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Conclusion of the above address read by Dr Kwame Nkrumah during the ratification of the OAU.
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.... a tribute to Ethiopia, just composed by a Ghanaian poet.
Ethiopia shall rise
Ethiopia, Africa’s bright gem
Set high among the verdant hills
That gave birth to the unfailing
Waters of the Nile
Ethiopia shall rise
Ethiopia, land of the wise;
Ethiopia, bold cradle of Africa’s ancient rule
And fertile school
Of our African culture;
Ethiopia, the wise
Shall rise
And remould with us the full figure
Of Africa’s hopes
And destiny.
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Ethiopia’s Emperor Haile Selassie both played vital roles in the formation of the
Organization of African Unity (OAU). In Kwame Nkrumah’s speech, he talks about the
unity of Africa and the independence of other African countries. It’s been 57 years and
Kwame Nkrumah’s speech is a very iconic one.
Kwame Nkrumah’s speech at the inaugural ceremony of the OAU Conference in Addis
Abeba, Ethiopia in 1963
“Your Excellencies, Colleagues, Brothers and Friends,
At the first gathering of African Heads of State, to which I had the honour of playing
host, there were representatives of eight independent States only. Today, five years
later, we meet as the representatives of no less than thirty-two States, the guests of His
Imperial Majesty, Haile Selassie, the First, and the Government and people of Ethiopia.
To His Imperial Majesty, I wish to express, on behalf of the Government and people of
Ghana my deep appreciation for a most cordial welcome and generous hospitality.
The increase in our number in this short space of time is open testimony to the
indomitable and irresistible surge of our peoples for independence. It is also a token of
the revolutionary speed of world events in the latter half of this century. In the task
which is before us of unifying our continent we must fall in with that pace or be left
behind. The task cannot be attached in the tempo of any other age than our own. To fall
behind the unprecedented momentum of actions and events in our time will be to
court failure and our own undoing.
A whole continent has imposed a mandate upon us to lay the foundation of our Union
at this Conference. It is our responsibility to execute this mandate by creating here and
now the formula upon which the requisite superstructure may be erected.
On this continent it has not taken us long to discover that the struggle against
colonialism does not end with the attainment of national independence. Independence
is only the prelude to a new and more involved struggle for the right to conduct our
own economic and social affairs; to construct our society according to our aspirations,
unhampered by crushing and humiliating neo-colonialist controls and interference.
From the start we have been threatened with frustration where rapid change is
imperative and with instability where sustained effort and ordered rule are
indispensable. No sporadic act nor pious resolution can resolve our present problems.
Nothing will be of avail, except the united act of a united Africa.
We have already reached, the stage where we must unite or sink into that condition
which has made Latin America the unwilling and distressed prey of imperialism after
one and a half centuries of political independence. As a continent we have emerged
into independence in a different age, with imperialism grown stronger, more ruthless
and experienced, and more dangerous in its international associations. Our economic
advancement demands the end of colonialist and neo-colonialist domination in Africa.
But just as we understood that the shaping of our national destinies required of each of
us our political independence and bent all our strength to this attainment, so we must
recognize that our economic independence resides in our African union and requires
the same concentration upon the political achievement.
The unity of our continent, no less than our separate independence, will be delayed if,
indeed, we do not lose it, by hobnobbing with colonialism. African Unity is, above all, a
political kingdom which can only be gained by political means. The social and
economic development of Africa will come only within the political kingdom, not the
other way around. The United States of America, the Union of Soviet Socialist
Republics, were the political decisions of revolutionary peoples before they became
mighty realities of social power and material wealth.
How, except by our united efforts, will the richest and still enslaved parts of our
continent be freed from colonial occupation and become available to us for the total
development of our continent? Every step in the decolonization of our continent has
brought greater resistance in those areas where colonial garrisons are available to
colonialism.
This is the great design of the imperialist interests that buttress colonialism and neo-
colonialism, and we would be deceiving ourselves in the cruelest way were we to
regard their individual actions as separate and unrelated. When Portugal violates
Senegal’s border, when Verwood allocated one-seventh of South Africa’s budget to
military and police, when France builds as part of her defence policy an interventionist
force that can intervene, more especially in French-speaking Africa, when Welensky
talks of Southern Rhodesia joining South Africa, it is all part of a carefully calculated
pattern working towards a single end: the continued enslavement of our still
dependent brothers and an onslaught upon the independence of our sovereign African
States.
