African Activists in Independence-Era United Nations Trust Territories: Anti-Colonial Movements as Genesis of International Human Rights

This paper focuses on the ways in which African activists in UN trust territories used human rights talk to engage global political realities in the era of Africa’s decolonization. African nationalists in the UN trust territories laid claim to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights which, in 1948, defined the human rights to be applied to all, regardless of the jurisdictional status of the territory to which they belonged. Combined with the UN Charter and Trusteeship Agreements, the Declaration supported the notion of self-determination as a human right. The tens of thousands of petitions sent from British and French Togo, the British and French Cameroons, Tanganyika, Italian Somaliland, Ruanda-Urundi and South West Africa to the UN Trusteeship Council from 1948 to 1960 represent the largest collection of petitions sent to a single institution during the decolonization period. Although these petitions reveal the African UN trust territories to be pivotal sites for the genesis of a popular awareness of international human rights norms, neither Africanists specializing in decolonization nor international human rights historians have systematically and comparatively examined them.

Drawing upon these petitions as well as the historical records of the International League of the Rights of Man, the first human rights NGO to achieve consultative status with the UN, I argue that African human rights activists in UN trust territories sought to utilize human rights principles as a revolutionary legal strategy to mediate their relationship with their soon-to-be former administering authorities. I then examine what became of the liberation politics of human rights during the first decade after independence in Cameroon and Tanzania, where activists had forged a strong alliance with the ILRM. In the case of Tanzania, human rights lost their connection with the politics of liberation, while in Cameroon they maintained a close connection with revolutionary reform.