As colonial rule unravelled in the 1950s and 1960s, European imperial powers sought to prepare their colonies for independence by introducing political and legal reforms and enacting new constitutions. In the British colonies, this process was characterised by the enactment of human rights legislation, including bills of rights at constitutional conferences hastily organised to prepare colonies for independence. These late colonial human rights bills, which expanded the scope of rights for colonial subjects, included provisions protecting individual rights such as the right to life, the prohibition of torture, slavery and forced labour, the right to fair trials, the freedom of expression and the freedom of assembly. In addition, these colonial bills of rights also placed limits on government’s powers on matters relating to fundamental liberties. Across British Africa, constitutional conferences leading to independence addressed whether and how to incorporate these human rights guarantees outlined into independence constitutions and implement them.
Scholars have examined why British colonial authorities, who had subjected indigenous people to unrepresentative government and authoritarian rule in the name of the “civilising mission,” suddenly pushed for human rights guarantees in the era of decolonisation. What explains this major shift in British policy, considering longstanding official opposition to enacting and enforcing human rights laws in colonial territories? Existing scholarship has advanced three main explanations. First, the policy change was to ensure the peaceful transfer of power from British colonial rulers to favoured indigenous political elites. The inclusion of human rights clauses in independence constitutions was intended to ensure orderly governance post-independence and preempt political instability that might endanger British economic and strategic interests.Footnote 1
The second explanation is that Britain’s late embrace of human rights was to secure long-term, stable post-colonial civil societies. Scholars who make these arguments add that while the first goal of peaceful transfer of power was largely successful, the second goal of securing a long-term stable civil society in the post-colonial state was not.Footnote 2 The third explanation is that the geo-political realities of post-war Europe drove late colonial human rights reforms. Post-war international arrangements to protect national minorities in Europe influenced the adoption of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) and shaped Britain’s outlook on human rights protection in her colonies.Footnote 3 Conservative British political leaders conceived the ECHR as a means of containing communism at home and promoting ideological agendas abroad.Footnote 4 British colonial authorities responded by selectively extending ECHR-inspired provisions to colonies, primarily to maintain international credibility and counter communist influence in the Cold War Era. Extending rights to colonial subjects—while containing their political aspirations—helped counter Soviet critiques of Western imperialism.Footnote 5
While these explanations of late colonial rights reforms provide valuable insights into the official imperial mindset and the rights debates within the metropole, they do not sufficiently address the perspectives of Indigenous leaders and the local debates among anti-colonial activists in the colonies, who often viewed Britain’s late colonial adoption of human rights with deep scepticism. Moreover, these accounts do not adequately examine how these debates influenced, either by advancing or constraining, the achievement of emerging universal human rights principles. While British officials promoted constitutional bills of rights as a guarantee of fundamental civil liberties in the independent state, African leaders and anti-colonial activists drew attention to the inconsistencies and contradictions of colonial rights regimes. They called out the hypocrisy of departing British officials hurriedly enacting human rights policies they had failed to adopt while in charge. African political leaders rejected the selective human rights reforms pushed by British officials as self-serving and demanded political independence anchored on the universal right to self-determination. These leaders saw late colonial human rights reforms as a British strategy to deflect anti-colonial opposition and achieve decolonisation on terms conducive to Britain’s strategic interests.
This paper examines the dynamics of African engagement with late colonial human rights reforms. It contends that, while several metropole-centric factors influenced the late colonial adoption of constitutional human rights, Britain’s overarching political and economic strategic interests were the primary drivers. These strategic priorities shaped the actions of departing colonial officials, who vigorously promoted human rights reforms, as well as European settlers, who supported the rapid implementation of constitutional rights protections. Similarly, strategic political considerations informed the decisions of skeptical African political leaders to endorse constitutional bills of rights advanced by British authorities, aiming to expedite the decolonization process and avoid delays in achieving independence. Ultimately, these strategic calculations undermined the realization of universal human rights principles—dignity, equality, and inalienability—articulated in foundational international human rights instruments such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) and the ECHR
Understanding the strategic political calculations that shaped late colonial human rights reforms is relevant to both histories of late colonialism and human rights scholarship. The late colonial period was a defining moment in the development of human rights norms and movements in the colonised world. This period marked the expansion of post-Second World War debates about human rights in the colonies. For histories of late colonialism, colonial human rights debates draw attention to the imperial and local political imperatives that shaped decolonisation processes. For human rights scholarship, late colonial rights debates provide insights into how the interests and calculations of political elites shape human rights lawmaking. Human Rights doctrine is premised on normative principles of dignity, equality, universality, and inalienability. Since they are rights that supposedly pertain equally to all human beings on the basis of their humanity, human rights language is often deployed as an emancipatory lexicon to challenge political power. However, late colonial debates over constitutional rights offer valuable lessons in how powerful actors can and have used human rights language to advance specific political and economic agendas.