Do we have any other weapon against this design but our unity? Is not our unity
essential to guard our own freedom as well as to win freedom for our oppressed
brothers, the Freedom Fighters?
Is it not unity alone that can weld us into an effective force, capable of creating our own
progress and making our valuable contribution to world peace? Which independent
African State will claim that its financial structure and banking institutions are fully
harnessed to its national development? Which will claim that its
material resources and human energies are available for its own national aspirations?
Which will disclaim a substantial measure of disappointment and disillusionment in
its agricultural and urban development?
In independent Africa we are already re-experiencing the instability and frustration
which existed under colonial rule. We are fast learning that political independence is
not enough to rid us of the consequences of colonial rule.
The movement of the masses of the people of Africa for freedom from that kind of rule
was not only a revolt against the conditions which it imposed. Our people supported us
in our fight for independence because they believed that African Governments could
cure the ills of the past in a way which could never be accomplished under colonial rule.
If, therefore, now that we are independent we allow the same conditions to exist that
existed in colonial days, all the resentment which overthrew colonialism will be
mobilized against us.
The resources are there. It is for us to marshal them in the active service of our people.
Unless we do this by our concerted efforts, within the framework of our combined
planning, we shall not progress at the tempo demanded by today’s events and the
mood of our people. The symptoms of our troubles will grow, and the troubles
themselves become chronic.
It will then be too late even for Pan-African Unity to secure for us stability and
tranquillity in our labours for a continent of social justice and material well-being.
Unless we establish African Unity now, we who are sitting here today shall tomorrow
be the victims and martyrs of neo-colonialism.
There is evidence on every side that the imperialists have not withdrawn from our
affairs. There are times, as in the Congo, when their interference is manifest. But
generally it is covered up under the clothing of many agencies, which meddle in our
domestic affairs, to foment dissension within our borders and to create an atmosphere
of tension and political instability. As long as we do not do away with the root causes of
discontent, we lend aid to these neo-colonialist forces, and shall become our own
executioners. We cannot ignore the teachings of history.
Our continent is probably the richest in the world for minerals and industrial and
agricultural primary materials. From the Congo alone, Western firms exported copper,
rubber, cotton, and other goods to the value of 2,773 billion dollars in the ten years
between 1945 and 1955, and from South Africa, Western gold mining companies have
drawn a profit, in the four years, between 1947 to 1951, of 814 billion dollars.
Our continent certainly exceeds all the others in potential hydroelectric power, which
some experts assess as 42 percent of the world’s total. What need is there for us to
remain hewers for the industrialised areas of the world?
It is said, of course, that we have no capital, no industrial skill, no communications and
no internal markets, and that we cannot even agree among ourselves how best to
utilise our resources.
Yet all the stock exchanges in the world are preoccupied with Africa’s gold, diamonds,
uranium, platinum, copper and iron ores. Our capital flows out in streams to irrigate
the whole system of Western economy. Fifty-two percent of the gold in Fort Knox at
this moment, where the U.S.A. stores its bullion, is believed to have originated from our
shores. Africa provides more than 60 percent of the world’s gold. A great deal of the
uranium for nuclear power, of copper for electronics, of titanium for supersonic
projectiles, of iron and steel for heavy industries, of other minerals and raw materials
for lighter industries – the basic economic might of the foreign Powers – come from
our continent.
Experts have estimated that the Congo basin alone can produce enough food crops to
satisfy the requirements of nearly half the population of the whole world.
For centuries Africa has been the milk cow of the Western world. It was our continent
that helped the Western world to build up its accumulated wealth.
It is true that we are now throwing off the yoke of colonialism as fast as we can, but our
success in this direction is equally matched by an intense effort on the part of
imperialism to continue the exploitation of our resources by creating divisions among
us.
When the colonies of the American Continent sought to free themselves from
imperialism in the 18th century there was no threat of neo-colonialism in the sense in
which we know it today. The American States were therefore free to form and fashion
the unity which was best suited to their needs and to frame a constitution to hold their
unity together without any form of interference from external sources.
We, however, are having to grapple with outside interventions. How much more, then
do we need to come together in the African unity that alone can save us from the
clutches of neo-colonialism.
We have the resources. It was colonialism in the first place that prevented us from
accumulating the effective capital; but we ourselves have failed to make full use of our
power in independence to mobilise our resources for the most effective take-off into
thorough going economic and social development. We have been too busy nursing our
separate States to understand fully the basic need of our union, rooted in common
purpose, common planning and common endeavour. A union that ignores these
fundamental necessities will be but a shame.
