From Below and to the Left? Human Rights and Liberation Politics in Africa’s Postcolonial Age*
During the 1950s, the African United Nations Trust Territories became pivotal sites where the human rights principles outlined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights played a complementary role to anticolonial nationalism. A transregional human rights network provided international support to African nationalists and rights activists, and the Trusteeship Agreements and the UN Charter that administering authorities had signed set the conditions for legally implementable human rights norms. But as the trusteeship system came to a close circa 1960, the UN no longer had the jurisdictional means to enforce rights principles, and the transatlantic network that activists throughout Africa, the United Kingdom, and the United States had put in place began to disintegrate. In the 1960s, the human rights movement in the global North parted ways with liberation politics as it narrowly redefined human rights as negative protections for individuals. Yet, as this comparative analysis of human rights in Tanzania and Cameroon reveals, in some parts of (post)colonial Africa, particularly in the former UN trust territories where a 1950s-era conception of rights had become prevalent, human rights remained the expression of a political solidarity rooted in the liberatory practices of anticolonial struggle.
The dynamic of the liberation movement is needed to point the direction, to gain the momentum for change. The human rights proponent must appreciate this initiative, but maintain some objectivity and stand in judgment on excesses. A creative tension must be maintained between the liberation struggle and the concern for human rights.
—George Houser, 19921
Beginning in 2010, three scholarly books about the historical trajectory of human rights since World War II were published within months of each other, written by authors in different disciplines: comparativist Randall Williams’s A Divided World (May 2010), historian [End Page 389] Samuel Moyn’s The Last Utopia (October 2010), and political philosopher Robert Meister’s After Evil (January 2011).2 Although none cites the others, each of the authors argues that in order for human rights to become an international mainstream movement—that is, to achieve global popularity among policy makers, intellectuals, and grassroots activists alike—they had to be severed from revolutionary liberation politics.3
The authors date this rupture to three different historical moments. For Williams, it occurred in 1964, the year that a fledgling Amnesty International reached a consensus that Nelson Mandela should be barred from the category the organization had recently created—“prisoner of conscience”—because during his trial, he had made a case [End Page 390] for the African National Congress’s use of violence to fight apartheid rule in the Union of South Africa.4 For Moyn, human rights emerged, apparently out of nowhere, in 1977 as a global movement functioning much as it does today, and then only because alternative, more political internationalisms—pan-Africanism, anticolonialism, communism, and Marxist humanism among them—had proven unable to transcend nation-state sovereignty to achieve the kind of revolutionary change each had promised.5 Meister posits 1989, the year of the fall of the Berlin Wall, as the moment at which human rights were definitively disassociated from the more revolutionary tradition they had galvanized over the last two centuries as the Rights of Man. For Meister, as the twenty-first century drew nearer, human rights became the monopoly of the democratic capitalist world as the phrase “responsibility to protect,” coined in Ottawa in 2001, began to underwrite militaristic humanitarian intervention—“the bombs that rescue.”6
I agree that the human rights movement parted ways with liberation politics in order to achieve the prominence it eventually did in the global North, where human rights were narrowly redefined as negative protections for individuals, a safeguard against physical pain and trauma.7 But I date this divergence to the end of the UN trustee-ship system circa 1960 and demonstrate that the new sort of human rights movement that swept in muted—but did not fully displace—the revolutionary one that had preceded it. In the following examination of the trusteeship era and its postcolonial aftermath, I compare and contrast the fate of rights talk in newly independent African states and demonstrate that the human rights movement that gained purchase in the global North (whether in the 1960s, 1970s, or 1980s) was not a universal one. It merely overshadowed an earlier transregional human [End Page 391] rights movement that played a complementary role to anticolonial liberation.8
Beginning in the 1940s, a number of intellectuals, lawyers, politicians, and activists in the northern Atlantic world shared a vision of a world founded upon peaceful consensus rather than conflict. World federation seemed to be a dream within reach. International law provided the means to reach it.9 They understood anti-imperialism and human rights for all—largely conceived as political and civil liberties for groups and individuals, self-determination, and social and economic equality—to be essential components of a pacifist approach. Visionaries in a realist, statist age, these men and women were to the Left, but not too far. Some were atheist, others devoutly Christian or Jewish; in the interwar period, many had been socialists, communists, conscientious objectors, anarchists, or some combination of the above. A few, like Alexandre Parodi, had survived German prison camps; some, such as Dr. Sabine Gova, were Holocaust survivors; while others, including Boris Mirkine-Guetzevitch and Jan Papanek, had defected from the Soviet bloc before migrating west.10 By the postwar period, most had settled into the progressive side of liberal but deliberately distanced themselves from communism.11 A few of them ignited organizations and projects, such as the World Movement for World Federal Government, that fizzled out after a few years, leaving only a blip in the [End Page 392] historical record.12 Many of these optimistic anti-imperialists believed in the rule of international law as the means to mitigate state sovereignty as needed to protect the rights of groups and individuals. As the first global human rights activists, they supported the internationalist ideal put into practice that, however impotent and flawed, has somehow survived to this day—the United Nations. A dozen or so of these visionaries were involved, through the structure of the UN, in the conception of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights—a document they believed was an articulation of a postwar moral authority that international law would underwrite, and the UN would eventually have the political authority to implement.13
The potential that these internationalist pacifists saw in the UN found legal expression in the UN trusteeship system, which represented a rare occasion in the world’s history for a supranational organization to wield a limited jurisdiction over territories administered under the authority of sovereign nations (in the case of the African UN trusteeships, the colonial powers of France, Britain, Italy, Belgium, and the Union of South Africa). In forming the International League of the Rights of Man (ILRM), the first human rights nongovernmental organization to obtain consultative status with the UN, the American chairman, Roger Baldwin, prepared his allies and like-minded colleagues to push the trust territories’ idiosyncratic jurisdictional status as far as it could go toward liberating inhabitants from European rule.14 The pressure of the League, which lobbied UN representatives daily on issues from the trusteeships, combined with the existence of the trusteeship agreements and the UN charter that administering authorities—with [End Page 393] the exception of the Union of South Africa—had signed, set the conditions for legally implementable human rights norms in the trust territories from 1948 to the trusteeship system’s end around 1960.15
Yet the mere existence of the UN and the ILRM was not enough to launch a transregional human rights movement. Such a thing could be accomplished only through the participation of trust territory inhabitants themselves. And participate they did. During the trusteeship years, tens of thousands of petitions poured in from African trust territory inhabitants—more than forty-five thousand from the British and French Cameroons in the year of 1956 alone.16 During the 1950s, the ILRM formed affiliations with organizations in all of Africa’s trust territories as well as in several other colonies. African activists in the trust territories took a leading role in identifying what needed to be done in order to apply the UN principles promising self-determination, an end to racial discrimination, and social and economic equality.17 In the late 1940s and early 1950s, African human rights activists and anticolonialists served as the guides and educators of those who, like Roger Baldwin, chaired organizations such as the ILRM seeking to [End Page 394] define human rights, their purpose, and methods for their implementation in this postwar, statist age that Cold War tensions increasingly divided. The place and time where people, ideas, and legal possibilities met, the UN trust territories in the anticolonial period became pivotal sites where various internationalisms, including postwar human rights principles, converged. The particular international status as well as the actions, words, and alliances forged between African activists and human rights organizations in the North made these territories the sites where human rights reached the zenith of their enforceability, arguably in the history of the world. In defining rights for people who had no rights of citizenship, the trusteeship system afforded the means to return the territories and people under its supervision to legal international existence.18
Even more importantly for African inhabitants who premised arguments for self-determination on the UN’s human rights principles, particularly as outlined in Article 76 of the UN charter,19 the trustee-ship system created the political space within which to “construct a dissensus against the denial of rights they suffer[ed].”20 The peculiar jurisdictional status of the trusteeship territories allowed African activists to transform them into a forum “shaped in the very gap between the abstract literalness of the rights and the polemic about their verification” which was essential to the conception and claiming of those [End Page 395] rights.21 “The back-and-forth movement between the inscription of the right”—in this case, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the UN charter, and the trusteeship agreements—and “the dissensual stage on which it is put to test,” created the conflictual debates that gave rights greater meaning in the Trusteeships than in colonies proper. For unlike in other colonies, the trusteeship system drew administering authorities into the debate by requiring them to defend or justify their policies and brought the contradictions between colonial powers’ discursive utterances of “civilizing mission” and the reality of their repressive style of governance into stark relief.
