In a eulogy to the UDHR on the occasion of its fiftieth anniversary, Hannum, with specific reference to Africa, triumphantly proclaimed that: ‘The Universal Declaration has served as a model or inspiration for numerous constitutional and legislative provisions … Many African constitutions in the immediate post-independence period made explicit reference to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.’ It is a triumphalism that is widely shared within African human rights commentary. For example, Asante drew attention to the ‘Charters of Human Rights’ in the independence constitutions of the former British colonial territories and the commitment to the 1789 French Declaration of Rights in the independence constitutions of the former French colonial territories and thereby concluded that the UDHR ‘has been a powerful source of inspiration for the founding pattern of African nations … national independence in Africa … arrived in an era replete with concepts of human rights. In these circumstances entrenchment of human rights was virtually automatic.’

A similar conclusion was reached by Mahalu who argued that, although African independence was itself based on the issue of human rights, significantly, it had come about ‘at a time when the categories of human rights had expanded and internationalized. In the international atmosphere they had a compelling moral force and found legal interpretation in domestic legislation of various states’. More authoritative, in that he served on the African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights for ten years, is the conclusion drawn by Ouguergouz that the incorporation into the independence constitutions of provisions relating to human rights, ‘with or without express reference to the Universal Declaration’, was

Playful sharks in the Delta

The Ijo group in the Niger Delta have a masking myth that tells of Kperighada, a fisherman. He wanted to explore new fishing waters far from home, so he joined other fishermen in an expedition all the way to Cameroon. There, suddenly, he disappeared, and his colleagues were unable to trace him. After seven days he reappeared. Asked about his experiences, Kperighada told them that he had been kidnapped by water spirits and taken to their underwater world, where he was taught how to dance a masquerade. Back home in his village he called all the elders of his town together and told them he would die if they did not accept the masquerade called ofurumo (shark). The elders agreed and since then the shark masquerade is performed in all Ijo towns.

In this origin story the usual female protagonist is lacking, but also the ritual itself has special characteristics. A mask with a mullet headpiece runs through the village as his assistants sing: ‘Sharks are coming! Run and hide!’ Villagers hasten to the riverside to watch a canoe tow a raft with the shark mask upriver, while crew members and supporters sing and drum his praise. The mask carries a large horizontal headpiece in the form of a shark, and has a costume made of head ties, wrappers, and trousers. A man and his wife circle the raft in a canoe as if they are stalking their prey. When the man throws his spear, the canoe capsizes and the pair end up in the water. This refers to a well-known song: ‘Anyone who spears this fish will upset his canoe.’ On land all start to dance, and the drummers accompany the mask with songs, such as ‘Force someone to give him food’ and ‘To remove all the fish and give fishless soup to one's husband’, songs criticising antisocial behaviour. The masquerade ends with a pantomime in which the fishing couple reappear, dragging their canoe around as if they are still paddling and chasing their prey, even occasionally pretending to capsize. Finally, the fisherman spears ofurumo and hauls him into his canoe, where he ‘kills’ the spirit.

What is special here is the light tone of the performance.

As described in earlier chapters, sometime around 1977, the first tentative signs that at least some African states were prepared to consider a degree of human rights oversight had begun to emerge. In 1977 and 1978, the military government of Nigeria, with support from other African states, had sponsored resolutions in the UNGA and CHR calling for states in those regions where regional arrangements for human rights did not exist to consider putting arrangements in place and requesting the Secretary-General to extend to the OAU, ‘if it so requests’, such assistance as it may require to facilitate the establishment of an African regional human rights commission. For the first time, unlike the Nigerian-sponsored 1967 CHR resolution with which these resolutions are often bracketed, the primary consideration was no longer self-determination or apartheid but domestic governance. At the same time, following M’baye's appointment as Chairman of the CHR in 1978, there had also seemed to be a modest shift in the attitude of some African states towards acceptance of criticism of one of their number thereby opening up the prospect of limited action being taken in respect of the Sub-Commission referrals against Equatorial Guinea and Uganda. Human rights, with President Amin most specifically in mind, also emerged as a major topic of discussion at the 1977 London Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM).

The Commonwealth human rights initiative

Already in advance of the 1977 London CHOGM, a major point of concern for most member states, but especially the UK where political feelings ran high, was whether President Amin would, or should be allowed to, attend – and the corollary concern that, were he to attend, the Queen would be obliged to invite him to her Silver Jubilee celebrations which overlapped with the CHOGM. The British government therefore deliberated carefully on what steps it might take as it was well aware that CHOGMs, by tradition, did not address the internal affairs of member states. The options ranged from barring President Amin, but not a Ugandan delegation of acceptable standing, expelling or suspending Uganda from the Commonwealth and an African walk-out at the meeting. As the due date neared, and it was feared that President Amin would after all force himself on the UK, arrangements were also made to divert his plane to Scotland or to detain him until he agreed to leave.

How then are the origins, political, intellectual and cultural, of the ACHPR to be explained? The starting point has to be an appreciation that the ACHPR process was a project of the OAU AHSG alone and therefore, in that it was at all times subject to the absolute discretion of African political leaders, it cannot simply be explained as a manifestation of an African desire to emulate the UDHR or to establish a regional human rights regime – either on the part of African leaders or African public opinion. On the contrary, African political leaders were consistently disdainful of the UDHR and, therefore, both pre- and post-independence, ignored, dismissed or limited the application of the UDHR in relation to Africa. This antipathy would have to be overcome or accommodated if the ACHPR were to have any chance of being adopted by the OAU AHSG.