It is only by uniting our productive capacity and the resultant production that we can
amass capital. And once we start, the momentum will increase. With capital controlled
by our own banks, harnessed to our own true industrial and agricultural development,
we shall make our advance. We shall accumulate machinery and establish steel works,
iron foundries and factories; we shall link the various States of our continent with
communications; we shall astound the world with our hydroelectric power; we shall
drain marshes and swamps, clear infested areas, feed the under-nourished, and rid our
people of parasites and disease. It is within the possibility of science and technology to
make even the Sahara bloom into a vast field with verdant vegetation for agricultural
and industrial developments. We shall harness the radio, television, giant printing
presses to lift our people from the dark recesses of illiteracy.
A decade ago, these would have been visionary words, the fantasies of an idle dreamer.
But this is the age in which science has transcended the limits of the material world,
and technology has invaded the silences of nature. Time and space have been reduced
to unimportant abstractions. Giant machines make roads, clear forests, dig dams,
layout aerodromes; monster trucks and planes distribute goods; huge laboratories
manufacture drugs; complicated geological surveys are made; mighty power stations
are built; colossal factories erected all at an incredible speed. The world is no longer
moving through bush paths or on camels and donkeys.
We cannot afford to pace our needs, our development, our security to the gait of
camels and donkeys. We cannot afford not to cut down the overgrown bush of
outmoded attitudes that obstruct our path to the modern open road of the widest and
earliest achievement of economic independence and the raising up of the lives of our
people to the highest level.
Even for other continents lacking tile resources of Africa, this is the age that sees the
end of human want. For us it is a simple matter of grasping with certainty our heritage
by using the political might of unity. All we need to do is to develop with our united
strength the enormous resources of our continent. A United Africa will provide a stable
field of foreign investment, which will encourage as long as it does not behave
inimically to our African interests.
For such investment would add by its enterprises to the development of the national
economy, employment and training of our people, and will be welcome to Africa. In
dealing with a united Africa, investors will no longer have to weigh with concern the
risks of negotiating with governments in one period which may not exist in the very
next period.
Instead of dealing or negotiating with so many separate States at a time they will be
dealing with one united government pursuing a harmonized continental policy.
What is the alternative to this? If we falter at this stage, and let time pass for neo-
colonialism to consolidate its position on this continent, what will be the fate of our
people who have put their trust in us? What will be the fate of our freedom fighters?
What will be the fate of other African Territories that are not yet free?
Unless we can establish great industrial complexes in Africa – which we can only do in
united Africa – we must have our peasantry to the mercy of foreign cash crop markets,
and face the same unrest which overthrew the colonialists? What use to the farmer is
education and mechanisation, what use is even capital for development; unless we can
ensure for him and a fair price and ready market? What has the peasant, worker and
farmer gained from political independence, unless we can ensure for him a fair return
for his labour and a higher standard of living?
Unless we can establish great industrial complexes in Africa, what have the urban
worker, and all those peasants on overcrowded land gained from political
independence? If they are to remain unemployed or in unskilled occupation, what will
avail them the better facilities for education, technical training, energy and ambition
which independence enables us to provide?
There is hardly any African State without frontier problem with its adjacent
neighbours. It would be futile for me to enumerate them because they are already
familiar to us all. But let me suggest to Your Excellences, that this fatal relic of
colonialism will drive us to war against one another as our unplanned and
uncoordinated industrial development expands, just as happened in Europe. Unless we
succeed in arresting the danger through mutual understanding on fundamental issues
and through African Unity, which will render existing boundaries obsolete and
superfluous, we shall have fought in vain for independence. Only African Unity can heal
this festering sore of boundary disputes between our various States.
Your Excellencies, the remedy for these ills is ready to our hand. It stares us in the face
at every customs barrier, it shouts to us from every African heart. By creating a true
political union of all the independent States of Africa, we can tackle hopefully every
emergency, every enemy and every complexity. This is not because we are a race of
superman, but because we have emerged in the age of science and technology in which
poverty, ignorance and disease are no longer the masters, but the retreating foes of
mankind. We have emerged in the age of socialized planning, when production and
distribution are not governed by chaos, greed and self-interest, but by social needs.
