The African personality: how the OAU and its founding leadership articulated economic unity 1958-1969

This project returns to the historical moment of African leaders' attempts to institutionalise Pan-Africanism in the mid-20th century. Specifically, it examines how they envisaged the Organisation of African Unity (OAU), later renamed the African Union (AU), as a means of securing unity to foster economic development. Drawing on archival records on the African Union digital repository spanning the early years of the Organisation's founding in the 1960s, my analysis suggests that the founding leaders of the OAU envisioned economic unity through loose economic integration, guided by the notion of an African Personality that functioned more as a discursive tool in their rhetoric than a cohesive, pan-continental, collective identity aimed at radical transformation against the colonial personality. Their administrative and financial limitations were reflected not only in the competing political visions within the organisation but also in their inability to gain significant progress to economically unify. Despite the major divisions, my analysis confirms, as previous scholars have demonstrated, that economic unity was a deeply political and contentious question, epitomised in the constrained role of the Secretary-General and in the isolation of Ghana's president, Kwame Nkrumah. Finally, the absence of women in the OAU's formative years, evident in almost all their documents, and highlighted in this dissertation's coda, reminds us of a foundational limitation in the Organisation's establishment, which limitation was arguably only addressed more than two decades after the Organisation's founding. This failing, at the intersection of gender, economics, and politics arguably still plagues national and continental politics in Africa. Three substantive chapters build the central argument of this thesis. Chapter one examines the rhetorical foundations of the OAU and how its founding leaders articulated their visions for the organisation and the African continent. The second chapter further dissects these visions, focusing on policymaking within institutional frameworks by analysing the OAU's administrative evolution, its "administrative nervous system" (the Secretariat), and its budget. Having established the organisation's administrative capacity, the third chapter builds on this foundation by investigating the OAU's relationship with a pre-established and more robust organisation, the UN Economic Commission for Africa (ECA). Finally, the coda concludes with a reflection on the role of women in the founding decade through the lens of the social reproduction of labour; social reproduction is the total sum of activities and processes by which human beings are sustained directly and indirectly materially and psychologically.

Grantor dc:publisher.institution

University of Cape Town

Year dc:date.issued

2026

Author dc:creator

• Sambadzai, Cheryl Nyaradzo

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Sen, Anandaroop

• Organisation of African Unity (OAU)
• economy

Language dc:language.iso

en

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/11427/43603

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:open.uct.ac.za:11427/43603