“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 and fifty million people we lead. Africa is today at midcourse, 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 mold the future and leave our imprint on events as they slip past into history.
This world was not created piecemeal. Africa was born no later and no earlier than any other geographical area on this glob. 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 suffers not at all by comparison with those of other continent. In those centuries.
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 Africas terrain cross-hatched and checker-boarded by artificial and arbitrary boundaries.
Many of us, during those bitter years, were overwhelmed in battle, and bloodshed. Others were sold into bondage as the price extracted by the colonialists for the “protection” which they extended and the possessions of which they disposed.
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 Africas advocates for freedom and unity. Those men who refused to accept the judgment passed upon them by the colonizers, 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.
Today, we look to the future calmly, confidently and courageously. We look to the vision of an Africa not merely free but united. Africans enjoy different cultures, distinctive values, and special attributes. But we also know that unity can be and has been attained among men of the most disparate origins, that differences of race, of religion, of culture, of tradition, are no insuperable obstacle to the coming together of peoples.
Let us, at this Conference, create a single institution to which we will all belong, based on principles to which we all subscribe, confident that in its councils our voices will carry their proper weight, secure in the knowledge that the decisions there will be dictated by Africans and only by Africans and that they will take full account of all vital African considerations. We are meeting here today to lay the basis for African unity. Let us, here and now, agree upon the basic instrument which will constitute of the foundation for the future growth in peace and harmony and oneness of this continent. Let or meetings henceforth proceed from solid accomplishments.
Ethiopia stands prepared here and now to decide on the site of the University and to fix the financial contributions to be made to it. This is but the merest summary of what can be accomplished. Upon these measures we are all agreed, and our agreement should now form the basis for our action.
We approach the days ahead with the prayer that we have assembled here may be granted the wisdom the judgment and the inspiration which will enable us to maintain our faith with the peoples and the nations which have entrusted their fate to our hands”.
The Ethiopian herald May 30, 2020
BY STAFF REPORTER
