The African role

05The African role

The foundations of African policy

• Africa received special attention from the leader of the 23 July revolution: he saw that Africa is a strategic depth for Egypt, and that freeing Africa from European colonialism completes the liberation of Egypt.

The political field

• Egypt supported the liberation movements in Africa with weapons, money and diplomatic backing, helping the states of East Africa — Somalia, Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania — and of West and Southern Africa — Nigeria, Ghana, the Congo.
• Its fruit appeared in the independence of seventeen African states during 1960.
• Egypt stood beside the people of Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia) and Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), whose fate was controlled by a racist European minority, and cut its political relations with Britain.
• It condemned racial segregation in South Africa and granted political asylum to those fleeing it, and on 23 December 1963 declared an economic boycott of South Africa.
• Egypt raised the slogan "Africa for the Africans" at the first conference of the African continent, held in April 1958 in Accra, the capital of Ghana.
• At Addis Ababa in May 1963 agreement was reached on creating the Organisation of African Unity; Egypt held its chairmanship in 1964, and held it again in 2019.

The economic, media and cultural field

• Economically: creating strong economic blocs to face poverty and exploit resources; founding the Egyptian Technical Fund for cooperation with African states and giving them full support by sending experts and technicians and insisting on building dams to generate electricity.
• Media-wise: opening offices for the African liberation movements in Cairo to explain the peoples' cases to world opinion, and broadcasting radio to African countries in their own languages.
• Culturally: cultural agreements with many states of the continent providing for the exchange of teachers, curricula and publications; al-Azhar played a leading Islamic and cultural role, with many African students studying in its sections and university and many Azharite preachers, imams and missionaries sent to African countries.