right to determine its membership. Secondly, this was the first conscious attempt to form a political bloc within Africa. Houphouet-Boigny (described as a "minimalist" - as one of those who wanted to limit inter-state co-operation, as much as possible in order to enjoy the above-average
prosperity of Cote d'Ivoire) and his associates did not regard the francophone bloc as a step towards Pan-African union, but as a pressure-group established to defend their
economic interests and curb the ambitions of outsiders like Nkrumah and Sekou Toure.
The conference was originally called at Abidjan in order to discuss possible French-African mediation in the Algerian War. It proved impossible to issue a unanimous resolution on Algeria - the delegates were torn between sympathy for the guerrillas and unwillingness to challenge France. Their discussions of the Morocco-Mauritanian hostilities had a more positive outcome. Predictably, they sided with Mauritania, supporting her admission to
the United Nations "without reservations" and, thus, earning the enmity of Morocco and her allies.
When the conference was re-opened at Brazzaville on December 15, there was a broader agenda but attendance was now definitively whittled down to the twelve nations
nicknamed "the Brazzaville powers". Their preliminary statement pledged the pursuit of peace on the basis of non-intervention in the internal affairs of any state.
They discussed diplomatic and economic links. While
rejecting demands for an Algerian referendum, they strongly recommended that France should enter into formal negotiations with the FLN. They supported a round-table congress of all factions in the Congo.
The Dakar conference (January 30 - February 4, 1961) was largely devoted to the study of the draft of a treaty for the O A M C E . ^ The OAMCE had first been proposed at the Brazzaville conference; its charter was finally signed at Yaounde. OAMCE amounted to much more than an economic study group: an organisation for postal and telecommunications, a banking group, a common airline, and an industrial property office were all affiliated to i t . ^ The OAMCE reinforced common economic links already stemming from, membership of
the franc zone and associate status in the Economic Community. Naturally, it did not mean that countries as remote and
mutually irrelevant as Haute Volta and the Malagasy Republic could ever be expected to become economically inter-dependent in any meaningful sense.
35 Chronologie politique africaine, V o l . 1, No. 6, Jan. 1961, p.2.
36 Le Monde 6/8/60.
37 Diakha Dieng, "From UAM to OCAM", African Forum, Vol. 1, No. 2, 1965; Thomas Höret, Africa in the United Nations.
137 It was less the economic programme than the political involvement of the "Brazzaville Group" in the Mauritanian dispute, the Congo crisis and the Algerian war that motivated the establishment of the Casablana bloc in January 1961.
Morocco took the initiative, concerned for the fate of its expansionist ambitions in Mauritania. On the francophone model, a restricted list was issued. It is not known how many nations were originally invited, since the list was suppressed. Only seven African delegations and a Ceylonese diplomat (!) actually attended. Libya soon dropped out, leaving the hard-core membership as follows: Ghana, Guinea, Mali, Morocco, U.A.R., and the Provincial Government of Algeria. What held them together? Some observers have
seen superficial resemblances between their "authoritarian, one-party regimes". Their primary reasons for mutual
support were their agreement on the "solutions" for Algeria and the Congo, their common sense of a. threat from the
Brazzaville group, their shared antagonism to "neo-colonial" pressures. Egypt could hope for moral support for her
assault on Israel (that Ghana was not, in the last analysis, ready to give); Morocco, for her projected campaign in
Mauritania (to which the others were almost completely
apathetic). At best, there might be room for common military action in resolving a crisis situation. But common
political institutions, economic exchange, or even effective
38 The original invitation list was never published. (London, 1963) PP*30~31*
lobbying in the United Nations were out of the question, and Nkrumah must have been well-aware that the Casablanca bloc produced the appearance of a united front without the
substance.v y
From the first, Ghana was out of step with the other Casablanca nations on the Congo issue. Nkrumah's views on support for the U.N. prevailed at Casablanca only because the other leaders were frightened of losing him.