Together with the rest of mankind, we have awakened from Utopian dreams to pursue
practical blueprints for progress and social justice. Above all, we have emerged at a
time when a continental land mass like Africa with its population approaching three
hundred million are necessary to the economic capitalization and profitability of
modern productive methods and techniques. Not one of us working singly and
individually can successfully attain the fullest development.
Certainly, in the circumstances, it will not be possible to give adequate assistance to
sister States trying, against the most difficult conditions, to improve their economic
and social structures. Only a united Africa functioning under a Union Government can
forcefully mobilize the material and moral resources of our separate countries and
apply them efficiently and energetically to bring a rapid change in the conditions of our
people.
If we do not approach the problems in Africa with a common front and a common
purpose, we shall be haggling and wrangling among ourselves until we are colonized
again and become the tolls of a far greater colonialism than we suffered hitherto.
Unite we must. Without necessarily sacrificing our sovereignties, big or small, we can,
here and now, forge a political union based on Defence, Foreign Affairs and Diplomacy,
and a common Citizenship, an African currency, an African Monetary Zone and an
African Central Bank. We must unite in order to achieve the full liberation of our
continent. We need a common Defence system with an African High Command to
ensure the stability and security of Africa.
We have been charged with this sacred task by our own people, and we cannot betray
their trust by failing them. We will be mocking the hopes of our people if we show the
slightest hesitation or delay by tackling realistically this question of African Unity.
The supply of arms or other military aid to the colonial oppressors in Africa must be
regarded not only as aid in the vanquishment of the freedom fighters battling for their
African independence, but as an act of aggression against the whole of Africa. How can
we meet this aggression except by the full weight of our united strength?
Many of us have made non-alignment an article of faith on this continent. We have no
wish, and no intention of being drawn into the Cold War. But with the present
weakness and insecurity of our States in the context of world politics, the search for
bases and spheres of influence brings the Cold War into Africa with its danger of
nuclear warfare. Africa should be declared a nuclear-free zone and freed from cold war
exigencies. But we cannot make this demand mandatory unless we support it from a
position of strength to be found only in our unity.
Instead, many Independent African States are involved by military pacts with the
former colonial powers. The stability and security which such devices seek to establish
are illusory, for the metropolitan Powers seize the opportunity to support their neo-
colonialist controls by direct military involvement. We have seen how the neo-
colonialists use their bases to entrench themselves and attack neighboring
independent States. Such bases are centers of tension and potential danger spots of
military conflict. They threaten the security not only of the country in which they are
situated but of neighboring countries as well. How can we hope to make Africa a
nuclear-free zone and independent of cold war pressure with such military
involvement on our continent? Only by counter-balancing a common defence force
with a common defence policy based upon our desire for an Africa untrammelled by
foreign dictation or military and nuclear presence. This will require an all-embracing
African High Command, especially if the military pacts with the imperialists are to be
renounced. It is the only way we can break these direct links between the colonialism
of the past and the neo-colonialism which disrupts us today.
We do not want nor do we visualize an African High Command in the terms of the
power politics that now rule a great part of the world, but as an essential and
indispensable instrument for ensuring stability and security in Africa. We need a
unified economic planning for Africa. Until the economic power of Africa is in our
hands, the masses can have no real concern and no real interest for safeguarding our
security, for ensuring the stability of our regimes, and for bending their strength to the
fulfilment of our ends. With our united resources, energies and talents we have the
means, as soon as we show the will, to transform the economic structures of our
individual States from poverty to that of wealth, from, inequality to the satisfaction of
popular needs. Only on a continental basis shall we be able to plan the proper
utilization of all our resources for the full development of our continent. How else will
we retain our own capital for our development? How else will we establish an internal
market for our own industries? By belonging to different economic zones, how will we
break down the currency and trading barriers between African States, and how will the
economically stronger amongst us be able to assist the weaker and less developed
States?
It is important to remember that independent financing and independent development
cannot take place without an independent currency. A currency system that is backed
by the resources of a foreign State is ipso facto subject to the trade and financial
arrangements of that foreign country. Because we have so many customs and currency
barriers as a result of being subject to the different currency systems of foreign
powers, this has served to widen the gap between us in Africa. How, for example, can
related communities and families trade with, and support one another successfully, if
they find themselves divided by national boundaries and currency restrictions? The
only alternative open to them in these circumstances is to use smuggled currency and
enrich national and international racketeers and crooks who prey upon our financial
and economic difficulties.
No independent African State today by itself has a chance to follow an independent
course of economic development, and many of us who have tried to do this have been
almost ruined or have had to return to the fold of the former colonial rulers. This
position will not change unless we have unified policy working at the continental level.
