria, Guinea, Senegal, Congo (DRC), Nigeria, Uganda, United Arab Republic and Tanganyika. Its head office was to be in Dar es Salaam.
It appealed to all nations to apply diplomatic and other sanctions against South Africa, and condemned apartheid and racial discrimination, particularly against people of African origin in the United States.
The OAU founding fathers, however, commended the US Government for introducing initial anti-racial discrimination measures.
While calling for an end to the arms race, the presidents reaffirmed their respect of the principle declaring Africa a “denuclear zone”, and the destruction of existing nuclear weapons.
It was at the Addis Ababa conference that the Economic Commission for Africa’s executive secretary announced that a meeting of African finance ministries would be held in July in Khartoum, Sudan, that very year to establish an African Development Bank, ADB.
The Conference looked at a wide area of possible co-operation among the 32 independent African states and accepted the incorporation of a set of resolutions submitted by the then kingdom of Libya. One of those resolutions called for the conduct of extensive studies on African social and labour problems.
It called also for the strengthening of inter-African co-operation through such measures as exchanges of social and labour legislation, establishment of an African youth organisation, the organisation of an African Scouts union and the holding of an annual continental jamboree, the organisation of annual African sports games, the establishment of an African sports games, the establishment of an African trade union, and the holding of vocational training courses for African workers.
For Zimbabwe, just as it is for every former colony that was liberated by the sweat and blood of African patriots, the OAU was the best thing that happened to the African continent since 1919 when a few black leaders pleaded in vain with imperial powers at the Versailles Peace Conference to end the First World War.
Coming to the continents rescue some 44 years after that conference, and some 78 years after the Berlin all-European gathering that criminally shared Africa among the European nations, the OAU helped to undo that unforgivable deed.
On 20 March 1976, after many attempts had been made in vain to get Ian Smith and his all-white party, the Rhodesian Front (RF), to understand and accept that Zimbabwe is an African country, the OAU issued a Press statement, a part of which read: “The OAU will no longer support any further meaningless talks with the white minority in Zimbabwe. The end of the road has come. The freedom fighters of Zimbabwe should now carry the armed struggle into the very heart of Zimbabwe.
“The white minority in Zimbabwe, who have aided and abetted the instransigence of Smith by their silence, must have themselves to blame for they will now reap an uncertain future in Zimbabwe under black majority rule which is now in the horizon . . . ”
The beginning of the end of colonialism in Africa came when the two Portuguese colonies, Angola and Mozambique, were liberated in the 1970s. Its remnants were Rhodesia and South-West Africa. South Africa was a different kettle of fish as what obtained in that country then was a rare type of highly oppressive, shamelessly dispossesive and brutally exploitative racialist tyranny known as apartheid.
The OAU faced these three challenges with much valour, and freedom fighters pulled down the Union Jack and raised that of an independent Zimbabwe at midnight on 17 to 18 April 1980. Namibia followed suit in 1990, and the democratisation of South Africa in 1994 was the grand finale of a long tragic story that was charaterised by the loss of much human blood, destruction of a great deal of property, generation of immeasurable, racial bitterness, and physical suffering particularly for the African people.
- Saul Gwakuba Ndlovu is a retired, Bulawayo – based journalist. He can be contacted on cell 0734328136 or through email. [email protected]
