Can the United Nations be used as a practical tool to advance the African revolution?

“The UN has never been capable of validly settling a single one of the problems raised before the conscience of man by colonialism…”

- Frantz Fanon (Lumumba’s Death: Could We Do Otherwise?)

Reflecting on the fate of the Congo during the early years of independence, the anti-colonial theorist Frantz Fanon insisted it was a grave mistake for African countries to have sent troops under the cover of the United Nations. The events of the Congo crisis, culminating in the overthrow and assassination of Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba, clearly demonstrated that rather than serving as a decisive shield against war and intervention, the United Nations would prove utterly incapable of preventing imperialist destabilization in the heart of Africa and beyond. Rather than securing sovereignty, the UN functioned decisively to neutralize it.

More than six decades later, the hard limits of the UN’s ability to enforce its Charter principles or achieve its stated aims remain starkly visible: the daily escalating US blockade on Cuba, the Zionist devastation against Palestine, Lebanon and Iran, the atrocities in the war on Sudan and the failures of so-called “peacekeeping” missions throughout the Global south. As US-led western imperialism runs rampant around the globe, the United Nations functions less as a forum for justice than as an assembly for empire where rhetorical declarations by oppressed nations occur alongside the decisive material power of the imperialist west.

A Pan-Africanist analysis of the United Nations requires that the institution be assessed through a dialectical materialist lens, through the positive and negative aspects of its historical development and current reality. The question is not simply whether the UN is “good” or “bad” in the abstract, but rather: under what conditions has it served as a terrain of struggle for the oppressed and to what extent should African peoples place trust in the United Nations today.

The Suez Crisis: A False Dawn

The UN’s first intervention in Africa occurred in 1956 in Egypt during the Suez Crisis when Britain and France, along with Israel, sought to seize control of the Suez Canal. The United States, now established as the foremost imperial power, opposed their invasion, projecting an anti-colonial rhetoric while acting to limit the old colonial powers only insofar as it advanced US hegemony.

The UN formed the first-ever peacekeeping force, the United Nations Emergency Force, to oversee the withdrawal of foreign troops, successfully managing the withdrawal by early 1957. While this seemed like a success for the principles of state sovereignty against unilateral colonial interventions, the United States had used the occasion to diminish the old colonial powers and maintain its own ascendancy — a strategy more geared to the principle of neocolonialism, the continuation of imperialism without the need for a direct colonial presence. The US thereby sought to present itself as a champion of anti-colonialism while protecting its own imperialist interests in the oil-rich Arab region.

The Congo Crisis: The UN’s Original Sin

If the Suez intervention offered a false promise, the Congo crisis of 1960 to 1961 revealed the UN’s true character. The Democratic Republic of Congo, mineral-rich and strategically vital, particularly its uranium deposits (which the United States was keen to control), achieved independence under the Pan-Africanist leadership of Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba. Almost immediately, the country faced a secessionist movement in the mineral-rich Katanga province, backed by its former colonial power Belgium with support from the United States.

Lumumba, believing the UN was a neutral institution and seeking to maintain a non-aligned stance, called for UN assistance in ending the Belgian secessionist movement. However, as stated by Belgian writer Ludo De Witte in his 2001 book The Assassination of Lumumba, these UN forces worked to overthrow Lumumba rather than protect the integrity of the Congo’s first democratically elected government.

The UN did not insist that the Belgians withdraw from the country or take real action against their active presence. Instead, the UN took over the radio station and the airport, stopped Lumumba from calling on friendly African nations for support, and blocked aid from the Soviet Union. Lumumba himself confirmed in a letter to his wife hours before his death that the Belgians were working with high officials at the United Nations to subvert his defense of the country.

Fanon’s lesson was brutal and clear: trusting the UN was a fatal error – not because of bad faith alone, but because the UN’s composition and funding reflected western imperial interests. What was needed was not a UN intervention but a Pan-Africanist military force that could have defended the Congolese revolution. Lumumba made a tragic mistake in relying on the UN’s supposed respect for national sovereignty and peace rather than ensuring the survival of his struggle through alliances with African and other anti-imperialist countries.

The Bandung Era: Glorious but Constrained

Despite this devastating early failure, the period from 1955 to 1975 represented what Samir Amin, the Egyptian Marxist economist, called the UN’s “glorious period.” The Bandung Conference of 1955, bringing together twenty-nine Asian and African nations, marked the Global South’s active participation in international relations. It established ten principles including mutual respect for sovereignty, non-intervention, and equality of races — serving as a blueprint for international relations after the era of direct colonialism.

By 1960, seventeen African countries had become nominally independent, and there was a further push to use the UN to advance decolonization. The Soviet Union presented a draft declaration calling for the final and complete abolition of colonialism. The UN Charter was thereby amended with the adoption of Resolution 1514 on December 14, 1960 — the Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples. It declared that the continuation of colonialism was incompatible with the UN Charter and that all peoples have the right to self-determination and independence.