The francophone bloc drew more tightly together at Yaounde after the Casablanca meeting. Their statements on the Congo revealed sympathies diametrically opposed to those of the Casablanca bloc: implicit sympathy for Moise Tshombe; criticism of the U.N. for "providing too much support" for
Lumumba. Besides ratifying the OAMCE Charter, they considered closer political exchanges. Ivory Coast was asked to study the possibility of Joint diplomatic representation; Cameroun was asked to prepare a draft treaty on nationality and
citizenship; Senegal was to study legal co-operation. It was at this stage that the "moderates" tried to restore unity. On the initiative of President Senghor of Senegal and of the patriarchal William Tubman of Liberia, a conference of all African states was assembled at Monrovia. on May 8, 1961. The Casablanca nations did not attend.
Although Guinea and Mali had been appointed to the conference
Zj_o
committee, they withdrew under Ghanaian pressure.
39 The Casablanca states did in fact adopt an "African
Charter" which projected a continental parliament to be called an African Consultative Assembly. (The Times 8/1/61). This can be regarded as a sop to Nkrumah. AO Legum, Pan-Africanism, pp.52-53* The Observer 8/5/61.
139
Nkrumah seemed to be pursuing the isolation in which he was later to find himself. His reasons for initiating the Casablanca boycott of the Monrovia conference are not immediately obvious. The Monrovia resolutions avoided most controversial issues and were "hard" only on "non- controversial issues" - support for freedom fighters in South Africa, for example. But Nkrumah went beyond simple boycott to sponsor a vitriolic press-campaign in Ghana
against Monrovia. The Ghana Evening News, for instance discussed the conference in these terms:
The very moment the BBC and other imperialist broadcasting brass-bands began their phoney
adulation of the so-called virtues of the Monrovia slave-mentality operated slogan of
’unity without unification', students of African history suspected with considerable concern the genesis of the new brand of His Master's Voice, just to discover that it was only the hand that was of Esau. 41
Tubman was called upon to admit that he was "an American first, an African second."
Nkrumah, uncomfortably, received harder-hitting
criticism than he dealt out. The West African Pilot (Lagos) explained that Nkrumah had shunned Monrovia because "he and his minority group could not, as they planned, imposed their will on the conference." "The truth is that Dr. Nkrumah must be at the head of everything or outside it because he
42
must always lead." The authoritarianism and complete intolerance of criticism and political competition within
41 Evening News 9/5/61.
Ghana under Nkrumah's regime makes the psychology of this argument at least plausible. Nkrumah was remarkably intolerant of proposals for unity that fell short of the political solutions he espoused, and equally intolerant of inter-African conferences initiated by others.
His boycott of Monrovia augured his indifference to the O.A.U., and both reflect the personality of a man who demanded a command-structure because he rejected dialogue.
The francophone bloc finally adopted a common
political organisation, the Union Africaine et Malagache,
in September, 1961. It was defined as "a union of independent and sovereign states, open to all African states." for
some leaders, this may actually have been a statement of
interest. Both Houphouet-Boigny and Senghor were interested in securing the membership of Nigeria, and approaches were made, but quietly rejected. Later, the UAM was extended
to include the ex-Belgian colonies, Rwanda and Toso.
Both these cases demonstrate that the francophone leaders were not exclusivists. By no means ready to admit other African states to the economic privileges enjoyed through the French connection, they were constantly in search of diplomatic allies. Senghor, dissociating himself from Houphouet-Boigny at this point, appeared interested in something more. He lamented that the UAM was "only a regional organisation.... The objective remains the same: to build together the whole continent, for if the UAM is
45 all Madagascar, it is not all Africa." v
141
The UAM was a limited political organisation, designed primarily to secure co-ordination of foreign policy, common defence arrangements, and supervision of
the special agencies established in the same year.
The UAM worked through a permanent secretariat, expert study committees, and a regular assembly of Heads of State. Late in 1962, various specialist bodies, including a
common communications directorate (UAMPT) and a joint
defence council (UAMD) were set up within the UAM framework. These interlocking committees, though skeletal in structure, represented an unprecedented degree of formal integration among African states.
