How to Keep Going

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 ago.

A 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 between Ethiopia and Somalia on Africa's hot, dry eastern horn. Somalia likewise stopped its border skirmishing with Kenya--officially at least--and is now negotiating both disputes under O.A.U. auspices.

Instant Unity? As the conference got under way last week, Ghana's "Redeemer," Kwame Nkrumah, offered his usual proposal for instant Pan-African unity, was instantly cold-shouldered by most of the delegates, who realize that though federation is a fine hope for the future, it cannot work now. The grand items on the agenda promised the customary condemnation of Africa's remaining white-dominated nations, a pledge to tighten the existing boycott on the Union of South Africa, and plenty of high-flown words on the benefits of pulling together.

On a more modest level, the organization's technicians were making sound if unspectacular proposals for increased inter-African trade, the establishment of an O.A.U.-wide commission of jurists, improved telecommunications and transportation. It was an irony of the conference that some of its delegates would have to fly to their sub-Saharan homes by way of Europe.

In the Same Boat. Nasser had laid on quite a welcome. A pair of saluting cannons chugged steadily while the Egyptian army band played a carefully rehearsed series of national anthems, most of which were unwritten five years ago. The entire Nile Hilton was turned over to the delegates, and Shepheard's bar was jammed. For nondrinking Moslems there was belly-dancing in the Tent Caravan Nightclub at the Hilton.

But the key mood of the Cairo conference was a sober one. Nasser him self best expressed it in his welcoming address to the Africans: "We are all in the same boat. We have all, in one way or another, struggled for independence. We have all achieved it in one form or another. Yet, at the very moment of victory, we discovered that the end we had reached was only the beginning of the real challenge."

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