Col. Qaddafi seeks to lead new club - Africa

"Now we are free and independent, it's time to move forward," Qaddafi told the more than 40 African heads of state here. The resolution agreed on yesterday looks for ways to strengthen African ties, and Libya says it wants an African parliament, judicial system, and a single currency. On Wednesday, Libya pledged $200 million to UNESCO to fund scholarships of 2,500 African students for eight years.

"Unity has always been the dream of Africans, and it proved a very good weapon in the freedom of our people," says OAU spokesman Ibrahim Dagash. "So any vision to improve this unity, no matter what its framework, is welcome."

The idea of African unity is not new and was a powerful force in the 1960s, when Africans rejected colonial rule. Ghana's new leader Kwame Nkrumah spearheaded the movement, but when the OAU charter was agreed on in 1963, the majority of African leaders opted for more sovereignty and inviolable borders.

Today Africa is still poor, and by one count half the world's conflicts are taking place within its borders. Libya's $7,000 per capita income is the highest in Africa, because of its oil wealth - a fact that the less well-off nations in Africa respect.

"Forty years of independence, but development reports show that we are going backwards," says Boniface Forbin, publisher of Cameroon's English-language The Herald newspaper. A World Bank study, for example, found that quality of life in the capital Yaound in 1994 was comparable to what it had been in 1964.

"All those promises of prosperity failed," says Mr. Forbin. "Africa is being marginalized, it is still atomized while Europe is coming together. Africa must do the same."

So the solution, he says, is the unity that Qaddafi is promoting. "I agree that he is a maverick, that he has his shortcomings, but he has moved his people and is blessed with riches," says Forbin.

Not all think it's rosy

But one journalist at the summit from the southern African state of Swaziland, who asked not to be named, scoffs, "It's all a dream. And in the future we'll form the United States of Pluto, against other planets."

Like other skeptics, he questions the role of Libya - Arab and Arabic-speaking, Muslim, and physically divided from ethnically "black," mostly Christian Africa by the Sahara Desert - in assuming the leadership role for all the continent. Libya's gnarled olive trees and date palms flourishing in desert sand are reminders more of Iraq, not Ethiopia.

"These people are from the Arab world, and they have nothing to do with us," the journalist says. "I'm going back home, to the real Africa."

(c) Copyright 1999. The Christian Science Publishing Society

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