The UAM and the OAMCE, together with other regional and sectional groupings of African states, expired soon after the conference in May, 1963, that founded the
Organisation of African Unity. No clause in the OAU Charter specifically called for the abolition of alternative groupings, but it was generally accepted that the Assembly of Heads of State and the Council of Foreign Ministers would replace other supranational organisations. Thus, the leaders of the East African PAFMECSA group announced that the chief function of their organisation, the liberation of southern Africa, had now become the responsibility of the OAU.
In contrast, the francophone leaders were reluctant to
abandon a lobby that had proved a useful tool for diplomacy and economic bargaining. In a press conference on 30 May, 1965, Senghor insisted that "We did not envisage the
disappearance of the Union Africaine et Malagache, which is 44
a regional grouping."
Despite the formal dissolution of the UAM and the OAMCE, the francophone bloc was soon knit together again by the foundation, first, of an economic commission - the UAMCE - and, in 1965, by the resuscitation of the UAM political caucus with the Nouakchott convention and the establishment of the Organisation Africaine et Malagache. In short, the Brazzaville bloc was in continuous existence from late I960. The vagaries of internal politics affected the adhesion of some members, v but the consciousness of common interest and of the need to present a united front ensured permanency
46
for the grouping as a whole. Eor the OAU, the survival of an organised francophone bloc had to be counted as a major failure to overcome political faction in Africa.
45 Witness the violently contrasting behaviour of Congo-
Brazzaville before and after Eassemba-Debat's coup of 1963* 46 The francophone states were intensely jealous of what they
regarded as their uniquely privileged status. Their conviction of this extended even to the idea that "preferment loses its value when it is more widely
extended." (The Observer 7/7/62). Part of Nkrumah’s campaign to break up the francophone bloc and make it accessible
to unionist arguments was an extended critique of associated status in the European Economic Community. One propaganda publication warned the Erench-speaking states that the E.E.C. intended to make them permanent "Leaders of wood and drawers of water" (Ghana Today,
28/2/62). But even in moments of uncertainty, the attitudes of the francophone states were conditioned by a wholly
justifiable fear: that the E.E.C. might withdraw their preferential status if they diversified, or industrialised their economies against E.E.C. competition, or if they took an unaccepted political line. Ali A. Mazrui,
Towards a Pax Africans. (London, 1967) pp.83-96, is stimulating on francophone attitudes as on many other topics.
143 For Nkrumah, it was the key to the collapse of his Pan-
African initiatives and of his attempts at mediation in crisis like the Saharan nuclear tests, the Congo, and Rhodesia. It will be observed the Ghanaian Bureau of African Affairs concentrated on training exiles from the Brazzaville states in techniques of guerilla warfare to be applied on their return. There was no stronger
indication of Nkrumah's growing conviction that there was no dialogue possible with those who shared Houphouet-Boigny's or Magsaysay's perspectives on African affairs. His good relations with Sekou Toure and, more briefly, with
Modiko Keita and Ben Bella - all of them mavericks from the francophone corral - proved the rule that Nkrumah's
4 0
diplomacy was unable to bridge the linguistic divide.
47 See below, Part IV, Ch. 3*
48 One attempt, not treated here in detail, was the short lived Paga Agreement between Ghana at Upper Volta,
signed on June 27, 1961, it announced the determination of Nkrumah and Yameogo to take "concrete measures quickly to achieve the total independence and effective unity of Africa." Immediately, it provided for free movement across the Ghana/Upper Volta border. Great fuss was made about knocking down a wall hurriedly constructed as a symbol. Guinea and Mali pointedly snubbed the ceremony, out of sympathy with. Yameogo's domestic opposition. But Upper Volta's partners in the Conseil de 1 'Entente were more vigorous in their disapproval. Threatened with exclusion from the privileges of the Entente, Yameogo had to
sacrifice his new deal with Ghana in October. (Le Monde 28/6/61; 18/10/61; I. Wallerstein, "Background to Paga" in West Africa, July 29-August 3, 1961).
3• Relations with the Q.A.U., (1963-1966)
The meeting at Monrovia was one attempt to establish a minimal consensus in Africa: to end political divisions and provide a forum at which common solutions to problems could be thrashed out. It failed because the Casablanca states, on Ghana's initiative, decided to stay away.
The meeting at Addis Ababa in May, 1963 produced something more tangible - the Organisation of African Unity.