But what happened to this nascent, transatlantic human rights project as the trusteeship system came to a close? As the sovereignty loophole closed, the UN no longer had the legal means to intervene, the locus of dissensus on a global stage disappeared, and the network activists had put in place began to disintegrate. The end of the trusteeship period coincided with the birth of Amnesty International, launched in 1961 in London as an organization called Appeal for Amnesty. This new human rights organization built upon the transatlantic network the ILRM had in place but reinvented its strategy. Under Amnesty International’s stewardship, human rights activists in the global North began to conceive of a way to effect change and protect rights without relying on government policy or the UN’s intervention. This resulted in a shift away from the political toward the moral, and from the collective toward the individual (as negative rights of individuals took precedence over self-determination for most human rights advocates in the North).
But it is one thing to argue that activists who continued to associate human rights with liberation—which they mostly defined as political freedom combined with economic justice—were viewed with skepticism or distrust by those advocating for the new sort of human rights that Moyn so aptly describes as gaining ground in the late 1970s.22 And it would certainly be correct to argue that the earlier activists’ view of the purpose of human rights progressively faded from the world stage throughout the 1960s and 1970s, as the new incarnation swept in. But it is simply incorrect to state that this new seemingly apolitical and utopic vision of human rights, which stressed the rights of individuals over all else, exploded on the international scene as the one and only, the first, global human rights movement. In many parts of the world, [End Page 396] and in surviving transregional networks that predated 1960, human rights remained “from below and to the left,” very much the expression of a political solidarity that took its “cues from liberatory practices forged out of long histories of anticolonial struggle.”23
In many of Africa’s postcolonial states, human rights activists—although some more reformers or critics now than revolutionaries—were among the first to be arrested and imprisoned as political subversives. In these settings, human rights remained part of the liberation struggle not only for African activists, oppositionists, and dissenters, but also for many of the British and American anti-imperialists who promoted the notion of human rights throughout the 1950s—among them, Walter White of the NAACP, Roger Baldwin of the ILRM, Fenner Brockway of the Movement for Colonial Freedom, Michael Scott of the Africa Bureau, and George Houser of the American Committee on Africa. As late as 1992, in a retrospective address, George Houser, one of those who played an active role in strengthening the transatlantic human rights network throughout the 1950s, spoke of the need to maintain a creative tension between human rights and the liberation struggle.24
This article historicizes the shift in human rights strategies that paralleled the lifting of the trusteeship system and evaluates what became of human rights in postcolonial Africa, most notably in the former trust territories, where, during the decade prior to independence, political activists and populations alike had appropriated and shaped these ideas to fit a revolutionary, nationalist agenda.
National Sovereignty, Liberation Politics, and Human Rights
Prior to independence, the contemporary principle of national sovereignty (which meant, of course, that of the colonial powers, rather than of the territories they governed) served to disempower African [End Page 397] politicians vis-à-vis their respective metropolitan centers, allowing colonial administrators to operate with impunity to scour out popular anticolonial and nationalist movements or trade unions, and to eliminate the political leaders they did not view as their successors during the twilight of colonial rule.25 But, from the moment of official independence, the preservation of a newly acquired national sovereignty became the basis upon which many postcolonial heads of state guarded their own political position—often to the detriment of the political and civil liberties that African human rights activists had struggled to claim, obtain, and maintain throughout the previous decade.26 Prevailing notions of national sovereignty bolstered the internal authority, if not legitimacy, of the first African presidents and prime ministers (not all of whom owed their positions to a carefully maintained allegiance with their former colonial powers), allowing African leaders to control and to keep under surveillance potential political enemies by using exceptional legislation such as preventive detention acts or broad laws against ambiguously defined political subversion.27
Accordingly, African human rights activists working at the grass-roots level who had previously advocated self-determination concurrently with calls for human rights protections now prioritized the preservation of political and civil liberties in the postcolonial state. In so doing, they often found themselves in direct confrontation with the political office holders who had been the ones to wrest self-determination from former colonial rulers. In other words, liberation politics in postcolonial African states shifted, after independence, to mean the protection of political and civil rights—whether collective or individual—from the excesses of the state. In practice, new definitions of human rights emerged differently depending on whether the independent state government claimed to support a human rights agenda (as in the case of Julius Nyerere’s Tanzania) or whether the nation’s leaders refused to even acknowledge—much less engage as a matter [End Page 398] of state policy—a notion of universal human rights (as in the case of Ahmadou Ahidjo’s Cameroon). These different postcolonial trajectories for human rights, which are all too often grouped under the same rubric in the scholarship on human rights in postcolonial Africa,28 can be explained to a great extent by their respective territories’ decolonization processes.
In the analysis of a number of human rights historians and Africanists alike, as “the anticolonial revolution”29 seemed to achieve its primary goal of political independence, the behavior of postcolonial leaders who restricted political and civil liberties exposed human rights as a hypocritical sham.30 In this conventional narrative, those African politicians who had invoked human rights in the anticolonial period had done so only as a rhetorical political strategy to achieve national sovereignty.31 But Africans’ attitudes toward human rights differed from place to place and among politicians and activists within a given state. In some states, particularly those like Tanzania, where the nationalists who had corresponded with the ILRM and petitioned the UN won access to political power upon decolonization, human rights became a matter of state policy and thus lost their connection to revolutionary ideals. In this category, postcolonial state governments began to portray Western critiques of rights abuses as paternalistic, hypocritical interventions. Elsewhere, where revolutionary nationalists were completely shut out of the postcolonial political sphere, as in Cameroon, or where colonialism or white minority rule persisted, as in South West Africa, human rights continued to serve as a companion movement to liberation politics in the postcolonial era.
Human Rights as a Matter of State Policy: The Case of Tanzania
The trusteeship system’s end coincided with both the dawning of Africa’s postcolonial age and a shift in human rights ideas that changed the way in which Western observers and activists structured their interventions. [End Page 399] A shift toward a moral, rather than political, authority in human rights notions can be detected in the correspondence between Baldwin and Peter Benenson, founder of Appeal for Amnesty, which, from its inception in 1961, began to edge the ILRM out as the world’s leading transnational human rights organization.32 Baldwin still expected, in 1964, that UN conventions on human rights would soon “carry some form of implementation.”33 On the other hand, activists following the new trend believed that the Appeal for Amnesty movement must be “entirely non-political,”34 and that, in the face of authoritarian rights abuses, the “intervention of outside opinion, disinterested except in the principle of the injustice involved, is far more likely to give pause to the offending authority” than local political resistance.35 Relying on the media and grassroots organization to publicize Amnesty’s various causes, Benenson purposely sought to circumvent the ineffective institutional mechanism of the UN while Baldwin clung to it. As the new model gained ground across the global North, shaming in the court of public opinion, rather than legal battles in the courts or the UN General Assembly, would serve as the mechanism through which human rights would be enforced.36
Yet it would take several years for the new organization and its methods to fully supplant those of the ILRM. Struggling to remain relevant in a world without the trusteeship system, the ILRM, in the process of changing leadership as Baldwin prepared his retirement, adopted a more moral than political tone in the early postcolonial period as well, particularly as it set its sights on the seemingly antidemocratic behavior of some of the activists it had previously supported.
