Dreams of power : the role of the Organization of African Unity in the politics of Africa 1963-1993

This study examines how the OAU functions in African politics. It is based on OAU documents, a corpus of African perceptions of OAU functioning collected from governmental and nongovernmental publications from more than thirty countries, and interviews conducted with African diplomats and OAU officials. It pays attention to the structures of Africa's international relations, some historical and ideological perspectives (African nationalism, Pan-Africanism), the formation of the OAU, its role in the political psychology of State elites, the OAU's internal functioning, the struggle against apartheid and colonialism, the OAU and conflict management in Africa, and the OAU's role in representing collective African viewpoints in global fora.