There can be no doubt that appeals by the African colonial territories to the UDHR or to human rights as the basis of their right to independence, as in the curious incident of the dog in the night-time, were conspicuous by their absence. In the case of the French colonial territories, this absence ought perhaps to be regarded as possibly not so curious as, Algeria and, pre-dating the UDHR, Madagascar in 1947 apart, there was not so much of a struggle for independence as a step-by-step creeping negotiation over many years with deferential African leaders invariably anxious to maintain a mutually beneficial close relationship with France and alive to the consequences were they to rock the boat unduly. In such circumstances, there was little scope or need for appeals to the UDHR. However, even in the North African protectorates and the British colonial territories, where by the early 1950s independence was being pressed with far greater urgency, demands were rarely expressed in terms of the UDHR or human rights. If at all, the preferred references were the Atlantic Charter and the UN Charter. As for the Portuguese colonial territories, their prolonged and violent struggle for independence served only to alienate them from the UDHR which they perceived as hypocritical, self-serving and racist, and inappropriate for the new revolutionary society they sought to create.

In her study of Black intellectual life in Paris in the 1950s and 1960s, Merve Fejzula (2022) argues that while women often participated on a par with men in the exchange of ideas, their presence is frequently overlooked by scholars for whom supposedly ‘menial’ forms of intellectual labour – editorial, secretarial and logistical – do not achieve the same recognition as the printed materials produced by men. To restore the visibility of women, Fejzula argues, historians require an expanded conception of the archives to include non-traditional materials and spaces, alongside a broader understanding of what constitutes intellectual labour to include ‘chores’ like fundraising and cooking, as well as other tasks undertaken by women (424). Using similarly expansive methods, feminist historians of Nigeria and West Africa have produced maps of women's intellectual labour and political power dating back to precolonial times, re-inserting women into traditional structures of political authority, and using the written archives of the mid- to late-colonial period to highlight women's robust presence in newsprint cultures as printers, editors, journalists and writers (Achebe 2011, Denzer 1994, Mba 1982, Gadzekpo 2001).

Given that only one Onitsha pamphlet, sadly no longer extant, was found under the name of a woman, Fejzula's injunction to expand our archives and methods to include the full infrastructure of intellectual production is all the more necessary if we wish to find signs of women's intellectual presence in Nigerian newsprint cultures of the 1950s and 1960s. The pamphlet – Cecilia D. Akosa's Stirring of a Heart – was purchased for £12 by the publisher George O. G. Ume-Ezeoke (aka ‘Gogue’) in 1950, making it one of the earliest Onitsha romances, predating Ogali's Veronica My Daughter by six years (Dodson 1974: 118). The existence of Stirring of a Heart implies the presence of an irrecoverable archive of locally published women's writing in a period when increasing numbers of Nigerian women occupied public positions as journalists and political activists, and when authors such as Flora Nwapa started to achieve international recognition, transforming African literature published in the Global North by giving sustained attention to female interiority.

Women are occasionally named in the prefaces and introductions in Onitsha pamphlets, where they are thanked by male authors for their input as typists, proof-readers, storytellers and informants.

As described in earlier chapters, sometime around 1977, the first tentative signs that at least some African states were prepared to consider a degree of human rights oversight had begun to emerge. In 1977 and 1978, the military government of Nigeria, with support from other African states, had sponsored resolutions in the UNGA and CHR calling for states in those regions where regional arrangements for human rights did not exist to consider putting arrangements in place and requesting the Secretary-General to extend to the OAU, ‘if it so requests’, such assistance as it may require to facilitate the establishment of an African regional human rights commission. For the first time, unlike the Nigerian-sponsored 1967 CHR resolution with which these resolutions are often bracketed, the primary consideration was no longer self-determination or apartheid but domestic governance. At the same time, following M’baye's appointment as Chairman of the CHR in 1978, there had also seemed to be a modest shift in the attitude of some African states towards acceptance of criticism of one of their number thereby opening up the prospect of limited action being taken in respect of the Sub-Commission referrals against Equatorial Guinea and Uganda. 2 Human rights, with President Amin most specifically in mind, also emerged as a major topic of discussion at the 1977 London Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM).

The Commonwealth human rights initiative

Already in advance of the 1977 London CHOGM, a major point of concern for most member states, but especially the UK where political feelings ran high, was whether President Amin would, or should be allowed to, attend – and the corollary concern that, were he to attend, the Queen would be obliged to invite him to her Silver Jubilee celebrations which overlapped with the CHOGM. The British government therefore deliberated carefully on what steps it might take as it was well aware that CHOGMs, by tradition, did not address the internal affairs of member states. The options ranged from barring President Amin, but not a Ugandan delegation of acceptable standing, expelling or suspending Uganda from the Commonwealth and an African walk-out at the meeting. As the due date neared, and it was feared that President Amin would after all force himself on the UK, arrangements were also made to divert his plane to Scotland or to detain him until he agreed to leave.