As a majority of human rights promoters in the West deliberately severed the link between human rights, on the one hand, and the quest for collective civil and political liberties characteristic of anticolonial struggles, on the other, many African politicians and diplomats and [End Page 400] not a few intellectuals began to see Western human rights activists as standing in moral judgment of postcolonial state governments and invoking human rights to justify hypocritical intrusions into matters of internal governance. More logically than ironically, this view gained greater purchase in the postcolonial states, such as Tanzania, where popular anticolonial nationalist movements had triumphed, and the human rights activists who had maintained a connection with the ILRM were the ones to come to power upon independence.37 Within the few short years after independence, the Nyerere regime, continuing in the revolutionary spirit of Africa’s liberation from foreign rule, became deft at presenting itself, on a pan-African and global stage, as pro–human rights while making clear that the state of Tanzania would be the sole entity to define and to implement rights and thus would reject any critiques coming from the global North. Meanwhile, the human rights activists within postcolonial Tanzania who remained focused on the protection of citizens’ freedom of speech, assembly, and other civil and political rights were politically neutralized in various ways as the state closed off any public space for dissensus.
In May and December 1961, Roger Baldwin sent letters congratulating Julius Nyerere, first prime minister of Tanganyika and leader of the nationalist party, Tanganyika African National Union (TANU), on behalf of the ILRM for the “successful campaign you led for the independence of Tanganyika next December.”38 In both letters, Baldwin reminded Nyerere of their alliance when he was a petitioner at the UN throughout the late 1950s.39
By 1965, Roger Baldwin, now in his eighties, had ceded the chairmanship to Jan Papanek, the Slovakian who had served as his country’s delegate to the UN from 1945 until 1948, when he went into exile in the United States after denouncing the Soviet takeover of Czechoslovakia before the UN Security Council.40 In July 1965, the ILRM became aware of Nyerere’s use of the colonial era Preventive Detention Act when the Africa Digest, published by the Africa Bureau, an NGO based in London with which the ILRM had affiliated in 1952, ran a story on the 126 people who had been detained the previous [End Page 401] March. Of the seventy-five still in custody, thirty were Africans from Mozambique or South Africa who were being held for interrogation after being arrested as suspected spies, thirteen were from Zanzibar and belonged to the Zanzibar National Party Cabinet, and twenty-five were Tanzanian citizens.41
Papanek addressed a letter to Mr. John W. S. Malecela, ambassador of Tanzania to the UN, expressing his concern about the seventy-five people held under the Act. The letter, a clear criticism, set off a volley of escalating exchanges between Papanek, one of the leading critics of Soviet human rights abuses at the time, and Malecela, the United Republic of Tanzania’s first permanent representative to the UN who arrived in New York in 1964.42 Papanek wrote: “we are opposed to preventive detention as contrary to the right of an open and public trial on specific charges. We would think that Tanzania as a member of the UN would subscribe to the principles of the UN which upholds the rights of arrested persons under Articles 7, 8, 9, 10 and 11 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.”43
Malecela’s initial reply expressed his resentment of the tone and implications of the inquiry: “I would like to inform you that our constitution which was approved by the representatives elected by the people in our Parliament provides for preventive detention [. . .] a law which is absolutely legitimate under any international law.”44 He then shifted the focus onto the human rights abuses taking place daily in the United States: “In the US several people have murdered black people and yet all of these cases have been dismissed on what my country would have considered very flimsy excuses. . . . We have Ku Klux Klans in the US which is not a secret as to its intentions with regard to human rights . . .”45 and suggested that Papanek would do better to occupy his organization with addressing those. Malecela continued by highlighting the abuses committed in South Africa and the Portuguese colonies, referring to “our African brothers being murdered under the [End Page 402] cruel regimes of Salazar and of Verwoerd. Here again is another field where your organisation could be of use.”46 Malecela clearly expressed a protectionist underscoring of Tanzanian sovereignty: “My country certainly subscribes to the questions of human rights but as to whether or not there has been a violation of human rights in Tanzania it is a matter of the Tanzanians themselves which they can also express through their elected governments.”47 He concluded by adopting a position of moral authority vis-à-vis the ILRM and severing the historic alliance the ILRM had established with the anticolonial nationalist party, the Tanganyika African National Union (TANU) prior to Tanganyikan independence: “your letter . . . lacks the responsibility of internationalism. . . . I will be unable to forward this letter to my government as it is not usual for my government to have dealings with private organisations in other parts of the world.”48
Papanek’s bristling response escalated the face-off as he enumerated the ILRM’s position and credentials as an international human rights organization with consultative status with the UN in the numbered format of a legal affidavit. He pointed out the ILRM’s work on the abuses in the United States, Portuguese Africa, and South Africa, and then turned back to the Tanzanian case. As a reminder of the ILRM’s history with the national liberation movement, TANU, Papanek wrote: “We have aided many petitioners at the UN in their goal for self-determination, and supported both Tanzania [sic] and Zanzibar when their petitioners appeared before the UN Committee on Colonialism.”49 Papanek shifted to a moralizing tone as he provided a lesson in good governance:
Unfortunately, [preventive detention] has become a far too common practice in countries recently freed from colonial rule, and abused by the parties in power. Even if Tanzanian opinion sustains the law, as you say, it is obviously not to be recommended as an international practice. The UN Charter and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights upholds such an opinion. . . . [N]ational discipline is most secure where people exercise their liberties freely without governmental distinctions between good and bad ideas, good and bad newspapers, good and bad men. Such governmental distinctions lead to tyranny in the hands of those few who make them.50 [End Page 403]
Malecela did not back down in his response. He reiterated his position that the ILRM should focus on the human rights violations occurring daily in the country where it was headquartered and then addressed the history of the ILRM’s assistance to Tanganyikan petitioners in the 1950s: “While I appreciate the help you extended to our people to come and petition the UN . . . to help people petition the UN is one thing and to criticize a law that has been passed by the Parliament is another thing. . . . Who are you then to suggest to us that this law is not good for the Tanzanians?51 Malecela denied Papanek’s claims that the ILRM could influence Tanzania’s relationship with the UN: “It is only the United Nations through resolutions which can remind members of their obligations towards the United Nations Charter.”52 The remainder of his letter consisted of reiterations of Tanzanian sovereignty: “I want to repeat to you that for heaven’s sake it is not your organisation which will tell us what laws are good for Tanzania but the people of Tanzania themselves. . . . Let me make it very clear to you once more that Tanzania has always refused and still refuses the interference in our internal affairs from any quarter . . . .”53
The row was smoothed over when Baldwin came out of retirement to take over the correspondence, sending subsequent letters as well as copies of the exchange so far, directly to the presidential office in Tanzania.54 A reply came from Joan Wicken, personal assistant to Julius Nyerere.55 She indicated the president’s awareness of the importance of the rule of law in “any free society” and, to explain Nyerere’s decision to use the Preventive Detention Act, quoted directly from a speech he had made when opening the Dar Es Salaam University College Campus in August 1964:
This is a desperately serious matter. It means that you are imprisoning a man when he has not broken any written law, or when you cannot be sure of proving beyond reasonable doubt that he has done so. You are restricting his liberty, and making him suffer materially and spiritually, for what you think he intends to do, or is trying to do, or for what you believe he has done. Few things are more dangerous to the freedom of a society than that. For freedom is indivisible, and with such an [End Page 404] opportunity open to the Government of the day, the freedom of every citizen is reduced . . .56
Yet the speech justified the Act as necessary for state security:
Our Union has neither the long tradition of nationhood, nor the strong physical means of national security, which older countries take for granted. While the vast mass of the people give full and active support to their country and its government, a handful of individuals can still put our nation into jeopardy, and reduce to ashes the efforts of millions . . . Here, in this Union, conditions may well arise in which it is better that 99 innocent people should suffer temporary detention than that one possible traitor should wreck the nation . . .57
Wicken pointed out that many detainees had been released and that many more would be released in the future, “as soon as the security of the State allows.” Papanek wrote back to Wicken, adopting a sympathetic tone: “We deeply sympathize with President Nyerere’s position and sincerely trust that the conditions he enumerates will soon be resolved and that Tanzania then will find itself in a position to adhere to the principles of human rights as outlined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.”58 Baldwin sent a response directly to Nyerere, thanked him for the “courteous” answer from his personal assistant, and indicated understanding tinged with reservation: “There is nothing for us to add. You understand our position quite as fully as we, and reluctantly we understand yours.”59
No further reference to the matter appears in the archival record, but the incident elucidated the postcolonial shift in the Nyerere regime as well as in the ILRM’s way of relating to African politicians in this new postcolonial age. In Tanzania, the association of human rights critiques with an intrusive Western paternalism served two purposes. First, it shored up the national identity of Tanzania as a sovereign nation that set its own laws and did not bow to external pressures from other nations, particularly when these were voiced in terms of a superior moral authority. Second, it provided the opportunity to legally [End Page 405] justify the repressive means utilized in governance as necessary to build a strong nation. But before accepting the conventional portrayal of Nyerere as dismissive of human rights once he had achieved Tanganyika’s independence, his foreign and domestic rights policies warrant a more nuanced examination.