Colonialism and strategic human rights
The links between colonialism and human rights are complicated and paradoxical. Colonialism is generally identified with racial prejudice and hierarchy in social and political relations, while human rights are associated with notions of freedom, justice, and equality. The European colonial states of the eighteenth to twentieth centuries were founded primarily on political subjugation and the denial of the collective right to self-determination. Imperial wars of conquest and colonial rule were characterised by gross violations of the rights and liberties of the rights of indigenous peoples. Moreover, colonialism everywhere entrenched regimes of despotism, racism, and exploitation which violated the rights and liberties of colonised peoples. These abuses and violations have been well documented from historical, socio-political, and legal perspectives.Footnote 6 However, twentieth-century imperialism also exported European liberal rights ideas to many parts of the colonised world. The paradox of the colonial enterprise is that these liberal rights traditions were also used to justify colonial subjugation as a “civilising mission” and empire as a “sacred trust.”Footnote 7 Colonial notions of native difference and social hierarchies remained fundamentally at odds with the principles of universal equality and inalienability on which modern human rights are founded.
One way in which colonial authorities sought to address the manifest contradictions between the liberal rights tradition espoused in law-making and the realities of colonial subjugation was the selective invocation of strategic human rights. Strategic human rights policies were not premised on universal liberties, equality, and inalienability. Instead, they were founded on colonial principles of social liberalism and native difference. The goal was not to extend to the colonised natives the same scope of rights and privileges that availed the European colonisers but to provide an ethical framework for dealing with the natives suited to their subordinate position in the colonial hierarchy. For example, Dutch authorities introduced seemingly progressive colonial policies such as the so-called Ethical Policy (Ethische Politiek), which committed them to an ethical responsibility for the welfare of their colonial subjects in the Dutch East Indies (Indonesia). Ethical Policy was integral to Dutch colonial social engineering aimed at creating social conditions conducive to colonial rule. Under this policy, Dutch colonial authorities introduced “strategic human rights” to Indonesia, such as legal guarantees of the freedom of association and expression and certain personal liberties. However, these strategic rights policies were mostly limited to the social sphere and excluded the political right that could have threatened the foundations of Dutch colonial rule.Footnote 8
British colonial policies in India and Africa reflected similar strategic human rights lawmaking and policymaking. In many parts of Africa, the abolition of slavery and the enforcement of “native liberties” became the pretext for the European conquest and imposition of colonial rule. In British India, colonial authorities introduced legislation to reform untouchability, a system of institutionalised inequality and indignity embedded in the Hindu caste structure. The logic of colonial strategic rights intervention is also evident in British efforts to end forced marriages and child betrothal practices in Africa. These liberal social reforms were framed as promoting individual freedoms and protecting the rights of lower caste natives, women, children, and other marginalised groups. Indeed, in some cases, these social reforms had a liberating impact on marginalised communities. However, the discourse of liberty and rights was often restricted to the social sphere and rarely extended to political self-rule since a discourse of self-defemination would have challenged the legitimacy of the colonial state.
The instrumentality of late colonial strategic social rights reforms is also evident in the history of Portuguese colonialism in Africa.Footnote 9 Legal changes were introduced that ended the formal distinction between ‘native’ (indígena) subject to ‘non-native’ (não-indígena) citizens. Compulsory crop growing and forced labour were also abolished.Footnote 10 Significantly, however, these social reforms coincided with a rapid expansion of white settler migration to Angola and Mozambique, encouraged and facilitated by the Portuguese government. The legal abolition of the formal distinction between Indígena and Não‐Indígena is a striking example of late colonial human rights strategising. Like the French assimilation policy, the Portuguese assimilation policy in Africa was founded on the legal distinction between Portuguese citizens and African subjects. Legal codification established a racialised colonial hierarchy that distinguished between the civilised European and the uncivilised native. Under colonial laws, an indígena African subject who had assimilated to the European way of life could potentially attain the status of Portuguese citizen. This status came with a certificate of ‘exemption,’ called the alvará de isenção, which identified the assimilated Africans as exempt from the hut tax and forced chibalo labour. “In the eyes of Portuguese law, becoming assimilated marked an applicant’s successful cultural evolution from ‘native’ subject to ‘non-native’ citizen.Footnote 11 The decision of Portuguese colonial authorities to abandon this longstanding discriminatory regime that defined its assimilation policy for over half a century expanded the legal rights of Africans. However, this policy change was part of a broader Portuguese strategy to sustain a declining colonial state and retain political control amidst growing anticolonial pressures.
Colonial constitutional rights
Historian Ronald Burke has argued that human rights were a distinctive feature of decolonisation and the optimistic atmosphere that characterised the dawn of the postcolonial era. The adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) by the United Nations General Assembly in 1948 and the signing of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) in 1950 lent the moral legitimacy of human rights to anti-colonial struggles for self-determination worldwide.Footnote 12 One consequence of decolonisation for the international human rights project was the rhetorical and legal synthesis of the concepts of self-determination and human rights. With the offfcial acceptance of the right to self-determination at the UN, the process of decolonisation became a human rights movement legitimising longstanding anticolonial struggles in Asia and Africa.Footnote 13 Meredith Terretta has shown how colonial subjects in the United Nations trust territories under the control of European powers invoked emergent international human rights norms to demand rights and autonomy.Footnote 14 The normative convergence of self-determination and emergent international human rights was itself the result of the transformation of the UN and other international bodies brought about by the admission of newly decolonized states. These developments in international politics prompted several late colonial human rights reforms. In British Africa, anti-colonial activism pushed colonial lawmaking to take a more universalist turn as rights rhetoric shifted from “native liberties” to universal human rights. The UDHR and the ECHR provided models and reference points for these debates.
