Colonel Muammar Gaddafi arrived by road from Senegal with an enormous entourage, all of whom had to be shipped across the Gambia River by a relay of ferries.

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran – invited by the Gambians as a special guest – cruised the dusty streets in a massive stretch limousine version of the American Hummer.

The event taxed The Gambia’s facilities to the limit – and sometimes beyond.

Since the luxury hotel at the new conference centre wasn’t ready in time, the heads of state were lodged in a suburban housing estate on the other side of the road – 52 identical red roofed bungalows which will now go on sale to the public, allowing them to buy a little bit of history and say “Thabo Mbeki or Ellen Johnson Sirleaf slept here”.

Appeals for solidarity

Some African summits in the past have produced blazing rows, furious walkouts and gruelling all-night sessions. By those standards this was a relatively low-key affair.

The big issue hanging over the African Union at the moment is the situation in Darfur in Western Sudan

The fireworks at the opening session came not from the African participants, but from President Ahmadinejad and his fellow guest, Hugo Chavez of Venezuela.

Both made stirring appeals for solidarity against capitalist and imperialist hegemony.

President Ahmadinejad also complained that the death chambers of the Jews were given more importance than the rooms where thousands of African slaves died before being shipped to the Americas – which did provoke a walkout, but only from the European diplomatic observers.

The big issue hanging over the African Union at the moment is the situation in Darfur in western Sudan, where the AU has made its first big peacekeeping deployment.

But 7,000 troops are not nearly enough to stop the violence over such a huge area, and the AU is running out of money to keep them there.

Mediation

Right at the beginning of the week’s meetings the AU peace and security council agreed that they would pull out at the end of the force’s present mandate, at the end of September, and that they wanted the United Nations to take over.

All they had to do was to persuade Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir to accept it. But there has been no breakthrough. President Bashir came, and was polite but adamant.

Now the AU has agreed to keep its troops there until the end of the year, still hoping that by then the UN will be accepted. There has been an appeal to donors to help fund the operation.

There were other bilateral meetings about other trouble spots, but again, not much movement.

Gambian President Yahya Jammeh (R) speaks with Kenyan President Mwai Kibaki at their meeting during the African Union summit in Banjul. African Union leaders agreed in Gambia to extend a peacekeeping force in Darfur until the end of the year to allow the UN to finalise its preparations to deploy in the vast troubled region.(AFP/Seyllou )

UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, who had been offering to play some kind of mediating role in Zimbabwe to help it out of its crisis with the opposition and the international community, had a meeting with President Robert Mugabe during the summit, only to be told that Mr Mugabe has already arranged help from another mediator – former Tanzanian President Benjamin Mkapa.

One expected initiative failed to materialise – a proposed African Charter on Democracy and Governance. Most of its provisions were accepted.

Even presidents who had come to power through coups d’etat themselves were willing enough to outlaw coups in the future. What they couldn’t all accept was a clause that tried to stop governments changing their constitutions to keep themselves in power.

So that project has been sent back for further study and will be presented again next year.