The value of this body has been much disputed. Designed to function as a kind of arbitration court, it failed to resolve three great crises during its first four years:
civil war in the Congo, the Rhodesian Unilateral Declaration of Independence and, more recently and most tragically, the secession of Biafra from the Federal Republic of Nigeria. Had the OAU been able to count on greater support from and unanimity among its members, these crises might still have proved beyond its control, and beyond the control of any purely African grouping. But the measure of apathy and of actual dissent was such that the Organisation, starved of funds, might have broken down altogether but for the generosity of the Ethiopian Government and the work of its officials in running offices, assembling ministers, and
planning agendas. This partially explains the other notable failures of the OAU: to make significant progress towards the liberation of southern Africa, and to move towards continental union. The OAU failed to eliminate lesser political blocs. The francophone states actually adopted
145
Nkrumah's indifference, and even open hostility, contributed to the failure of the OAU. Despite early enthusiasm, Nkrumah's attitude towards his fellow-members came to resemble Othello's:
But he (as loving his owne pride, and purposes) Evades them, with a bumbast Circumstance,
Horribly stufft with Epithetes of Warre...
On the eve of the preliminary meeting of Foreign Ministers in Addis Ababa, The Ghanaian Times issued a
"friendly warning" to the delegates:
We recognise the dangers you face. Right now in Addis Ababa, agents of imperialism must be working overtime to sow seeds of discord among African countries, to create suspicion among one another and to thrust upon you such confusion of ideas and thoughts as to make unity impossible. Africa looks up to your ability to recognise the devil and sweep it out before it sweeps Africa out. 1
This was a fairly harmless exercise in demonology - the old theme of the return of the imperialists to divide and rule, masking the real political divisions between African states. There was no Ghanaian criticism of the Addis conference
before it took place. Nkrumah spent the weeks before the meeting lobbying for support for his unionist proposals from his fellow heads of state.
*
Determined to make the right impression, the Ghanaian delegation swept into the meeting of Foreign Ministers on
2
May 15 in trailing kente cloth. Preliminary discussions centred on the agenda for the main conference.
1 15/5/63
2 The African Chronicler (Bureau of African Affairs, Accra) Vol. 1, No. 1.
The Ghanaians wanted the projected union to be political and wanted to raise the questions of a common foreign
policy and an African High Command. The Sudanese wanted agreement on practical ways of helping the freedom, fighters, the liquidation of all foreign military bases on African soil (a demand aimed primarily at the French, and also at the United States), and the repudiation of defence pacts with non-African powers. The francophone delegates,
predictably, called for a "minimal" programme. They were unwilling to discuss political unification, and baulked at the idea that their treaty relations with France should be exposed to fire. The agenda finally adopted was a compromise
4
devised by Ethiopia. The main topics suggested were: (1) The formation of an Organisation of African Unity with a Charter and a Permanent Secretariat; (2) Co-operation on
"agreed areas of African endeavour" - economic, educational and military; (3) The total de-colonisation of Africa;
(4) Opposition to apartheid and other forms of racial discrimination; (5) Study of the effects of regional groupings on African economic development; (6) World disarmament.^
3 Ghana Today 21/3/63
4 The African Chronicler Vol. 1, No. 1. 5 ibid
147
The agenda accepted in this form failed to mention the kind of "final solution" demanded by Nkrumah.
On May 17 ? Kojo Botsio publicly summarised Ghana's demands, insisting on unified African foreign policy, diplomacy, and
6
defence arrangements. At the same time, he stated that Ghana was prepared for each nation to retain its sovereignty, flag, anthem, and political institutions. It was clear
from this that, while Nkrumah was prepared to temporise on matters of internal government and economic development, he was anxious that Africa, should present a united front to the outside world. Botsio left no doubt that the limited
agenda accepted for Addis was unsatisfactory to Accra:
"Ghana does not want union on the pattern of the Organisation of American States."
But Ghana was in a weak bargaining position.
The assassination of President Sylvanus Olympio of Togo shortly before the conference inspired a heated debate over whether the new Togo delegation should be seated. An early personal friendship between Nkrumah and Olympio had long