Emerging in the aftermath of the atrocities of the Second World War, the UDHR, adopted by the UN General Assembly in 1948, sought to establish a universal framework for the protection of individual freedoms and dignity. The Holocaust and widespread wartime atrocities galvanized the international community to seek mechanisms to safeguard fundamental rights anchored on the core principles of universal equality, dignity, and inalienability. The principle of universal equality asserts that human rights are inherent to all individuals, irrespective of their nationality, ethnicity, gender, religion, or any other status. Moreover, the UDHR proclaims that these rights are not contingent upon government recognition, cultural traditions, or legal systems; rather, they are universal because they derive from the inherent humanity of each individual. This principle reflects the global consensus achieved at the time of the Declaration’s adoption, which aimed to transcend cultural, political, and ideological divisions. Article one of the UDHR explicitly declares, “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.”Footnote 15 In a direct repudiation of the foundational premise of the colonial social order, the second article prohibits discrimination on various grounds, including “race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth, or other status.”Footnote 16
The principle of inherent human dignity is embodied in UDHR provisions that safeguard personal integrity, such as the right to life, freedom from torture, and protection against degrading treatment. It extends further to socio-economic rights that enable individuals to lead dignified lives, such as the right to work and adequate living standards. The principle of inalienability underscores that human rights cannot be transferred, relinquished, or taken away under any circumstances. These rights are inseparable from the individual because they are rooted in the very essence of human existence. Furthermore, this principle ensures that no government (elected or imposed), individual, or institution can strip people of their rights.
These foundational principles found resonance in the ECHR, which was conceived as a regional counterpart to the UDHR to address the specific needs of post-war Europe. Like the UDHR, the ECHR emerged against the backdrop of the atrocities of the Second World War and the early tensions of the Cold War, reflecting a dual purpose: protecting individuals from state abuses and promoting liberal democratic values in Europe.Footnote 17 British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, a staunch proponent of European unity, argued that a European Charter of Human Rights should be central to a new post-war program of European unification.Footnote 18 Churchill’s advocacy, alongside contributions from figures such as French jurist René Cassin—who also played a pivotal role in drafting the UDHR—reflected both universalist aspirations and strategic regional priorities.
Like the UDHR, the ECHR was founded on the principles of dignity, equality and non-discrimination. Among its most significant provisions are the affirmation of the fundamental right to life and the prohibition of arbitrary deprivation of life. These provisions were a direct response to the mass executions and genocides that marked the atrocities of the Second World War. The Convention also prohibits torture and inhuman or degrading treatment, guarantees the right to a fair trial and freedom of expression, and explicitly prohibits discrimination. Despite its proclamations of universality, European powers systematically excluded their colonial subjects from the protections afforded by the Convention, thereby undermining its claim to universal applicability. To be sure, the ECHR was conceptualised and implemented not merely as a response to the atrocities of Nazism and Fascism but also as a Cold War instrument designed to juxtapose liberal democracy with the repressive nature of Soviet communism. Its emphasis on civil and political rights over socio-economic rights underscored this ideological struggle, prioritizing freedoms associated with liberal democracy while sidelining the socialist emphasis on collective rights, such as the right to self-determination. The selective scope of the ECHR also mirrored Western European post-war concerns about sovereignty. Britain, in particular, initially resisted binding supranational obligations, wary of challenges to its imperial authority. Historian Brian Simpson had highlighted this ambivalence, noting that British policymakers sought to limit the Convention’s reach, ensuring it would neither apply to colonial territories nor undermine domestic legal traditions and political control in these territories.Footnote 19
The foundational normative contradiction was that the ECHR was designed primarily to protect individuals from state coercion by prohibiting their arbitrary arrest and detention, guaranteeing their freedom of expression and securing their privacy and possessions. It was not designed to address questions of collective solidarity rights, such as the right to self-determination, that resonated in the colonies. Unlike the UDHR, the ECHR makes no reference to territorial independence or self-governance. Rather, post-war international arrangements to protect national minorities in Europe influenced the ECHR and shaped Britain’s outlook on minority rights protection in her dependencies. In crafting the ECHR, European political leaders were more amenable to a notion of fundamental rights limited to Europe than those with a global or universal reach. However, they understood the political imperatives of extending some of these rights to colonial subjects to address growing anti-colonial agitations. Rather than following the model of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), European conservative politicians who authored the ECHR viewed human rights as emerging from a shared regional culture nominally Christian. Thus, despite the rhetoric of universal and inalienable human rights, such rights were not considered appropriate for all persons everywhere. In particular, they were deemed inapplicable to non-white European colonies.Footnote 20