The Bandung-era UN also produced important legal victories. Resolution 1803 of 1962 on Permanent Sovereignty over Natural Resources gave states the legal right to nationalize foreign-owned mines, oil fields, and plantations. The United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, (UNCTAD), was created in 1964 as a forum for Global South demands on trade and development. The Charter of Economic Rights and Duties of States was adopted in 1974. These were real achievements within the limits of the UN at that time; they provided newly independent states with diplomatic weapons to invoke against former colonizers. However, the Congo crisis had already demonstrated the fundamental limit of these achievements: the UN could pass resolutions, but it could not enforce them. Legal victories without material power — military capacity and financial independence — were vulnerable to imperial destabilization.

The Pattern of Failure

The early failure in the Congo established a pattern of UN interventions that failed to restore order or protect civilians. The UN neither prevented nor stopped the Western orchestrated 1994 Rwandan genocide, withdrawing its peacekeeping force instead of reinforcing it when violence escalated. It has failed to protect civilians in the Central African Republic, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Angola, Somalia, and Sudan resulting in the death of tens of millions of Africans.

The war in Sudan, which began in April 2023, has displaced over twelve million people. The UN’s humanitarian appeal for Sudan in 2025 reached only fourteen percent of its funding target. Developmental progress has been minimal, with UN agencies functioning as bandages that obscure rather than heal the wounds of imperial extraction — a far cry from the developmental framework envisioned by Bandung and the G77.

Samir Amin’s analysis is essential for understanding the UN’s current crisis. He argues that the UN did not simply fail or decay. It was murdered — that is, deliberately stripped of its already limited countervailing power by US unipolar action. Following the overthrow of the Soviet Union, the United States, with its European and Japanese allies, decided to implement its project of global dominance and installed NATO military power and the G7 countries as the UN’s authority. What we have now is an “Empire of Chaos”: permanent war, global apartheid, and the systematic negation of sovereignty, all dressed up in the liberal logic of “human rights” and “democracy”.

The Example of the Sahel

In the Sahel, popular uprisings overthrew neo-colonial governments in Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger. These new governments — forming the Alliance of Sahel States, or AES — have taken decisive action to assert genuine sovereignty: expelling French troops, taking back control of their natural resources and withdrawing from Western institutions.

Significantly, Mali has joined the Group of Friends in Defense of the UN Charter, a coalition of states that includes China, Russia, Cuba, Venezuela, Iran, and others which explicitly rejects the western “rules-based order” and insists on the primacy of the UN Charter’s principles of sovereignty, non-interference, and peaceful settlement of disputes. The AES, learning from the lessons of the tragedy in the Congo demonstrates a path forward for those seeking genuine liberation: do not trust the UN to secure your revolution; build your own capability first, then use the UN as a platform for diplomacy and legitimation.

The Primary Task: Building Material Counter-Power

The decisive lesson of the Congo crisis, affirmed by every subsequent failure, is that the UN cannot be relied upon to defend sovereignty or liberation struggles. Legal victories at the UN are real and valuable — they provide legitimacy, build solidarity, and create norms that can be invoked in struggle — but they are insufficient without material power to enforce them.

The primary task for the global south today is therefore to build cooperative independent military capacities, economic infrastructures and diplomatic institutions. The UN can then be tactically used as a megaphone, a witness, and a site for exposing imperial hypocrisy — but never as a savior.

The Way Forward

The United Nations was created by imperialist nations in order to administer the world. However, colonized people have historically managed to utilize this Western forum as another terrain to advance their struggle for liberation. This was clearly demonstrated in the 1960s when African nations utilized this platform to rally global support for their anti-colonial struggles.

Whether the UN will ever become a body capable of settling “the problems raised before the conscience of man by colonialism” depends on it being delinked from western economic infrastructure and refastened to a new anti-imperialist multipolar infrastructure — a process that will not happen through UN reform debates but through the growth of material counter-power outside the UN. The growing multipolar world order — the rising financial, economic, and political power of the anti-imperialist world — creates the necessary conditions for any international body to function fairly.

Amin is clear that the UN cannot be reformed from within while the global balance of forces remains unchanged. The necessary preconditions for any potential transformation include the removal of US military bases covering the planet, the dismantling of Western financial dominance including dollar hegemony and SWIFT control, the building of regional monetary systems such as an African common currency, the creation of alternative institutions like the New Development Bank and BRICS Pay, and a genuinely multipolar world order where no single power or bloc can dominate.

The history of the UN in Africa and across the Global South demonstrates conclusively that the institution cannot be trusted to defend sovereignty or deliver justice. Therefore, the primary task for anti-imperialist and Pan-Africanist forces today is to build the independent military, economic, and diplomatic power that can, over time, shift the global balance of forces and create the conditions for a genuinely just international order.