54 Anyangwe/Right to self-determination under the African Charter claim to self-determination in member states, a claim which may or may not extend to secession. It is doubtful whether exclusion is even feasible or morally and politically desirable. If part of the territory of a member state is sufficiently aggrieved as to claim the right of selfdetermination as a legitimate ground for seeking autonomy within or for seceding from the state, it is hard to see how the AU can force it to give up its right.21 Even if it were minded to do so it would lack both legal and moral justification for its action. The right of selfdetermination is not lightly asserted. It appears that when such a claim has been made it has often been as a result of a long train of some pernicious and un-sufferable injustices, policies and actions by a tyrannical and oppressive state. 3 SELF-DETERMINATION AND THE CASE LAW OF THE AFRICAN COMMISSION African countries achieved independence as beneficiaries of territorial self-determination. But they then ‘forgot’ about this collective right of peoples and did not even mentioned it in the OAU Charter of 1963. The closest reference to self-determination in that document was the commitment to eradicate all forms of colonialism in Africa and to emancipate dependent African territories. This commitment, however, rested on a state-centred conception of territorial self-determination. It was not until two decades later that self-determination was conceptualised in Africa as a peoples’ right under the African Charter, a right claimable by peoples. Article 20 of that treaty guarantees four distinct but interconnected rights: (i) the right to existence, which has to do with living or human existence, and not with the right to food; (ii) the right to self-determination eo nomine, which has two dimensions – a territorial dimension entailing separate statehood, and a political or constitutional dimension entailing autonomy and economic and socio-cultural development; (iii) the right to freedom from domination, and (iv) the right to assistance from third states. Article 20 recognises two sets of ‘peoples’ as beneficiaries of selfdetermination: ‘all peoples’ generally, and ‘colonized or oppressed peoples’ (the ‘or’ is disjunctive, not conjunctive). Legal scholarship acknowledges and seldom contests these beneficiaries of selfdetermination, unlike the content of the legal right to selfdetermination which is often contested. The right to existence bespeaks emphatic rejection of genocide, pogrom or other massacres, and other acts aimed at destroying or annihilating a people. Any people faced with an existential threat is entitled to appeal to the right of self-determination as a remedy of last resort in order to eliminate that peril and free itself from threatened extinction. Self-determination eo nomine in the African Charter is a right claimable by ‘all peoples’, dependent or non-dependent, and it is 21 The Organization may of course decline recognition of the seceding entity. But, as the case of Somaliland demonstrates, that will be ineffectual in trying to force the entity to renounce secession.