The Organization of African Unity (OAU) and later on the African Union (AU) will celebrate its fifty year anniversary on 25 May, 2013 in Addis Ababa. The Golden Jubilee celebration of an institution like the OAU and later the African AU is a special event. For Africans and friends of Africa, it has greater public importance. It offers an occasion for celebration. But more crucially, it presents a unique opportunity for critical introspection and collective reflection on the journey of Africa in the past half-century--which seriously affected the lives of millions of Africans both positively and negatively. Even most vital benefit of such opportunity needs to be seized to set a clear vision for Africa, craft commonly and widely shared mission to realize such a vision and mobilize the necessary commitment and resources to implement the mission. It is fitting for the new leadership of the AU Commission, under Dr Dlamini Zuma to present strategic plan of AU for the next 50 years. [1]

While building on the good Pan-African legacies of OAU, the AU needs to shift focus to new foundations of Pan-Africanism. But what are the good and bad legacies of the OAU/AU? What should be the focus of the AU to build on the good legacies of OAU and address the bad ones?

This article divides, and then explains, the last five decades of the OAU/AU into four eras : First, the Era of Pan-African Solidarity that mainly mobilized the anti-colonial and anti-apartheid struggle of Africa; second, the Era of Confusion and Division in which the Cold War brought ideological struggle between supporters of the West and the East that led to conspiratorial and undemocratic political mobilizations, dictatorial governance styles, bloody political changes through military coups, revolutions and civil wars; and third, with the end of the Cold War, the Era of an Interventionist and Integrationist Agenda necessitating the transformation of the OAU into the AU. Since the North African uprisings of 2011, Africa is now in Era of Popular Uprisings and Democratic Progress. [2] Admittedly, the subject matter of the OAU is quit rich and very broad to cover in an article, thus, it unavoidably condenses the history of five decades in an article which lacks some details and peculiar contexts of events.

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