Not since the vivid nightmares I had during a certain semester of political science classes could I have imagined the following lineup – PLO leader Yassir Arafat as the impartial observer, the enigmatic protagonist played by Libyan leader Colonel Muammar Al-Gaddafi, Nelson Mandela type-cast in the role as venerated participant and wise leader, and Secretary-General to the United Nations, Kofi Annan, adding some global intrigue to the plot.

While the combination of leaders may seem a maudlin (yet all-star) cast, wait till you hear about the complexity the supporting actors bring to the story.

The host of the show, President Frederick Chiluba of Zambia, should be basking in the glow of his crowning achievement – holding the final meeting of an international organization in his capital and orchestrating a new approach to governing a continent, but alas, his past catches up with him.

Throughout the show, the cameras pan to the angry demonstrators blocking diplomatic traffic with signs accusing Chiluba of murder.

Days before Al-Gaddafi, Mandela and company arrived on the scene, Chiluba’s chief political opponent, slated to testify in a tell-all trial, is mysteriously killed. Did he do it?

Or was he too busy terrorizing the populace and smuggling diamonds to fit a murder into his schedule?

While the events at the continent-wide meeting of heads of state in Lusaka, Zambia may be misconstrued as fictional musings from a political science undergrad with a crazy imagination and a chemical problem, the reality is that the Organization of African Unity is dissolving to make way for the African Union.

The OAU was formed in 1963, right in the midst of a giant power shift within the African continent, as the colonial powers exited.

The nascent states of Africa were grappling with a foreign infrastructure, populations that had been excluded from education and civic involvement until independence, and a tangle of tribes, languages and religions that suddenly had to coexist without Big Brother.

Fortunately for Africa, the Cold War was raging, so the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. looked hungrily upon the new nations as peoples to be wooed and converted.

They supported tyrannical regimes, because everyone knows a dictator is infinitely more stable than a population with freedom. Unfortunately, as Nigerian author Chinua Achebe observed, things do fall apart.

In the post-Cold War era, Africa was left forgotten with the rest of the toxic waste generated by the fervent dual of the superpowers.

Left to their own devices on a planet that no longer seemed to value them, the African nations had little holding them together.

The Muslims in North Africa and the Sahel were united by their faith, the Francophone and Anglophone nations joined by widely-used European languages, but the continent had only the Organization of African Unity as a weak and ineffectual tie to bind them.

The 1990s brought horrific challenges to the continent. Members of the first generation of presidents-for-life were passing away, bringing new struggles for power in many nations. HIV/AIDS exploded in pandemic proportions; today in many parts of Sub-Saharan Africa roughly 20 percent of the young adult population is infected. Civil wars raged in Mozambique, Sudan, Somalia, Angola and Sierra Leone.

Thanks to his involvement in some terrorist and bombing incidents with the United States, Al-Gaddafi was accustomed to isolation long before the end of the Cold War cut the cord on the rest of Africa. He saw that Africa was severely divided and had no means for consolidating its economic power or political interests into an African bloc.

Now his notoriety is overshadowed by what is being called revolutionary vision for laying the groundwork for the African Union. Now, leaders from most African nations have convened in Lusaka to buy into the Libyan’s suggestion.

Like the European Union, the African Union will have a governance structure to create policies for the continent and also move toward a more unified economy.

Rather than depending on wealthy developed nations for handouts, the African Union hopes to harness the continent’s resources as well as take care of its own diplomatic problems, as Mandela and others have shown in the Arusha tribunals of Rwandan war criminals.

The formation of the African Union signifies not only Africa’s recognition that the rest of the globe is largely unconcerned with its affairs, but also that it is taking initiative on a continental scale to unify and address common problems.

The African Union will not be simple. Can a continent with many divided nations unite from Cape to Cairo?

While the drama in Lusaka is intriguing and the characters unforgettable, this show, with subtitles in English, French, Spanish, Portuguese and Arabic, will probably not be a summer blockbuster. Some of the cult followers of African politics, however, hope for a sequel.

Rachel Faber Machacha is a student with too many majors and no clear classification from Emmetsburg.