Nyerere espoused a political philosophy of gradual constitutional reform both before and after independence.60 From Nyerere’s perspective, the transition to independent nationhood was still ongoing in 1965. Tanganyika had acquired official independence only in December 1961, at which time it was admitted to the UN as a member state. An army mutiny in January 1964 definitively pushed the Nyerere regime toward authoritarian rule as, in its aftermath, Nyerere “utilize[d] the full power of party and state to eliminate organized dissent.”61 The republic of Tanzania, incorporating an independent Zanzibar, formed only in October 1964, at the height of Nyerere’s political anxieties. In the few years since independence, Nyerere transformed himself from one of Tanganyika’s most radical anticolonialists to a statesman seeking to consolidate his rule.62
Despite his unease with authoritarian rule, Nyerere believed that political differences and grievances should be addressed within TANU, and after independence moved ever closer to establishing a single-party state.63 Disgruntled traditional chiefs who had been deposed shortly after independence, planters’ cooperatives with economic grievances, and Muslims who felt disenfranchised under the Nyerere regime64 came to view joining with TANU as their only option as the government curtailed the space for political dissent. Nyerere held the same statist [End Page 406] stance on workers’ rights, as he sought, beginning in 1962, to coopt all laborers into the Tanganyika Federation of Labor (TFL), the trade union umbrella organization affiliated with TANU.65 Critics faced arrest under the Preventive Detention Act—first passed in 1962 to control trade union activity that did not conform to TFL—and detention or rustication, a sort of internal exile. TANU’s dominance of the political arena culminated in Nyerere’s successful presidential election in November 1962 with more than 1.1 million votes. The runner-up, Zuberi Mwinyisheikh Manga Mtemvu of the African National Congress (ANC), one of the sole persistent opposition parties in postindependence Tanganyika, obtained only slightly more than twenty-one thousand votes.66 The following year, Nyerere declared Tanganyika to be a one-party state, a decision underwritten by the Tanzanian constitution voted into law in 1965.
Nyerere’s consolidation was so effective that late trusteeship-era activists who became oppositionists after independence were cut off from transnational networks like the ILRM. The leader of the ANC, Mtemvu, who had served as TANU’s first organizing secretary in the mid 1950s, had been one of Baldwin’s correspondents in the final years leading up to independence. In 1957, Mtemvu had promoted the slogan “equal rights for all men” to counter the parliamentary speech of Sir Godfrey Huggins, the first prime minister of the new Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland, which propounded “equal rights for all civilized men.”67 Mtemvu split ways with TANU and formed the ANC in January 1958, days after Nyerere had convinced TANU delegates to accept the British government’s terms and participate in the upcoming territorial elections, even though their design ensured that two-thirds of the elected representation would go to the non-African population (Europeans and Indians, primarily).68 Advocating “Africa for Africans only,” Mtemvu criticized Nyerere for his compliance with the British administration’s principle of multiracism, which, despite its name, seemed a euphemism for white minority rule.
Although Mtemvu remained unable to mobilize opposition sufficiently to garner more than a few votes for the ANC at the polls in territorial or local elections, the party was a vocal critic of TANU both [End Page 407] before and after independence and often framed critiques in human rights terms. In September 1962, Chief Francis Masanja of Kwimba, a member of the National Assembly, withdrew his TANU membership and joined the ANC, stating that “the ANC was the only party that could uphold human rights and that TANU leaders were ‘upsetting baba kabwela [the poor] without considering their rights.’”69
Soon after Nyerere’s successful bid for the presidential election in late 1962, Mtemvu seems to have given up, conceded to Nyerere’s one-party policy enacted in early 1963, and rejoined TANU. The new president of the ANC, Jackson Saileni, maintained a dissenting voice but was arrested in May with three of his supporters for “‘assisting in the management of an unlawful society and of being a members [sic] of it.’”70 By late 1963, the ANC and other minor opposition parties had been eradicated from the political landscape and Nyerere had closed the gap of dissensus that the trusteeship system had kept open. Nyerere’s political monopoly left no room for human rights talk or action that did not come under his regime’s control, and no channel—outside of TANU—through which to point out that people “have not the rights that they have.”71
In his conversion from anticolonialist to nation builder, Nyerere brought human rights under the control of the state and muted the voices of his competitors and critics internally. But when it came to external politics, Nyerere preserved his revolutionary stance as well as his commitment to human rights, viewing them as a companion to liberation politics. Nyerere continued to support anticolonial movements throughout Africa and was outspokenly critical of human rights abuses in the United States and in apartheid South Africa. He was the first African head of state to recognize the independence of Biafra in April 1968, and, breaking ranks with those who, perhaps like his own representative at the UN, Malecela, viewed human rights abuses primarily in racialized terms, he, alone among his peers, denounced human rights abuses carried out by the Nigerian government in the name of suppressing Biafran secession.72 He willingly hosted exiled Black Panthers [End Page 408] from the United States beginning in the early 1970s. He never shifted to the view—as Western human rights advocates overwhelmingly had, certainly by the late 1970s—that only the resolutely nonviolent were deserving of human rights. In stark contrast to European and American heads of state who adopted human rights talk as a matter of policy in the late 1970s, Nyerere kept alive the increasingly outdated view that self-determination was a human right.73 Although Baba Taifa74 closed the space of dissensus that ascribed rights meaning at home, he did all he could to actively maintain it in transnational political processes.
It may be too facile to find in his use of the Preventive Detention Act proof that Nyerere appropriated human rights as an anticolonial platform prior to independence and invoked them as part of his postcolonial political rhetoric on a world stage only to lapse in his commitment to them within the borders of the independent Tanzania he governed.75 Instead, it seems Nyerere’s attitude toward human rights became that of a statesman, and human rights themselves became a matter of state policy to be invoked and legally circumvented as conditionally and inconsistently as foreign and domestic policy might require. Foreign and domestic policy in early postcolonial Africa required Nyerere to guard against foreign intervention in the matters of independent African states, to advocate for liberation of territories still under colonial or white minority rule, and to preserve his place in power regardless of political threats, whether external or internal. Nyerere the statesman cogently expressed his attitude toward human rights in the speech he gave explaining the reasons for Tanzania’s official recognition of Biafra in 1968: “Africa fought for freedom on the ground of individual liberty and equality, and on the grounds that every people must have the right to determine for themselves the conditions under which they would be governed. We accept the boundaries we inherited from colonialism, [End Page 409] and within them we each worked out for ourselves the constitutional and other arrangements which we felt to be appropriate to the most essential function of a state—that is the safeguarding of life and liberty for its inhabitants.”76 For Nyerere, the state was the locus of consensus about rights, and human rights were principles that “states should embody, not superordinate rules to which they must defer.”77
But in applying the Preventive Detention Act, was not the Nyerere regime stripping the people of their rights the way the British had before them? For Nyerere, the fact that elected political representatives of the citizens of Tanzania had voted the Act into law constituted the essential difference. Throughout Africa, colonial law had been designed to deny Africans access to legal and political arenas, allowing administering authorities and European settlers to monopolize those spheres.78 In the 1950s, when protesting bans on TANU meetings, the closing of the party’s local branches, and the prohibition of Nyerere’s public speeches, the ILRM had intervened on Tanganyika’s behalf at the UN to claim the rights the UN documents defined for inhabitants of trust territories. This amounted to the ILRM using the trusteeship agreement to claim human rights in lieu of the rights of citizenship for those who had neither, thus providing supra-territorial legal recourse to the inhabitants of Tanganyika.79 In 1965, from Nyerere’s point of view, the ILRM was not intervening on account of a breach in international law, nor on behalf of a people without rights or political representation, but to criticize Tanzanian law. Was it not the privilege of a sovereign nation in this statist age to claim that no law had been breached? And had not the late colonial era thoroughly confirmed that the state of exception (emergency and martial law) was the not-so-hidden secret of modern power?80
Tanzania exemplifies the places where late colonial era human rights activists now occupied positions of power and where, as state administrators, they cordoned off human rights from revolutionary or [End Page 410] critical political processes. The fate of human rights activists was quite different in the states, like postcolonial Cameroon, that revolutionary nationalists, freedom fighters, and other progressives deemed to be neocolonial—where, beyond the changing of the guard, official independence did little to change the socioeconomic and political realities inhabitants faced daily. In these states, activists who had forged ties with transnational rights organizations in the trusteeship era struggled to keep those connections alive in the postcolonial era. Paradoxically, perhaps, it was in the postcolonial states where human rights did not figure as part of official political rhetoric that they maintained their connection to liberation politics. But, after the disintegration of the jurisdictional status that had enabled the UN Trusteeship Council to intervene, the transregional human rights network had lost the ephemeral enforceability—and therefore potency—it once had.