The first step towards our cohesive economy would be a unified monetary zone, with,
initially, an agreed common parity for our currencies. To facilitate this arrangement,
Ghana would change to a decimal system.
When we find that the arrangement of a fixed common parity is working successfully,
there would seem to be no reason for not instituting one common currency and a
single bank of issue. With a common currency from one common bank of issue we
should be able to stand erect on our own feet because such an arrangement would be
fully backed by the combined national products of the States composing the union.
After all, the purchasing power of money depends on productivity and the productive
exploitation of the natural, human and physical resources of the nation.
While we are assuring our stability by a common defence system, and our economy is
being orientated beyond foreign control by a Common currency, Monetary Zone and
Central Bank of Issue, we can investigate the resources of our continent. We can begin
to ascertain whether in reality we are the richest, and not, as we have been taught to
believe, the poorest among the continents. We can determine whether we possess the
largest potential in hydroelectric power, and whether we can harness it and other
sources of energy to our own industries. We can proceed to plan our industrialization
on a continental scale, and to build up a common market for nearly three hundred
million people. Common Continental Planning for the Industrial and Agricultural
development of Africa is a vital necessity.
So many blessings must flow from our unity; so many disasters must follow on our
continued disunity, that our failure to unite today will not be attributed by posterity
only to faulty reasoning and lack of courage, but to our capitulation before the forces of
imperialism.
The hour of history which has brought us to this assembly is a revolutionary hour. It is
the hour of decision. For the first time, the economic imperialism which menaces us is
itself challenged by the irresistible will of our people. The masses of the people of
Africa are crying for unity. The people of Africa call for a breaking down of boundaries
that keep them apart. They demand an end to the border disputes between sister
African States – disputes that arise out of the artificial barriers that divided us. It was
colonialism’s purpose that left us with our border irredentism that rejected our ethnic
and cultural fusion.
Our people call for unity so that they may not lose their patrimony in the perpetual
service of neo-colonialism. In their fervent push for unity, they understand that only its
realization will give full meaning to their freedom and our African independence.
It is this popular determination that must move us on to a Union of Independent
African States. In delay lies danger to our well-being, to tour very existence as free
States. It has been suggested that our approach of unity should be gradual, that it
should go piece-meal. This point of view conceives of Africa as a static entity with
“frozen” problems which can be eliminated one by one and when all have been cleared
then we can come together and say: “Now all is well. Let us unite”. This view takes no
account of the impact of external pressures. Nor does it take cognizance of the danger
that delay can deepen our isolations and exclusiveness; that it can enlarge our
differences and set us drifting further and further apart into the net of neo-colonialism
so that our union will become nothing but a fading hope, and the great design of Africa’
s full redemption will be lost, perhaps, forever.
The view is also expressed that our difficulties could be resolved simply by a greater
collaboration through cooperative association in our inter-territorial relationships.
This way of looking at our problems denies a proper conception of their inter-
relationship and mutuality. It denies faith in a future for African advancement, in
African independence. It betrays a sense of solution only in continued reliance upon
external sources through bilateral agreements for economic and other forms of aid.
The fact is that although we have been cooperating and associating with one another
in various fields of common endeavour even before colonial times, this has not given
us the continental identity and the political and economic force which would help us to
deal effectively with the complicated problems confronting us in Africa today. As far as
foreign aid is concerned, a United Africa would be in a more favourable position to
attract assistance from foreign sources.
There is the far more compelling advantage which this arrangement offers, in that aid
will come from anywhere to Africa because our bargaining power would become
infinitely greater. We shall no longer be dependent upon aid from restricted sources.
We shall have the world to choose from.
What are we looking for in Africa? Are we looking for Charters, conceived in the light of
the United Nations example? A type of United Nations organisation whose decisions
are framed on the basis of resolutions that in our experience have sometimes been
ignored by member States? Where groupings are formed and pressures develop in
accordance with the interest of the group concerned? Or is it intended that Africa
should be turned into a lose organization of States on the model of the organization of
the American States, in which the weaker States within it can be at the mercy of the
stronger or more powerful ones politically or economically or at the mercy of some
powerful outside nations or group of nations? Is this the kind of association we want
for ourselves in the United Africa we all speak of with such feeling and emotion?
