ABSTRACT
This essay, based largely on historical evidence found in petitions located in UN and nongovernmental organizations’ archives, presents Africa’s UN Trust Territories as pivotal sites for the conception, definition, and grassroots popularization of human rights in the postwar period. After World War II, a transregional anti-imperial human rights network emerged at the intersections of early human rights nongovernmental organizations, the United Nations, and these UN Trust Territories in Africa: British and French Togo, British and French Cameroons, Tanganyika, Ruanda-Urundi, Italian Somaliland, and South West Africa. During the ca. 15 years that the trusteeship system was in place, African activists collaborated with activists in the United States, France, Great Britain, and elsewhere. They created a human rights model anchored in UN principles, upheld by early NGOs such as the International League of the Rights of Man, and fueled by activists on the ground, thousands of whom addressed petitions to the UN Trusteeship Council from 1947 into the 1960s. This was well before individual petitioners were heard in the UN’s Third Committee. Recognizing colonialism to be a primary cause of rightlessness, economic inequality, and racial segregation, these African subjects claimed self-determination as a right even as they exposed the ways that racial discrimination in colonial settings limited their social and economic well-being and kept unequal justice systems in place. The claims that inhabitants of mandate and trusteeship territories made in the interwar and post-World War II eras show that activism drove policy, public opinion, and international law and its implementation. While some human rights historians have argued that anticolonialism was not a human rights movement, this essay shows a clear connection between the two. Human rights as both practice and as concept developed in the internationally supervised African territories.