From Below and to the Left: The Case of Cameroon
In the late colonial and trusteeship periods, African activists had been at least partially, if not completely, excluded from power and governance. After the transition to political independence, those who publicly voiced their critique of the new regimes’ rights abuses remained on the outskirts of power, although a few of them held office and became the first political oppositionists. In these postcolonial states, as in the territories where the colonial state lived on, human rights remained bound up with liberation struggles, hence “from below and to the left.”81
The historical record is filled with examples of African human rights activists who were detained and/or tortured or exiled from post-colonial states that had been, in part or in whole, UN trust territories.82 The human rights activist from a UN trust territory who had knit the closest ties with the ILRM during the years prior to independence and kept up regular correspondence with Roger Baldwin was Dr. Marcel [End Page 411] Bebey-Eyidi of French Cameroon. A World War II veteran who had fought in the first division of the Forces Françaises Libres, Bebey-Eyidi completed his medical training in Paris after the war.83 In 1956, he ran successfully in elections to French Cameroon’s territorial assembly, the first in which universal suffrage applied. The elections took place the year after the French administration’s proscription of the most popular political party, the Union des Populations du Cameroun (UPC), and its youth, women’s, and trade union affiliates, which together made up the nationalist movement in the territory.
Bebey-Eyidi had adopted a moderate position aimed at reconciling revolutionary nationalists—or upécistes, as they called themselves—with those who followed the French administration’s path of progressive steps toward independence.84 From the time of his election onward, Bebey-Eyidi lobbied passionately at home and abroad for complete amnesty for political prisoners, the repeal of the proscription of the UPC (which breached the terms of the trusteeship agreement as well as the UN charter) and the organization of new, UN-supervised parliamentary elections prior to independence. The ILRM, which took its cues from Bebey-Eyidi and other Cameroonian petitioners who traveled to the UN during the 1950s, supported these same measures and pressured the UN to pass them as resolutions, but to no avail.85 In early 1959, when the debate on Cameroon’s political future came before the General Assembly of the UN, the Afro-Asian bloc pushed for the implementation of political amnesty, the restoration of the UPC to legality, and UN-supervised elections prior to independence. But the correctives never passed. Instead, the General Assembly voted to lift the trusteeship in French Cameroon without requiring new elections, without amnestying political prisoners or repealing the proscription and without a constitution in place.86
A constitutionless French Cameroon acquired independence on 1 January 1960 as upécistes, barred from the political landscape, took up arms and formed underground resistance camps or maquis throughout [End Page 412] British and French territory. French and Cameroonian troops engaged in active “pacification” were poised to stifle further uprisings. During eight years of transition, from 1956 to 1964, official British records estimate that some sixty-one thousand to seventy-six thousand civilians were killed, most as a result of aerial bombings of the Franco-Cameroonian military campaign.87 Prime Minister (and later president) Ahidjo had spent the second half of 1959 (after the trusteeship was lifted) amassing the juridical arsenal to crush the UPC rebellion. His proposed bills passed in the legislative assembly (by thirty-four to fourteen votes) and the declaration of a state of emergency throughout the southern portion of the territory, preventive detention, press censorship, one to five years’ imprisonment for “acts that constituted a threat to public order,” and the establishment of criminal tribunals became law.88 French troops backed Cameroonian security forces who arrested suspects and detained them without trial, and six opposition newspapers were shut down.89
Although conceived as emergency measures, these laws were extended by presidential decree from independence onward and were increasingly used to severely restrict the civil and political liberties of anyone suspected of being a political opponent of the Ahidjo regime. In October 1961, MP Bebey-Eyidi wrote a reflective letter to Baldwin in which he recalled the UN’s role in French Cameroon’s transition to independence. By not pressuring the French to hold UN-supervised elections, to offer political amnesty, or to restore the UPC to legality, “the UN opened the way for extremists who plunged our country into terror and confusion.”90 The entire structure of political governance, created by the circumstances of Cameroon’s transition to independence, had to be rebuilt to “promote a larger degree of justice and liberty in our society whoever may occupy official posts.”91
In June 1962, after writing an open letter denouncing the fascist and dictatorial tendencies of Ahidjo’s united national party, the Union Camerounaise, Bebey-Eyidi and three of his independent parliamentary colleagues were arrested and sentenced to thirty months in prison [End Page 413] and a hefty fine under the “anti-subversion law” that targeted “anyone who propagates false information, news, or rumors or who engages in tendentious commentary on news, when the information, news, rumors, or commentary may endanger public authorities.”92
Bebey-Eyidi managed to continue to correspond with Baldwin after his incarceration. A number of his letters contain reflective passages on the philosophy rights and Cameroon’s historical legacy as a former trust territory.93 He understood that the time to act had been while the trusteeship system was still in place: “That is where all the trouble began. Today, we are slaves of an arbitrary regime and the UN can do nothing, due to the principle of “non-interference.” [. . .] The rights of man are completely violated in our country. None of the democratic liberties inscribed in our constitution are in existence. The population is reduced to silence . . . for fear of the violent repression carried out by the army.”94 With the principle of noninterference taking precedence at the UN, Bebey-Eyidi realized that the window of opportunity during which the UN could have acted to enforce human rights had closed, and that the repressive measures put in place as the French began their gradual departure would have full rein in the years ahead.
Bebey-Eyidi closed with an allusion to the restorative power of liberation from colonial rule, a belief expressing the articulation between human rights and the kind of political solidarity forged in liberatory practices: “Wouldn’t it be normal for the liberated African countries to prove to the world that their liberation engenders a complete restoration of the personhood and dignity of African mankind? It is right to work to accelerate economic development. But of what good would the greatest wealth be for us if it did not have as its foundation and its purpose the person worthy of being called human?”95 This philosophical expression characterized the conception of human rights among those who, like Mandela and Malcolm X, as well as a number of anti-imperialists from the global North, including Roger Baldwin, Fenner Brockway, George Houser, and the Reverend Michael Scott, viewed them as [End Page 414] working in tandem with liberation politics. Bebey-Eyidi lost his sight shortly after this last letter to appear in the ILRM records, and died in Douala in June 1966, soon after his release from the Yoko prison.
