MAPS OF HISTORY · ON THIS DAY · May 25 · 1963
ON THIS DAY · 25 MAY 1963
The OAU is founded
25 May 1963 — Thirty-two heads of state meet in Addis Ababa to found the Organisation of African Unity, and a year later pledge to keep the borders inherited from empire — a choice historians still debate as guarantor of peace or freezer of injustice.
THE MOMENT IN CONTEXT
The flags were up; now came the harder thing — turning a colony into a country. The map goes quiet in places and violent in others, and both tell the same story: the new states were trying to build nations inside borders drawn in European boardrooms, with economies designed to serve Europe, and almost no time to do it. The founding decision was the OAU’s: meeting in Addis Ababa in 1963 (the marker) and Cairo in 1964, Africa’s leaders pledged to keep the colonial borders exactly as inherited. It was a fateful choice — argued both ways to this day. Redraw the borders and you invite endless secession and war (see Katanga, and now Biafra); freeze them and you lock millions inside artificial states and divide peoples across lines. They chose to freeze, and mostly it held.
From Chapter 7 — Building States from Colonies of The Decolonization of Africa, 1945–1994 (JAN 1967).
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TEACH THIS IN 5 MINUTES
- Why it happened — The border bargain of 1964. The OAU enshrined uti possidetis — colonial borders are inviolable — to prevent a continent-wide unravelling into secession and irredentist war. The…
- The turn — Addis Ababa & Cairo, 1963–64 — the borders are frozen. In founding the OAU and then resolving to respect inherited frontiers, Africa’s leaders made the single most consequential structural decision of…
- What it changed — Biafra: the border principle tested in blood. The Nigerian civil war was the OAU’s doctrine enforced at terrible cost — most African states backed the federation against secession, and the…
Then ask the room: The OAU’s decision to keep colonial borders is defended as the guarantor of African peace and attacked as the freezing of colonial injustice. Weigh the case. The argued answer is on the chapter page →
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