However, upon signing the ECHR in 1951, the British Government sought to extend some provisions to its colonial territories and dependencies. After initial hesitation, the Colonial Office mandated the enactment of a constitutional bill of rights fashioned after the ECHR in colonial territories where there was no opposition to such bills. This marked a significant reversal in British Government policy. Until this period, the position of the Colonial Office was that bills of rights were unwarranted in the colonies. Constitutional rights guarantees were seen as placing undue limitations on a government’s power over its own people. The Colonial Office argued that existing legal guarantees adequately protected the rights of British subjects in the colonies.Footnote 21 This was, of course, not the case. Gross human rights violations were, in fact, replete in British colonies and dependencies, as evident in the well-documented atrocities committed by British authorities during the Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya.Footnote 22 In both the metropole and colonies, anti-colonial activists framed British colonial emergency regulations and abuses as human rights violations and derogations from the ECHR. In 1960, Iceland considered taking Britain before the European Commission for Human Rights for alleged infringements of the ECHR in relation to its treatment of Africans in Kenya and Nyasaland.Footnote 23 To meet its treaty obligations under the ECHR, Britain had to extend to its overseas territories the human rights provision it had adopted internally. The Colonial Office mandated local administrators to file annual reports on human rights conditions in their respective territories and to explain “derogations” from the provisions of the Conventions in cases of violations or emergency rule.Footnote 24
Africa was a key site of British experimentations with late colonial constitutional human rights guarantees and efforts to uphold its ECHR obligations. British authorities were keen to transfer power to strong centralised governments, yet they recognised the need to provide legal safeguards for minority groups within newly independent states. Their mantra was “majority rule, minority rights.”Footnote 25 Late colonial shifts in British human rights policies were also prompted by the activities of anti-colonial activists and nationalist leaders who highlighted the hypocrisy and contradictions in the positions of European imperial powers on universal human rights. These nationalist anti-colonial leaders demanded the extension to the colonies of South Asia and Africa UDHR and ECHR human rights guarantees. The right to self-determination and minority rights became the dominant themes in late colonial human rights discourse. In Nigeria, for example, the catalyst for the colonial government’s human rights policy shift was the demand of minority groups to include a bill of rights in the independence constitution. British authorities acceded to these demands in Nigeria and other colonies partly because they wanted to transfer power at independence without political crisis or violence and “protect racial, tribal, or religious minorities after independence.”Footnote 26 The “Uganda Relationship Commission,” established in 1961 by the British to recommend ways to sustain the relationship between Britain and independent Uganda, recommended that a human rights code be included in the independence constitution. However, it also recommended that “after independence, the new government might ask to have a British Governor-General for a period of years.”Footnote 27
British experience in Palestine (1946) and India (1947) and the anti-colonial conflicts in Congo and Algeria highlighted the perils of abandoning a colonial territory amidst ethnoreligious tensions and civil strife. British officials also desired to create a viable post-colonial civil society that protected certain human rights.Footnote 28 The goal of ensuring a peaceful power transfer to preferred indigenous leaders required negotiations and compromises with indigenous nationalists, European settlers, and other minority groups. These late colonial political goals were quite different from the social objectives of the earlier strategic rights reforms. While earlier social rights reforms, such as those associated with the “civilising missions”, were aimed at maintaining social order in the colonies to accommodate imperial interests, late colonial universal human rights lawmaking was aimed at managing colonial transition and safeguarding metropolitan interest in the post-colonial state. In this sense, both early colonial social rights reforms and late colonial political rights reforms reflected overarching imperial agendas.
African political leaders who negotiated the terms of decolonisation with departing British officials were keenly aware of the motivating strategic political and economic calculations behind late colonial human rights lawmaking. Many were deeply sceptical of Britain’s late colonial embrace of constitutional universalist human rights. The processes and debates about the bill of rights in several African colonies illustrate that they saw colonial human rights rhetoric as an agenda to serve Britain’s strategic political ends more than anything else. The contradictions between late colonial human rights rhetoric and the persistence of abuse became new grounds for negotiating decolonisation.
Rights contradictions and contestations
Before the UDHR and the ECHR, the Atlantic Charter was a recurring theme in the debates over late colonial rights reforms. African political leaders frequently drew attention to the inherent contradictions between the idealism of the Charter and the conditions in the colonies. Colonial rule, they argued, represented a fundamental contradiction of the principle of self-determination, which British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and US President Franklin D. Roosevelt affirmed in the Atlantic Charter in 1941. The Charter, which set out American and British goals for the world after the end of the Second World War, expressed the two countries’ beliefs in the right of self-determination of all people to live in freedom from fear and want. A key provision of the Charter states: “… [A]fter the final destruction of the Nazi tyranny, [we] hope to see established a peace which will afford to all nations the means of dwelling in safety within their boundaries, and which will afford assurance that all men in all lands may live out their lives in freedom from fear and want.”Footnote 29 It soon became apparent that this affirmation of freedom and self-determination was aimed at addressing the crisis of nationalism in Europe, not “all nations” of the world as the Charter proclaimed. By 1945, Churchill would argue, in relation to the colonies, that the Atlantic Charter was intended as “a guide, and not a rule.”Footnote 30 For pro-imperial liberal and conservative European political leaders, delinking self-determination struggles in the colonies from the emergent universal human rights doctrine was a matter of political and ideological expedience. They viewed the principle of sovereignty and the concept of human rights as being fundamentally opposed to each other – one having to do with the rights of states and the other with the rights of individuals.