One could certainly not say that human rights became a matter of state policy in postcolonial Cameroon. While the Ahidjo regime appeared less committed to human rights—whether discursively or in practice—than Nyerere’s, oppositionists like Bebey-Eyidi ensured that human rights remained connected to political reform, critique, and opposition. Indeed, this connection between human rights and revolutionary politics, instilled in the political culture during the late trusteeship period, is traceable throughout the decades and remains prevalent even today.96
Conclusion
Despite the transition to independence and the end of the trusteeship period, in the states where postcolonial governance was repressive in the extreme, as in Cameroon, human rights remained connected to political reform, critique, and opposition. Where human rights maintained their association with liberation politics, the identity of activists and whom they advocated for within the continent had not changed. There was no consensus among activists, intellectuals, or lawyers in the continent that they must forsake the political battlefront in order to focus on a narrowly conceived moral and apolitical protection of individual bodies from harm. In fact, most of the African human rights activists who had forged alliances with western NGOs in the late colonial period expected that human rights would continue to mean the protection of civil and political liberties vis-à-vis the state, whether colonial or postcolonial. In this alternative vision, human rights retained their full potential as political and economic reformer, and human rights talk was a mode of expression of dissensus. Inhabitants of the nations where political and civil rights were suppressed in the postindependence era preserved their agency by being the ones to act and to speak out to expose abuses.
The lifting of trusteeship engendered two significant changes that radically reshaped perceptions of human rights and the way they were [End Page 415] discussed and enforced (or not), setting the stage for the new, seemingly utopic and apolitical moral human rights movement that became dominant in the global North. First, in shutting down the system that had allowed for Africans to debate rights on equal terrain with global powers, the end of the trusteeship system closed the transnational political space of dissensus, both within the African continent and at the UN. The shift away from the UN engendered a second change: the new human rights movement’s sometimes deliberate, sometimes unintentional, exclusion from active participation of the persons whose rights it claimed to protect stripped African activists of agency. The combination of these factors enabled the global North to assume the role of speaking for, rather than clamoring with, human rights activists in the postcolonial world. Concurrently, the northern human rights movement would prove increasingly unable to promote the recognition of human rights abuses inside Euro-America.97 These phenomena, in turn, moved a number of Africans to associate the “universal” human rights movement now clearly originating in the First World with Western paternalism. Those African activists who continued to view rights talk as a component of liberation politics became part of a marginal human rights tradition, more or less isolated from the newer one that would fill an increasingly hegemonic role in the world. [End Page 416]
Footnotes
* Conversations and exchanges with Roland Burke, Megan Vaughan, Priya Lal, Emma Hunter, H. Larry Ingle, and Tim Stanton aided in the conceptualization of this article, as did comments, suggestions, and queries posed by Fellows at the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH) and the African Studies Centre at Cambridge University. Responsibility for the text remains the author’s. Support for the research and writing of this article was provided by the American Council of Learned Societies, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and CRASSH at the University of Cambridge.
1. George M. Houser, “Human Rights and the Liberation Struggle . . . The Importance of Creative Tension,” Africa Today 39, no. 4 (1992): 5–17, 14.
2. Randall Williams, A Divided World: Human Rights and Its Violence (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010); Samuel Moyn, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2010); Robert Meister, After Evil: A Politics of Human Rights (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011).
3. My purpose here is not to recapitulate the main arguments and polarities that have emerged in the relatively new field of human rights history over the last decade, but to focus specifically on the genealogy of contemporary notions of human rights, particularly as stemming from the latter’s relationship to postcolonial politics in the Cold War era. However, it is important to note that the growing historiography of postwar human rights is currently polarized between those who argue that African and Asian anticolonial activists rarely, if ever, invoked human rights as part of their political platforms and those who argue that a commitment to human rights characterized Third World politics beginning in the late 1940s. Those in the first group tend to be intellectual historians focused on a First World genealogy for current human rights norms: see, for example, A. W. B. Simpson, Human Rights and the End of Empire: Britain and the Genesis of the European Convention (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001); Moyn, Last Utopia, especially chap. 3, “Why Anticolonialism Wasn’t a Human Rights Movement”; and Jan Eckel, “Human Rights and Decolonization: New Perspectives and Open Questions,” Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and Development 1, no. 1 (2010): 111–135. Those on the other side of the debate are mostly historians of Africa and Asia’s decolonization or historians of U.S. civil rights movements; see Vijay Prashad, The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World (New York: New Press, 2007); Fabian Klose, Menschenrechte im Schatten kolonialer Gewalt: Die Dekolonisierungskriege in Kenia und Algerien 1945–1962 (Munich: R. Oldenbourg Verlag, 2009); Carol Anderson, Eyes Off the Prize: The United Nations and the African American Struggle for Human Rights, 1944–1955 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). My own research reveals that inhabitants of UN trust territories, whether political leaders or ordinary folk, invoked human rights talk to a greater degree than inhabitants of colonial territories throughout the anticolonial period. For an excellent overview of the debates regarding human rights and their articulation with self-determination and anticolonialism see Roland Burke, Decolonization and the Evolution of International Human Rights (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), especially “Introduction,” and Reza Afshari, “On Historiography of Human Rights Reflections on Paul Gordon Lauren’s the Evolution of International Human Rights: Visions Seen,” Human Rights Quarterly 29, no. 1 (2007): 1–67. For a general overview of human rights history to date, Kenneth Cmiel, “The Recent History of Human Rights,” American Historical Review 109, no. 1 (2004): 117–134, is an excellent, if now slightly dated, place to start.
4. Williams, Divided World, introduction and chap. 1.
5. For more on the “alternative internationalisms” prevalent in the African continent from the 1950s to the 1970s, the following recent works are useful: Priya Lal, “Self-Reliance and the State: The Multiple Meanings of Development in Early Postcolonial Tanzania,” Africa: Journal of the International African Institute 82, no. 2 (2012): 212–234; Christopher J. Lee, Making a World after Empire: The Bandung Moment and Its Political Afterlives (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2010); Meredith Terretta, “Cameroonian Nationalists Go Global: From Forest Maquis to a Pan-African Accra,” Journal of African History 52, no. 2 (2010): 189–212; Frederick Cooper, “Possibility and Constraint: African Independence in Historical Perspective,” Journal of African History 49, no. 2 (2008): 167–196; Gregory Mann and Baz Lecocq, “Between Empire, Umma, and the Muslim Third World: The French Union and African Pilgrims to Mecca, 1946–1958,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 27, no. 2 (2007): 365–381.
6. Meister, After Evil, pp. 4–5.
7. See, for example, Michael Ignatieff, Human Rights as Politics and Idolatry (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001), pp. 56, 57, 149, 173.
8. Rather than posit a binary between human rights and liberation politics, Stefan-Ludwig Hoffman writes that “Liberal-democratic, socialist, and postcolonial human rights norms competed in the international arena, and yet each claimed for itself moral universalism.” Unlike Williams, Moyn, and Meister, Hoffman does not argue that one of these categories eventually effaced the others, but suggests that contestations between different human rights norms have continued since the Second World War. Stefan-Ludwig Hoffman, “Introduction: Genealogies of Human Rights,” in Human Rights in the Twentieth Century, ed. Hoffman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 1–26, 16–17. While I certainly agree, my research reveals that Hoffman overstates the geographical boundaries between categories of human rights norms.
9. Antoine Prost and Jay Winter, René Cassin et les Droits de l’Homme: Le Projet d’une Génération (Paris: Fayard, 2011).
10. Ibid., p. 286; Sabine Gova, “What I Saw in North Africa,” Africa Today 2, no. 4 (1955): 9–10; and Sabine Gova, “Reconstructing a Society,” Africa Today 11, no. 1 (1964): 13–16.
11. Not all human rights advocates in postwar Europe were Leftists. Marco Duranti has demonstrated that anticommunism and conservatism were essential for the emergence of a human rights regime in postwar Western Europe. See Marco Duranti, “From Vichy to Strasbourg: The French Far Right, National Reconciliation and Supranational Human Rights Law,” in Reconciliation, Civil Society and the Politics of Memory: Transnational Initiatives in the 20th Century, ed. Birgit Schwelling (Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 2012), and “Conservatism, Christian Democracy and the European Human Rights Project, 1945–50” (PhD diss., Yale University, 2009).
12. See John Pearmain to Max Beer, 25 February 1951, New York Public Library (NYPL), International League of the Rights of Man (ILRM) Box 5, General Correspondence, Max Beer (1950–1953), Folder 1.
