11 - “Source of Embarrassment”

Summary

What Africans are fighting for is nothing revolutionary, it is found in the Charter of the United Nations.

Tom Mboya, 1958 (Kenyan Politician and Trade Unionist)

By the summer of 1957, Sir Robert Armitage, British Governor of Nyasaland, was so tired of human rights debates that he decided to refuse to introduce the Universal Declaration of Human Rights into the curriculum of his colony’s African schools. Considering the anticipated worldwide attention – the coming year would see the tenth anniversary of the Declaration – he felt that the UN document’s terminology was too difficult and exotic for an African schoolchild to be able to distinguish ideals from political realities. “We are, of course, doing the exact opposite of that which is set down in a number of the articles [of the Human Rights Declaration], and no doubt will continue to do so for the next generation at least, if not for ever.”

Placed in its larger context, Armitage’s straightforward description of colonial rule as the “exact opposite” of proclaimed human rights was absolutely correct, corresponding to reality throughout the colonized world. Paradoxically, following the Second World War, colonial powers such as Britain and France had taken part in the creation of a human rights regime under the auspices of international organizations such as the United Nations in New York and the International Committee of the Red Cross in Geneva. From that moment on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights secured for every individual basic rights while Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions of 1949 preserved these rights even in times of armed conflict. At the same time, European colonial powers simultaneously and under all circumstances tried to prevent the extension of fundamental human rights in their colonial possessions. The global spread of such rights did not lie in their interest, because, after all, it delegitimized any claim to colonial rule or foreign domination. In this way a “divided world” with a humanitarian double standard was perpetuated.