Churchill’s imperial agenda was founded on a hierarchy of rights and obligations that he believed should be accorded to individuals of different social groups. In theory, his imperialism rendered the British responsible for alleviating the suffering of all human beings under their colonial jurisdiction, just like with the poor back home. However, this humanitarian imperative did not mean that Britain granted all their subjects equal civil and political rights. According to historian Marco Duranti, Churchill believed that British colonial subjects were only entitled to the enjoyment of civil liberties on the basis of their belonging to particular social categories. “The same helplessness that made darker-skinned peoples the ideal recipient of humanitarian sympathy also rendered them incapable of being active rights-bearing subjects. Hence, from Imperialism, Churchill derived at once a radically universalist and radically hierarchical moral sensibility.”Footnote 31
By the 1950s, this hierarchical imperial hierarchy of rights, which had never been acceptable to colonized subjects, was also no longer tenable in international politics. Imperial ambivalence and double standards could not be sustained. Indigenous political leaders in the colonies and anti-colonial proponents elsewhere called out the hypocrisy of European powers invoking universal human rights at the UN and promoting hierarchical rights in the colonies. Much of the debate centred on the collective right to right to self-determination. The right to self-determination not only implied an end to colonialism but also the terms under which colonial rule would be abolished and independent governments established. Anti-colonial nationalist leaders in Asia and Africa, from Jawaharlal Nehru in India to Kwame Nkrumah in the Gold Coast (Ghana), rejected imperial defensives at the UN, and the attempts to delink national liberation struggles in the colonies from the emergent universal human rights movement. Other African nationalist political leaders such as Ferhat Abbas in Algeria, Nnamdi Azikiwe in Nigeria, Julius Nyerere in Tanganyika, and Tom Mboya in Kenya invoked human rights in the political negotiations and struggles for independence. These anti-colonial nationalist leaders framed self-determination in terms of peoples’ collective rights and fundamental human rights.
In the changed international political order of the post-Second World War era, a new generation of African nationalist leaders and anti-colonial activists demanded immediate independence, rejecting Britain’s more gradual approach to decolonization. In 1947, Nnamdi Azikiwe led a delegation of Nigerian political leaders in London, where he petitioned the British government to abrogate colonial laws that deny the people of Nigeria their “basic human rights.”Footnote 32 Responding to the atrocities committed by French authorities during the Algerian war for independence, Algerian political leaders called on the United Nations to take steps to prevent the “crimes” France was perpetrating against the Charter of Human Rights.Footnote 33 Ferhat Abbas, the nationalist politician who became the first prime minister of independent Algeria, stated that his goal was to gain equality for the Algerian people based on their fundamental human rights despite the opposition and repression they faced from the French settlers and the French government.Footnote 34 As the leader of the Algerian nationalist movement, Abbas published Manifesto of the Algerian People in 1943, in which he invoked the Atlantic Charter and demanded that the Vichy government implement comprehensive reforms to grant equal rights and political representation to the Muslim population of Algeria.
In the Belgian Congo, colonial authorities became increasingly worried about the growing agitation for immediate independence, led by a new generation of vocal African political leaders who invoked the language of universal human rights. These indigenous leaders were not satisfied with the strategic social rights reforms initiated by Belgian authorities in the 1950s. They viewed Belgian rights reforms as policies designed “simply to keep the African happy by granting him economic and social benefits while ensuring indefinite rule by the white man while denying the African any form of political expression.”Footnote 35 Writing on the eve of Tanganyika’s independence in 1959, the nationalist politician, Julius Nyerere, who became the country’s first president, demanded independence from Britain on the basis of universal human rights rather than the selective and hierarchal colonial rights order. He stated: “There can be no tampering with the principle [of] the right of people to govern themselves. No Colonial Power, however benevolent, has the slightest right to impose its rule on another people against their will… Independence is our right.”Footnote 36
Other African political leaders like Ton Mboya framed their struggles for independence in terms of universal human rights and the emergent global rights movement. “The African independence movement,” Mboya stated, “is not only an African struggle but a world struggle.”Footnote 37 He stressed the hypocrisy and double standards of Western discourses of rights within post-War internationalism. “How are we in Africa to explain to our people the differences in the stand the West takes in Hungary and Algeria and in Tibet and Nyasaland? How can we explain how the West can compromise on principles.”Footnote 38 At the United Nations, Kwame Nkrumah demanded independence for African and Asian countries still under colonial rule on the basis of rights to self-determination enshrined in international human rights law.Footnote 39 Diplomats representing newly independent Ghana at the UN called for a “crusade for the observance of fundamental human rights and freedoms.”Footnote 40 They declared that the independence of Ghana from Britain attained on 6 March 1957 was meaningless unless it was linked with the liberation of “all our brothers and sisters on the African continent who are struggling to free themselves from colonial denomination.”Footnote 41 Similarly, Indian diplomats argued that self-determination and freedom from colonial rule must remain cardinal to the covenant on human rights being debated at the UN.Footnote 42
The contradictions of British colonial human rights policies were also a subject of critique within Britain itself. In 1959, the Member of Parliament Dingle Foot condemned the introduction of a “Preventive Detention Bill” in the Southern Rhodesian Parliament, describing it as regressive and inconsistent with Britain’s international human rights obligations. Under the new bill, individuals suspected of subversive activities could be detained indefinitely at the discretion of the Governor. Crucially, the bill denied detainees the right to seek judicial redress, explicitly prohibiting any applications to the courts for relief. Foot underscored the contradictions between Britain’s international commitments and its colonial policies, stating, “Britain is a signatory to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the European Convention on Human Rights. Yet, the fact remains that several subjects of Her Majesty’s government are vulnerable to imprisonment for an indefinite term, even though they have not been charged with any offence recognised by law, nor have they been convicted by any court of law.”Footnote 43
