Word: commonwealth
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...make it work even better, after its fashion, the Prime Ministers decided to establish a Commonwealth Secretariat. To be manned and financed by all members, it will have no political powers, will serve instead as a clearinghouse for information-and help Britain's Commonwealth Relations Office plan bigger and better conferences. Most remarkable fact about the new Secretariat: its strongest backers were the African members, who for all their frequent nationalist fuming evidently find advantages in belonging to the club...
From London the Commonwealth's African members flew on to Cairo, where a club of a different sort was meeting. Out of their traffic stacks high over Gamal Abdel Nasser's shiny new airport swooped jet after jet, bearing every sort of African leader from emperor to president to tribal chief. They were gathering for the second annual "summit" of the fledgling Organization of African Unity founded by His Imperial Majesty Haile Selassie I of Ethiopia a little over a year...
...vast, parti-colored mosaic, the O.A.U. consists of 34 states fragmented into racial, tribal and religious segments that make the Commonwealth's problems look easy. With a total population of only 240 million (less than Western Europe), the O.A.U.'s member states show per capita incomes as low as $17 a year, giving the group as a whole less purchasing power than New York State. Yet for all its obstacles, the O.A.U. in its short lifetime has a number of successes to its credit. It skill fully mediated the Algerian-Moroccan border war and cooled down the fighting...
There were those who wondered whether Britain could much longer dominate an association with such widely differing political and economic systems. London's respected Economist had a remedy: "It is high time that Britain and the Commonwealth shed the 'mother country' fixation and made their relationship one of real as well as constitutional equality...
Whatever the merits of this argument, the Commonwealth nations last week showed that they are still preoccupied less with global goals than with regional and racial issues close to home. All seven African leaders at the conference were insistent that Britain use force, if necessary, to ensure that Southern Rhodesia's white-supremacist government grants full constitutional equality to the African population before achieving its independence. But militant white Southern Rhodesians have many sympathizers in England. And in an election year, the government of Sir Alec Douglas-Home is deeply reluctant to make any move that might encourage...