The Founding of the Organisation of African Unity, May 25, 1963

On May 25, 1963, representatives of 32 independent African states gathered in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, and signed the charter creating the Organisation of African Unity, the continent’s first permanent, near-universal political body. The date is still commemorated annually as Africa Day. The charter formally entered into force that September, and Addis Ababa, chosen partly because Ethiopia had never been colonized, aside from a brief Italian occupation from 1936 to 1941, became the OAU’s permanent headquarters, a role its successor, the African Union, still holds there today.

The organization’s shape was the product of a real, unresolved argument among African leaders in the years leading up to 1963, not a foregone consensus. One camp, known as the Casablanca bloc after a January 1961 conference in that city, was led by Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah and included Guinea, Mali, Egypt, Morocco, and Libya. This group pushed for something close to full political federation: a continental government with unified defense and foreign policy, echoing the same ambitions behind the Ghana-Guinea-Mali Union that Nkrumah had championed. The rival Monrovia bloc, associated with a 1961 meeting in Liberia’s capital and loosely led by figures such as Senegal’s Léopold Sédar Senghor, took a more gradualist view. It included Nigeria, Liberia, Ethiopia, and most former French colonies, and favored economic and technical cooperation between fully sovereign states over any surrender of national authority to a continental body.

Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie I played the decisive role in bridging the divide, inviting both blocs to Addis Ababa in May 1963 and using Ethiopia’s neutral standing to broker a compromise. The charter that emerged split the difference: it committed the OAU to promoting “the unity and solidarity of African states” and coordinating action against colonialism, but it also enshrined strict respect for the sovereignty and territorial integrity of each member state and a firm policy of non-interference in members’ internal affairs. That second principle effectively meant the OAU would not challenge the colonial-era borders its members had inherited, whatever their ethnic or historical illogic, a deliberate choice to prioritize stability over redrawing the map.

The compromise let the organization come into being where a purely federalist proposal likely would have failed to win broad support, but it also built in the limits that would draw criticism for decades: a body reluctant to intervene against member states’ internal abuses or civil conflicts, precisely because non-interference was the price of unity in the first place. When the OAU was replaced by the African Union in 2002, that tension between sovereignty and collective action remained one of its most debated legacies.