Indeed, public opinion in Britain largely opposed the introduction of policies that curtailed the human rights of British subjects, especially at a time when many believed the government should be introducing liberal reforms in the colonies. In a 1960 editorial, the influential British newspaper The Observer criticized the proposal to extend emergency powers in Nyasaland, which would grant the governor unrestricted authority to detain individuals. The editorial stated that detention without trial could only be justified in cases of grave emergency, referencing Article 5 of the European Convention on Human Rights, to which Britain was a signatory on behalf of itself and forty-two dependent territories, including Kenya, Northern Rhodesia, and Nyasaland. Article 5 explicitly prohibits imprisonment without trial, and Article 15 permits derogations only in the most extreme circumstances. Highlighting the tensions between Britain’s human rights obligations and the restrictive measures employed in its colonial territories the newspaper observed that local officials in Nyasaland had “introduced a dangerous restriction of liberty, while in other ways inaugurating a more liberal approach in British colonial administration.”Footnote 44
Negotiating constitutional rights
Apart from anticolonial invocations of the right to self-determination, a discourse of minority rights also shaped decolonization in British Africa. During negotiations for Nigeria’s independence, for example, it became clear to British authorities and local politicians that the fears of marginalization by minority ethnic groups had to be addressed to ensure a unified Nigeria at independence.Footnote 45 In 1957, British authorities established a Commission to investigate the complaints of minority ethnic groups and recommend ways to allay their fears of being oppressed by majority groups at independence. The Commission recommended the inclusion of a bill of rights, fashioned along the lines of the ECHR, in the independence constitution. While leaders of minority ethnic groups welcomed this recommendation, some majority groups rejected it. Some Nigerian political leaders objected to a bill of rights out of concern that constitutional anti-discrimination provisions would nullify government policies aimed at persevering land and public service jobs for ethnic groups in educationally disadvantaged regions. Colonial officials also worried about conflicts between a European-style bill of rights and prevailing indigenous customary practices.Footnote 46 The constitution eventually adopted in Nigeria in 1959 included a bill of rights with elaborate provisions for fundamental human rights, including the right to life, freedom of expression, peaceful assembly and association; protection against inhuman treatment, slavery and forced labour, and protection against discrimination on the grounds of tribe, religion, or political opinion. The Nigerian bill of rights became the model used for subsequent bill of rights in Britain’s overseas territories, notably in the British West Indies.
In the settler colonies of Eastern and Southern Africa – Kenya, Botswana, Nyasaland, and Uganda – the constitutional bill of rights served to reassure the European minority population.Footnote 47 As independence approached, British colonial authorities in Kenya had to address the future of their European settler communities. The Colonial Office’s position was that a bill of rights was the best way to protect the interests of concerned European minorities at independence. One such bill of rights was included in Kenya’s 1963 independence constitution and reassured European setter minorities by enshrining private property protections. These assurances were achieved through political negotiations and compromises among colonial and nationalist elites. The Kenyan bill of rights followed the Nigerian model, but unlike in Nigeria, debates over minority rights protection centred on racial fears. At the Lancaster House Conferences, where the constitutional framework for self-government was negotiated, the British Government faced pressure from European settlers who wanted to maintain their political control and African politicians who wanted majority rule. Once the principle of African self-rule was settled, the core issue that concerned the departing British authorities was how to protect the European settlers after independence. The New Kenya Party, which represented the interests of the white European settler minority population, wanted a bill of rights to protect their community during the transfer of power to the African majority. Representatives of the Asian and Arab “middleman minorities” also demanded constitutional guarantees with specific provisions for property rights protection. These competing demands shaped the bill of rights in Kenya’s pre-self-government constitution of 1960.
African political leaders at the Lancaster House Conferences did not consider a bill of rights centred on protecting private property rights a priority issue. Their primary rights concern was independence, the transfer of power to Kenyans and power sharing among Kenyans upon independence.Footnote 48 These African delegates objected to the rushed inclusion of a bill of rights in the constitution. Tom Mboya, the General Secretary of the Kenya African National Union, summed up the African position on the bill of rights when he stated: “I consider this [bill] to be virtually a betrayal of the good faith we had shown. This is not because we are against a bill of rights…. but because we object to its imposition in this fashion.” He described the arbitrary inclusion of the bill of rights without adequate consultation with Africans as a “thoughtless act on the part of the Government and the kind of high-handed action that is likely to cause grave misunderstanding.”Footnote 49
In their opposition, Mboya and other African political leaders noted the prominence given to protecting property rights in the bill of rights and the expense of other human rights provisions that mattered more to the African delegates. The Kenyan bill contained elaborate provisions that limited the government’s power to acquire private properties compulsorily. African delegates at the constitutional conference noted that Africans who were arbitrarily dispossessed of their land did not enjoy these property rights under British rule. Among other land expropriations, the British government had set aside 13,000 square miles of the best and most fertile land exclusively for European settlers. Under a colonial legal order, non-Europeans were refused land ownership in these areas, known as the “White Highlands.” Africans had no right or access to these lands, and they were not even allowed to manage or become subtenants to white owners.Footnote 50 African political leaders, therefore, saw late colonial constitutional human rights provisions primarily as a reassurance to the European settler population. Indeed, British officials went to great lengths to assure anxious white farmers that no independent Kenya Government could abrogate their property rights “without completely losing financial credit and borrowing ability on world markets.”Footnote 51 The British colonial governor of Kenya, Sir Patrick Renison, specifically assured white farmers that their fears of expropriation of property were groundless as long as the constitutional bill of rights proposed was in force.Footnote 52 In London, British officials insisted that addressing the concerns of white farmers was a precondition for granting independence to Kenya. Local colonial officials were urged to ensure that the proposed bill of rights protected the interest of favoured groups in independent Kenya - Europeans, Asians, and loyal Africans.Footnote 53
