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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 25 April 2022
The Commonwealth Secretariat, an international body at the service of all member countries of the Commonwealth, was established in 1965 to provide the central organisation for joint consultation and cooperation in many fields. In the words of the Agreed Memorandum, the Secretariat was to be “a visible symbol of the spitit of cooperation which animates the Commonwealth”.
Before describing the Secretariat's development since 1965, its present structure and functions, and in particular its involvement in African affairs, a backward look may not be out of place in order to discover why the Heads of Government meeting in 1964 decided that the time was then ripe for setting up a formal secretariat. With Britain's rapid programme of decolonisation almost completed surely there was no need to institutionalise a relationship which up till then had been remarkable for its informality.
For my account of the events leading up to the establishment of the Secretariat in 1965 I have relied upon M. Margaret Ball's “The open Commonwealth”, Duke University Press, 19711 J. D. B. Miller's “Survey of Commonwealth affairs: problems of expansion and attrition, 1953-1969”, OUP, 1974, and Peter B. Harris's “The Commonwealth”, Longman,'1975. The main sources of material on the Secretariat's history and activities have been the published reports of the Commonwealth Secretary General and the publicity material produced by the Secretariat's own Information Division.