H.I.M. Haile Selassie O.A.U. speech 1963 African Summit
"We welcome to Ethiopia, in Our name and in the name of the Ethiopian Government
and people, the Heads of State and Government of independent African nations who
are today assembled in solemn conclave in Ethiopia's capital city. This
conference, without parallel in history, is an impressive testimonial to the
devotion and dedication of which we all partake in the cause of our mother
continent and that of her sons and daughters. This is indeed a momentous and
historic day for Africa and for all Africans.
We stand today on the stage of world affairs, before the audience of world
opinion. We have come together to assert our role in the direction of world
affairs and to discharge our duty to the great continent whose two hundred fifty
million people we lead. Africa is today at mid- course, in transition from the
Africa of yesterday to the Africa of tomorrow. Even as we stand here we move
from the past into the future. The task on which we have embarked, the making of
Africa, will not wait. We must act, to shape and mould the future and leave our
imprint on events as they pass into history.
We seek, at this meeting, to determine whither we are going and to chart the
course of our destiny. It is no less important that we know whence we came. An
awareness of our past is essential to the establishment of our personality and
our identity as Africans. This world was not created piecemeal. Africa was born
no later and no earlier than any other geographical area on this globe.
Africans, no more and no less than other men, possess all human attributes,
talents and deficiencies, virtues and faults. Thousands of years ago,
civilizations flourished in Africa which suffer not at all by comparison with
those of other continents. In those centuries, Africans were politically free
and economically independent. Their social patterns were their own and their
cultures truly indigenous. The obscurity which enshrouds the centuries which
elapsed between those earliest days and the rediscovery of Africa are being
gradually dispersed. What is certain is that during those long years Africans
were born, lived and died. Men on other parts of this Earth occupied themselves
with their own concerns and, in their conceit, proclaimed that the world began
and ended at their horizons. All unknown to them, Africa developed in its own
pattern, growing in its own life and, in the nineteenth century, finally
re-emerged into the world's consciousness.
The events of the past hundred and fifty years require no extended recitation
from Us. The period of colonialism into which we were plunged culminated with
our continent fettered and bound, with our once proud and free peoples reduced
to humiliation and slavery; with Africa's terrain cross-batched and
checkerboarded by artificial and arbitrary boundaries. Many of us, during those
bitter years, were overwhelmed in battle, and those who escaped conquest did so
at the cost of desperate resistance and bloodshed. Others were sold into bondage
as the price extracted by the colonialists for the "protection" which they
extended and the possession of which they disposed. Africa was a physical
resource to be exploited and Africans were chattels to be purchased bodily or,
at best, peoples to be reduced to vassalage and lackeyhood. Africa was the
market for the produce of other nations and the source of the raw materials with
which their factories were fed.
Today, Africa has emerged from this dark passage. Our armageddon is past. Africa
has been reborn as a free continent and Africans have been reborn as free men.
The blood that was shed and the sufferings that were endured are today Africa's
advocates for freedom and unity. Those men who refused to accept the judgement
passed upon them by the colonies, who held unswervingly through the darkest
hours to a vision of an Africa emancipated from political, economic and
spiritual domination, will be remembered and revered wherever Africans meet.
Many of them never set foot on this continent. Others were born and died here.
What we may utter today can add little to the heroic struggle of those who, by
their example, have shown us how precious are freedom and human dignity and of
how little value is life without them. Their deeds are written in history."
H.I.M. Emperor Haile Selassie I