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.