13. Prost and Winter, René Cassin, pp. 284–288. Although these actors’ role in conceiving the purpose of the UN has been deemphasized in the historical literature, Sunil Amrith and Glenda Sluga point out that the development of the UN “was nourished by the contention and convergence of competing universalisms and not merely the Western tradition of thinking about security and rights with which the organization is usually associated.” Sunil Amrith and Glenda Sluga, “New Histories of the United Nations,” Journal of World History 19, no. 3 (2008): 251–274, 252. The debate over human rights amounted to one such universalism.
14. For the legal precedents established, beginning in 1947, through the activism of the International League of the Rights of Man and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored Peoples in the case of South West Africa, the territory that the Union of South Africa refused to administer as a trust territory, see Carol Anderson, “International Conscience, the Cold War, and Apartheid: The NAACP’s Alliance with the Reverend Michael Scott for South West Africa’s Liberation, 1946–1951,” Journal of World History 19, no. 3 (2008): 297–326.
15. Roger Baldwin to “the members of the Board and Advisory Committee and all Affiliates,” November 1952, NYPL, ILRM, Box 9; Memorandum (draft) for the Division of HRs, UN, on the work of the ILRM Concerning Discrimination, 2 March 1955, NYPL, ILRM, Box 8, File: General Correspondence: United Nations–Discrimination and Protection of Minorities, Sub-Commission on Prevention of, 1955–1959.
16. These petitions have yet to be comparatively and systematically evaluated by historians. I am currently leading a research team to photograph these petitions in their entirety and convert them into a keyword-searchable digital database, a process we expect to take a few years but one that will increase their accessibility to researchers.
17. Debates over whether or not “anticolonialism was a human rights movement” have—whether they argue in the affirmative or not—overlooked much of the available empirical evidence that could shed further light on the question and adopted a “top-down” approach, focusing mostly on UN activity and the speeches or official correspondence of Third World politicians and future heads of state. See Moyn, Last Utopia; Eckel, “Human Rights”; Andreas Eckert, “African Nationalists and Human Rights, 1940s–1970s,” in Hoffman, Human Rights in the Twentieth Century, pp. 283–300; and Burke, Decolonization. The absence of empirical evidence has distorted historians’ understanding of the intersection between human rights and decolonization to a certain extent. Burke, for example, mentions petitions sent to the UN’s Third Committee on Human Rights after 1960, but, in overlooking the UN’s Fourth Committee, of which the Trusteeship Council was a part, ignores entirely the tens of thousands of petitions sent from trust territory inhabitants to the UN from 1948 to 1960. By relying on evidence from the earliest human rights NGO, the ILRM, as well as petitions to the Trusteeship Council, this article fills in some of the empirical blanks and thus offers a close-up history of an earlier period of human rights activism and from a more “grassroots” perspective. See also Meredith Terretta, “‘We Had Been Fooled into Thinking That the UN Watches Over the Entire World’: Human Rights UN Trust Territories, and Africa’s Decolonization,” Human Rights Quarterly 34, no. 2 (2012): 329–360.
18. On this point, see Florence Bernault, “What Absence Is Made of: Human Rights in Africa,” in Human Rights and Revolutions, ed. Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom, Lynn Hunt, and Marilyn B. Young (2000; Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2007), p. 138.
19. Article 76 of the UN charter, which defines the trusteeship system, reads as follows: The basic objectives of the trusteeship system, in accordance with the Purposes of the United Nations laid down in Article 1 of the present Charter, shall be:
• to further international peace and security;
• to promote the political, economic, social, and educational advancement of the inhabitants of the trust territories, and their progressive development towards self-government or independence as may be appropriate to the particular circumstances of each territory and its peoples and the freely expressed wishes of the peoples concerned, and as may be provided by the terms of each trusteeship agreement;
• to encourage respect for human rights and for fundamental freedoms for all without distinction as to race, sex, language, or religion, and to encourage recognition of the interdependence of the peoples of the world;
• to ensure equal treatment in social, economic, and commercial matters for all Members of the United Nations and their nationals, and also equal treatment for the latter in the administration of justice, without prejudice to the attainment of the foregoing objectives and subject to the provisions of Article 80.
20. On the notion of dissensus, see Jacques Rancière, “Who Is the Subject of the Rights of Man?” South Atlantic Quarterly 103, no. 2/3 (2004): 297–310, 305–306.
21. Ibid., pp. 305–307.
22. Moyn, Last Utopia, chap. 4.
23. Williams, Divided World, p. xxiii. Williams posits the political solidarity of liberatory practice, which he describes as a “decolonizing praxis” as standing in opposition to human rights as they have been reconfigured since the early 1960s. He views 1964 as the moment of foundational oppositionality separating human rights from liberation politics. Like Moyn, he ignores the importance of the international human rights movement in existence during the 1950s and views the “international human rights movement” and the “anticolonial revolution” as mutually exclusive.
24. Houser, “Human Rights.”
25. Terretta, “Cameroonian Nationalists Go Global”; Tony Chafer, The End of Empire in French West Africa: France’s Successful Decolonization? (Oxford: Berg, 2002); Caroline Elkins, Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain’s Gulag (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2005); David Anderson, Histories of the Hanged: Britain’s Dirty War in Kenya and the End of Empire (New York: W. W. Norton, 2005); Frederick Cooper, Decolonization and African Society: The Labor Question in French and British Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Ludo de Witte, The Assassination of Lumumba (London: Verso, 2001); Klose, Menschenrechte.
26. Eckert, “African Nationalists”; Frederick Cooper, Africa since the 1940s: The Past of the Present (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 197–198.
27. Bernault, “Absence,” pp. 136–139; Eckert, “African Nationalists,” p. 300.
28. See, for example, Eckert, “African Nationalists.”
29. Misleadingly singularized, and therefore oversimplified and homogenized in the present-day works of a number of Europeanist, Americanist, or empire scholars, there was, of course, no such thing as an anticolonial revolution, but rather a series of often competing political and social movements that shared a common goal of doing away with the colonial state and white supremacist rule.
30. Moyn, Last Utopia, pp. 212–213; Eckel, “Human Rights,” p. 129.
31. Ibid.
32. See NYPL, ILRM, Box 16, File: General Correspondence, England, Appeal for Amnesty, 1861–1961, Peter Benenson and Mr. Eric Baker, Joint Directors, to Roger Baldwin, 4 May 1961. Moyn dates this shift toward a moral authority to 1977, more than a decade and a half after Appeal for Amnesty began to pave the way toward these new, seemingly apolitical human rights strategies.
33. Roger Baldwin to Peter Benenson, 24 July 1964, ILRM Box 29, General Correspondence, File: Amnesty International.
34. Peter Benenson to Roger Baldwin, 1 February 1961, ILRM Box 29, General Correspondence, File: Amnesty International.
35. As expressed in the Amnesty Human Rights Day Lecture given by Victor G. Reuther in London on 10 December 1967, ILRM Box 29, General Correspondence, File: Amnesty International 1968.
36. On this point, see Williams, Divided World, chap. 3.
37. These factors were also present in Togo, Ghana, and Nigeria, each of which had been partially or entirely a trust territory prior to independence.
38. Roger Baldwin to Julius Nyerere, 22 May 1961, NYPL, ILRM Box 27, General Correspondence: Tanganyika.
39. Roger Baldwin to Julius Nyerere, 5 December 1961, ibid.
40. “Jan Papanek: 100th Anniversary: Diplomat, Delegate, Defender of Democracy,” UN Chronicle, Winter 1996.
41. Africa Digest XII, p. 5.
42. Malecela’s arrival in New York coincided with the time and place of the convergence of the civil rights movement and a nascent black nationalist movement under the leadership of Malcolm X. Perhaps not coincidentally it was also the year of Malcolm X’s first visit to Tanzania, where he met Mwalimu Nyerere. Manning Marable, Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention (New York: Viking, 2011), p. 371.