The Kenyan bill of rights, adopted at independence, was a compromise document which addressed British and settler concerns about property rights. The constitution contained dedicated seats in the legislature for Asian and European representatives elected by ethnic constituencies. Use of racially reserved electoral seats was a core element of Colonial Office policy for Kenya intended to guarantee “individuals of every community a full opportunity to participate in the administration of their country.”Footnote 54 Given the strategic political interests that shaped these debates, legal scholar Anthony Munene has argued that the Kenyan bill of rights “cannot be said to be representative of a set of higher values emanating from, and subscribed to, by the Kenyan people. Indeed, it was meant to be nothing more than a bulwark against political power in the hands of natives, primarily to protect the interests of European settlers.”Footnote 55
Similar political and racial considerations in Botswana (Bechuanaland) shaped human rights debates leading to independence. In the constitutional negotiations of 1963, the British colonial government received several petitions from white farmers and settler groups, who wanted reassurances that the independent state would protect their political and economic interests. Concerned about the economic impact of white flight on the independent state, the colonial government and the dominant African political party, the Bechuanaland Democratic Party, saw the bill of rights as a means of calming white anxieties about marginalisation under an African majority government. The party supported the colonial government and white settlers in championing the constitutional protection of individual rights. It listed the protection of fundamental human rights as a founding principle, and its leader, Seretse Khama, espoused a philosophy of “non-racialism” and individual rights protections that reassured the European and white settler community. While the dominant Bechuanaland Democratic Party emphasised individual and property rights protections, the more radical People’s Party outlined a plan for African collectivisation involving the nationalisation of white-owned land and capital. Their rights agenda centred on collective economic and social rights anchored on the redistribution of land that British authorities had allocated to European settlers. Europeans who feared the People’s Party’s rhetoric of land confiscation, demanded that specific property rights guarantees be included in the bill of rights. They also demanded protections for their economic capital in the bill of rights.Footnote 56
The bill of rights included in Botswana’s 1965 self-government constitution and the 1966 independence constitution enshrined individual rights to life and personal liberty. It also affirmed freedom of expression, movement, association, and assembly. It prohibited racial discrimination, forced labour, and inhuman treatment. The bill repudiated the People’s Party’s agenda for collective rights over land ownership and land reform. It marked a significant concession to the preservation of white economic power in Botswana. By privileging non-racialism and individual property rights over collective land rights, the bill of rights affirmed racial equality under the law without completely overturning the privileges that entrenched racial hierarchies.Footnote 57 A key provision of the bill of rights was the comprehensive guarantee of private property rights meant to reassure the European minority population.Footnote 58 The Bill stated that property could only be acquired by the state if it was in the public or community interest and on the condition of payment of prompt and adequate compensation.Footnote 59 These provisions largely succeeded in allaying white minority fears in the lead-up to independence in 1966.
It is instructive that in the negotiations for independence, the dominant African political party, the Bechuanaland Democratic Party, supported including a bill of rights in the independence constitution on terms favourable to the British government and European settlers. By enshrining protections suited to the European population within the bill of rights, the Democratic Party, was able to secure favourable compromises in other areas of the political negotiations for independence. Europeans gave up their reserved seats in the legislature and became a political minority after independence, whilst the African population began to enjoy a broad range of new democratic rights under majority rule and a multi-party system. To this extent, the bill of rights was a tool of negotiation that served the political interests of influential constituencies in the country. When the Democratic Party won the first elections in 1965, and Khama became the Prime minister of independent Botswana, it was also seen as a victory for the party’s liberal democratic model. It was also seen as a victory for a pro-British human rights agenda that privileged individual and private property rights over collective solidarity rights.
Uganda’s path to independence and the debates about rights highlight a similar interplay of ethnic nationalism and political strategizing. British authorities, mindful of potential ethnic tensions, included minority protections in Uganda’s independence constitution. The creation of a federal structure, granting autonomy to regions like Buganda, was framed as a means of protecting sub-national self-determination rights and ensuring stability. However, these measures often prioritized British strategic interests over genuine self-determination. The 1900 Buganda Agreement, which formalized the relationship between the British Protectorate and the Buganda Kingdom, granted significant autonomy and privileges to the Buganda. These concessions were highly valued by Buganda elites, who sought to preserve them during the transition to independence. Moreover, the agreement maintained Buganda’s traditional system of governance under the Kabaka (king), who retained substantial authority over internal affairs. Over time, this autonomy was increasingly framed as a right to self-determination in the constitutional negotiations for independence. Additionally, the agreement allocated extensive tracts of land to Buganda’s ruling elite, reinforcing the power of the traditional aristocracy and conferring considerable economic advantages. In the late colonial period, colonial officials began to describe these privileges within the framework of “customary land rights,” further legitimizing their status.Footnote 60
The sudden rediscovery of human rights and democracy by European imperial powers in the 1950s was mostly met with scepticism in the colonies. British hurried efforts to enact constitutional bills of rights fashioned after the European Convention in the colonies did not gain broad support among African nationalists. In some cases, Africans resisted European powers’ opportunistic use of human rights rhetoric to further imperial political and economic agendas. Some African leaders saw this late rhetorical embrace of human rights as an imperial strategy to douse the fervour of nationalist anti-colonial movements.Footnote 61 For example, Swazi politicians thought that pre-independence British insistence on enacting a bill of rights was disingenuous and showed a lack of confidence in Africans. Why, they asked, had no one heard of a bill of rights while the British were firmly in command? “But now that they are withdrawing, we hear a great deal about them.”Footnote 62 These Swazi politicians were alert to the imperial instrumentality of human rights.