Your Excellences, permit me to ask: is this the kind of framework we desire for our
United Africa? And arrangement which in future could permit Ghana or Nigeria or the
Sudan, or Liberia, or Egypt or Ethiopia for example, to use pressure, which either
superior economic or political influence gives, to dictate the flow and the direction of
trade from, say, Burundi or Togo or Nyasaland to Mozambique? We all want a United
Africa, united not only in our concept of what unity can connote, but united in our
common desire to move forward together and dealing with all the problems that can
best be solved only on a continental basis.
When the first Congress of the United States met many years ago at Philadelphia, one
of the delegates sounded the first chore of unity by declaring that they had met in a
“state of nature” in other words, they were not at Philadelphia as Virginians, or
Pennsylvanians, but simply as Americans. This reference to themselves as Americans
was in those days a new and strange experience. May I dare to assert equally on this
occasion, Your Excellences that we meet here today not as Ghanaians, Guineans,
Egyptians, Algerians, Moroccans, Malians, Liberians, Congolese or Nigerians but as
Africans. Africans united in our resolve to remain here until we have agreed on the
basic principles of a new compact of unity among ourselves which guarantees for us
and future a new arrangement of continental government.
If we succeed in establishing a new set of principles as the basis of a new Charter or
Statute for the establishment of a Continental Unity of Africa and the creation of social
and political progress for our people then, in my view, this Conference should mark the
end of our various groupings and regional blocs. But if we fail and let this grand and
historic opportunity slip by then we should give way to greater dissension and division
among us for which the people of Africa will never forgive us. And the popular and
progressive forces and movements within Africa will condemn us. I am sure therefore
that we should not fail them.
I have spoken at some length, Your Excellences, because it is necessary for us all to
explain not only to one another present here but also to our people who have entrusted
to us the fate and destiny of Africa. We must therefore not leave this place until we
have set up effective machinery for achieving African Unity. To this end, I now propose
for your consideration the following:
As a first step, Your Excellences, a Declaration of Principles uniting and binding us
together and to which we must all faithful and loyally adhere, and laying the
foundations of unity should be set down. And there should also be a formal declaration
that all the Independent African States here and now agree to the establishment of a
Union of African States.
As a second and urgent step for the realization of the unification of Africa, an All-Africa
Committee of Foreign Ministers be set up now, and that before we rise from this
Conference a day should be fixed for them to meet. This Committee should establish on
behalf of the Heads of our Governments, a permanent body of officials and experts to
work out a machinery for the Union Government of Africa. This body of officials and
experts should be made up of two of the brains from each Independent African State.
The various Charters of the existing groupings and other relevant document could also
be submitted to the officials and experts.
A presidium consisting of the Head of the Governments of the Independent African
States should be called upon to meet and adopt a Constitution and others
recommendations that will launch the Union Government of Africa.
We must also decide on allocation where this body of officials and experts will work as
the new Headquarters or Capital of our Union Government. Some central place in
Africa might be the fairest suggestion either at Bangui in the Central African Republic
or Leopoldville in Congo. My colleagues may have other proposals.
The Committee of Foreign Ministers, officials and experts should be empowered to
establish:
1. A Commission to frame a Constitution for a Union Government of African States;
2. A Commission to work out a continent-wide plan for a unified or
common economic and industrial programme for Africa; this plan should
include proposals for setting up:
• A Common Market for Africa
• An African currency
• African Monetary Zone
• African Central Bank, and
• Continental Communications System;
3. A Commission to draw up details for a Common Foreign Policy and Diplomacy;
4. A Commission to produce plans for a Common System of Defence;
5. A Commission to make proposals for Common African Citizenship.
These Commissions will report to the Committee of Foreign Ministers who should, in
turn, submit within six months of this Conference their recommendations to the
Presidium. The Presidium meeting in Conference at the Union Headquarters will
consider and approve the recommendations of the Committee of Foreign Ministers.
In order to provide funds immediately for the work of the permanent officials and
experts of the Headquarters of the Union, I suggest that a special Committe be set up
now to work a budget for this. Your Excellences, with these steps, I submit, we shall be
irrevocably committed to the road which will bring us to a Union Government of Africa.
Only a united Africa with central political direction can successfully give effective
material and moral support to our Freedom Fighters in Southern Rhodesia, Angola,
Mozambique, South-West Africa, Bechuanaland, Swaziland, Basutoland, Portuguese
Guinea, etc., and of course South Africa.” - Kwame Nkrumah
Source: Tsega Tekle Haimanot ~ FB post ~ 6 September 2020
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