Introduction

This chapter examines the international roles played by the Organization of African Unity (OAU)/ African Union (AU) during two global health crises. The two health crises included for study are the HIV/ Aids crisis, beginning in 1981, and the COVID-19 crisis that erupted in February 2020. Over the course of the Aids crisis, the AU was formally launched to replace the OAU in July 2002, following three years of planning. African leaders judged that the OAU had failed to live up to its promises, and they created a somewhat more ambitious ‘Constitutive Act’ to guide the activities of the AU. The response to the Aids crisis was one among the many areas in which the OAU failed to promote the welfare of African peoples.

Following the theoretical framing of this volume, this chapter attempts to identify the OAU or AU roles across two dimensions. It seeks to assess what roles the OAU/ AU adopted in relation to other major international organizations (IOs) and the ‘global order’ that prevailed in each health crisis (‘functional role’); and the roles that it adopted in dealing with the respective health crises (‘relationship role’). The evidence gathered here shows that the roles of the OAU/ AU with respect to its relational role demands changed substantially across the two crises.

The research design for this chapter entails establishing a baseline of role selection by the OAU before the advent of the Aids crises. This will enable us to perceive how roles changed in the face of two successive crises. When other, earlier issues were on its agenda, the OAU was performing strikingly different roles on the world stage and in the global community of IOs. Accordingly, the changing roles of the OAU/ AU in response to the two global health crises make an excellent case for close examination. This chapter relies upon the secondary literature for identifying and labeling the roles of the OAU in the pre-Aids era, and also after the onset of the Aids crisis. These roles are well-described, albeit without the use of role theory language, in the existing literature. Since the COVID-19 crisis is a more recent one, the chapter draws chiefly upon press releases of the AU and news reports about AU activity to assess the AU's role during this crisis.