In Tanganyika (Tanzania), the dominant African party, the Tanganyika National Union, opposed the inclusion of a bill of rights in the independence constitution on the grounds that, unlike many other African colonies, Tanganyika did not have a problem of ethnic minority agitation. Opponents of the bill of rights argued that parliamentary democracy and enlightened public opinion were enough to safeguard minority rights in the new state. The rights of the individual in any society, they insisted, depended more on the ethical sense of the people than on formal guarantees in the law.Footnote 63 They noted the example of England, which had “an enviable respect for human rights” based not on a bill of rights but on enlightened public opinion.Footnote 64 Tanganyika was, therefore, one of a few British dependencies to achieve independence as an autonomous state since 1957 without a bill of rights.
In the years following the attainment of independence, it became apparent that bills of rights hurriedly enacted in the independence constitution did not fully guarantee human rights protection in the post-colonial state. The hope that constitutional human rights would ensure state civil societies was not fulfilled. In Ghana, which adopted a bill of rights at independence, the government of Kwame Nkrumah immediately began to deconstruct the constitution in an effort to consolidate power. His government repealed the constitution’s human rights protection clauses, abolished regional assemblies, and enacted restrictive laws such as the Preventive Detention Act, which enabled it to detain citizens without legal recourse. In 1964, Ghana was declared a one-party state and effectively ceased to be a liberal democracy. Two years later, the Nkrumah regime was overthrown in a military coup, ushering in a decade of military dictatorship. Events took a similar turn in Nigeria. Ethno-religious tensions that necessitated enacting a bill of rights were exacerbated soon after independence. A military coup in 1966 overthrew the elected government, and the new military rulers suspended the constitution, including the Bill of Rights.
Developments in these British ex-colonies raise pertinent questions about the utility and effectiveness of the constitutional bill of rights and other rights reforms hurriedly enacted in the era of decolonisation. The promising adaptation of rights ideas in anti-colonial struggles and the decolonisation process seemed to falter at independence. Minority rights talk, once wielded by colonial governments to legitimise decolonisation agendas and by some African political leaders to negotiate independence, was overshadowed by a discourse of nation and sovereignty. New arguments emerged about the constraints of the bill of rights, the central thrust of which was that it imposed limits on the state’s power over its own people and undermined sovereignty and national unity.Footnote 65 Individual rights centred on citizenship came to be differentiated from collective rights centred on the nation. The ideals of national unity manifested by centralised political power, common language, and culture, all so fundamental to the self-identification of the new states, came to be expressed in intolerant and repressive attitudes toward those who were perceived as “others.”Footnote 66
Conclusion
Historian Mark Mazower has argued that the atrocities of Nazism and Fascism prompted a global recommitment to the “virtues of democracy” and the primacy of individual liberty.Footnote 67 A parallel argument can be made regarding Britain’s rediscovery of human rights in its colonies during the era of decolonization. However, the enactment of constitutional bills of rights in British colonies was less a reflection of universalist ideals and more a calculated response to specific challenges, such as minority fears, settler anxieties, and the threat of political instability. African nationalist leaders were acutely aware of the contradictions in Britain’s sudden embrace of human rights rhetoric. While they strategically engaged with this discourse to expose colonial hypocrisy and advance their demands for self-determination, their focus on national sovereignty often clashed with the individual and property rights agenda promoted by departing colonial authorities. This divergence highlighted the conflicting priorities between colonial powers, intent on safeguarding their strategic interests, and anti-colonial movements, which emphasized collective rights and political autonomy as the foundation for future freedoms.
The limitations of the late colonial human rights framework are particularly evident in its failure to address the entrenched systemic inequalities of colonialism. The hurried implementation of constitutional bills of rights often prioritized the interests of elite groups—both colonial and indigenous—while marginalizing broader aspirations for social and economic justice. For example, in countries like Ghana and Nigeria, post-independence governments quickly dismantled these constitutional protections, revealing the fragility of these reforms in the face of political centralization and authoritarianism. The strategic calculations underlying late colonial human rights reforms turned human rights rhetoric into a tool for negotiating power and advancing sectional interests, rather than a means to enhance liberty and equality. For Britain, these reforms were instrumental in securing minority rights and ensuring a peaceful transfer of power, thereby protecting its political and economic stakes in post-colonial states. African elites, on the other hand, used human rights language pragmatically to serve their goals during independence negotiations. While some of these goals, such as self-determination were congruent with universal human rights principles, they were often framed in ways that also advanced the sectional interest of nationalist elites. Ultimately, the late colonial period emerges as a critical juncture in the evolution of human rights discourse, one that reveals the tension between universalist ideals and the political pragmatism of decolonization.
Funding Statement
The author is grateful to McMaster University’s Centre for Human Rights and Restorative Justice and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), whose grants supported research for this article. SSHRC Grant Number: 435-2018-0921.
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