ABSTRACT
Over this forty-year period of formal independence, there have been relatively few studies of African foreign policy and even fewer in a comparative vein. Many texts have focused on Africa and the global system, but fewer have focused on the African element of this relationship or on the intra-African dimension to foreign policy. Significant emphasis was rightly placed upon the influence of the outgoing colonial powers on shaping the foreign policy orientations of the newly emergent African states. The main factors that shaped policy were given as the impact of colonialism, the role of resources, membership of international governmental organizations (IGOs), nonalignment, security and sovereignty, unity against apartheid, economic development, and centralized decisionmaking. Pan-Africanism and continentalism are terms gaining new currency in Africa out of an urgency to deal with the political, economic, and social crises facing the continent.