43. NYPL, ILRM Box 27, Jan Papanek, Chairman of the ILRM to H. E. Mr. John W. S. Malecela, Ambassador, Mission of United Rep of Tanzania to the UN, 20 September 1965.
44. Ibid. Malecela, Permanent Mission of the UR of Tanzania to the UN to Mr. Jan Papanek, 22 September 1965.
45. Ibid.
46. Ibid.
47. Ibid.
48. Ibid.
49. NYPL, ILRM Box 27, Papanek to Malecela, 14 October 1965.
50. Ibid.
51. NYPL, ILRM Box 27, Malecela to Papanek, 15 October 1965.
52. Ibid.
53. Ibid.
54. NYPL, ILRM Box 27, Papanek to Julius Nyerere, 11 November 1965.
55. Ibid., Joan Wicken to Papanek, 19 November 1965.
56. As quoted in ibid. The speech in its entirety appears in the law journal published by the International Association of Democratic Lawyers. See Julius Nyerere, “Development and State Power” (speech inaugurating the University of Dar-es-Salaam [Tanzania], 21 August 1964), Review of Contemporary Law 2 (1964): 11–15.
57. As quoted in ibid.
58. NYPL, ILRM Box 27, Jan Papanek to Mr. John [sic] Wicken, 10 December 1965.
59. NYPL, ILRM Box 27, Roger Baldwin to Julius Nyerere, 10 December 1965.
60. For the first time Nyerere made an understated request for self-determination before the UN; see Statement made by Mr. Julius K. Nyerere at the 579th meeting of the Fourth Committee on 20 December 1956, A/C.4/SR.579.
61. James R. Brennan, “The Short History of Political Opposition and Multi-Party Democracy in Tanganyika, 1958–64,” in In Search of a Nation: Histories of Authority and Dissidence in Tanzania, ed. Gregory H. Maddox and James L. Giblin (Oxford: James Currey Press, 2005), p. 252.
62. On Nyerere’s anticolonial activities and speeches prior to independence, see John Iliffe, “Breaking the Chain at Its Weakest Link: TANU and the Colonial Office,” in Maddox and Giblin, In Search of a Nation. For an overview of Nyerere’s nation-building strategies, see Brennan, “Short History,” and Andrew Coulson, Tanzania: A Political Economy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), pp. 118–144.
63. Brennan, “Short History,” p. 251. See also Julius Nyerere, Democracy and the Party System (Dar es Salaam: Tanganyika Standard Ltd, 1963).
64. See Mohamed Said, The Life and Times of Abdulwahid Sykes (1924–1968): The Untold Story of the Muslim Struggle against British Colonialism in Tanganyika (London: Minerva Press, 1998).
65. Brennan, “Short History,” p. 260.
66. Ibid., p. 262.
67. Zuberi M. M. Mtemvu (of TANU headquarters) to Roger Baldwin, 12 March 1957, NYPL, ILRM, Box 4, General Correspondence: Tanganyika.
68. Brennan, “Short History,” p. 252.
69. Ibid., p. 260.
70. Ibid., p. 265.
71. Rancière, “Subject,” p. 302.
72. “‘Why We Recognized Biafra—President Nyerere,” A. H. M. Kirk-Greene, Crisis and Conflict in Nigeria: A Documentary Source Book, vol. 2 (Aldershot, U.K.: Gregg Revivals), pp. 211–213. See also the speech in which Nyerere explains his reasons for Tanzania’s recognition of Biafra as necessary to bring to an end the human rights abuses committed by the Nigerian government against the 12 million inhabitants of Biafra: “Biafra, Human Rights and Self-Determination in Africa,” 13 April 1968, as quoted in Godfrey Mwakikagile, Nyerere and Africa: The End of an Era (New Africa Press, 2010). Copies of Nyerere’s speech appeared in the TANU daily newspaper and in The Standard.
73. Moyn posits an oppositional relationship between human rights and the quest for self-determination as one of the most significant characteristics of the “global human rights movement” that began in 1977. In his discussion of “third-world revolution,” which serves to posit the “first-world geography of the birth of human rights in the 1970s,” Moyn writes that “guerilla warfare provides the starkest counterpoint to later human rights activism—especially since the human rights revolution in the late 1970s not only displaced it but also targeted it for its most passionate criticism.” Moyn, Last Utopia, p. 117.
74. Literally “Father of the Nation” in Kiswahili, this was one of Nyerere’s most common honorifics.
75. This argument, relatively prominent among human rights historians of this period, is well summarized in Eckel, “Human Rights.”
76. Julius Nyerere, “Biafra.”
77. Moyn, Last Utopia, p. 111.
78. Bernault, “Absence,” pp. 130–133. Beginning in 1921, British law in Tanganyika allowed for the removal, expulsion, and indefinite detention of persons deemed “dangerous to the peace and good order of the territory.” On such laws passed in Tanganyika during the mandate and trusteeship periods, see Andrew Harding and John Hatchard, eds., Preventive Detention and Security Law: A Comparative Study (1993).
79. On the ILRM’s bringing pressure to bear on the British in Tanganyika, see NYPL, ILRM Box 1, Folder 1, Roger Baldwin to Fenner Brockway, MP, House of Commons 21 June 1957.
80. See Rancière, “Subject,” p. 301.
81. Williams, Divided World, p. xxiii.
82. For Ghana, the eastern portion of which had been British Togoland, see Amon Nikoi, Private Secretary to the Ambassador, to Roger Baldwin, International League of the Rights of Man (ILRM), New York, 8 April 1958, New York Public Library, ILRM Box 2, Antor Case; for Ruanda-Urundi, see René Van Saceghem to Roger Baldwin, Kisenyi, 27 April 1960, and Emile Rabaud to Roger Baldwin, Kisenyi, 14 August 1960, NYPL, ILRM Box 4, General Correspondence: Ruanda-Urundi, 1960; for Togo, see Report by Service Civil International, European Secretariat, London, in NYPL, ILRM, Box 27, General Correspondence: Tanzania [letters from Togo are included in this file].
83. Marcel Bebey-Eyidi, Le vainqueur de la maladie du sommeil: Le Docteur Eugène Jamot (1879–1937) (Paris, 1951).
84. For more on the “middle of the road” position of MACNA, see Meredith Terretta, “Chiefs, Traitors, and Representatives: The Construction of a Political Repertoire in Independence Era Cameroun,” International Journal of African Historical Studies 43, no. 2 (2010): 227–254.
85. Terretta, “UN Trust Territories,” pp. 353–354.
86. “Talking Drums: Commentary on African Affairs,” Africa Today 6, no. 2 (1959): 3–6, 21.
87. British National Archives, Kew Gardens, Foreign Office, 371/176876, 22 July 1964, Goodfellow, British Embassy, Yaoundé, to Mellon, West and Central Africa Department.
88. Nicodemus Fru Awasom, “Politics and Constitution-Making in Francophone Cameroon, 1959–1960,” Africa Today 49, no. 4 (2002): 3–30.
89. Ibid.
90. NYPL, ILRM, Box 14, File: General Correspondence: Cameroons, Bebey-Eyidi to Baldwin, 24 October 1961.
91. Ibid.
92. Marie-Emmanuelle Pommerolle, “A quoi servent les droits de l’Homme? Action collective et changement politique au Cameroun et au Kenya” (PhD diss., Bordeaux IV, 2005), p. 137. For Baldwin’s response to the arrest and sentencing, see NYPL, ILRM, Box 14, File: General Correspondence: Cameroons, Emmanuel Ngalle to Baldwin, 12 November 1962, Baldwin to Ngalle, 23 November 1962, Ngalle to Baldwin, 26 November 1962.
93. NYPL, ILRM Box 14, File: General Correspondence: Cameroons, Bebey-Eyidi (Maison d’Arrêt à Yoko) to Baldwin, 6 June 1963.
94. Ibid.
95. Ibid.
96. See, for example, Marie-Emmanuelle Pommerolle, “Routines autoritaires et innovations militantes: Le cas d’un movement étudiant au Cameroun,” Politique africaine 108 (2007): 155–172.
97. On this point, see Williams, Divided World, p. 46.
