Human Rights and National Liberation: The Anticolonial Politics of Nnamdi Azikiwe

Abstract

Anticolonial struggles for self-determination had significant impact on the development of the idea of universal human rights. In the second half of the twentieth century, colonized people drew on the emergent language of universal human rights in their ideological struggles against European imperialism and to articulate demands for independence. Anticolonial movements in Africa were among the first mass movements to draw on the language of human rights in the post-Second World War era. Yet, some scholars have argued that anticolonialism was not a human rights movement because its primary aim was collective national liberation rather than the reduction of state power over the individual. The anticolonial politics of African nationalist leaders such as Nnamdi Azikiwe provide grounds for challenging this argument. Leaders of anticolonial movements in Africa explicitly sought to link their domestic anticolonial activities with the nascent universal human rights movement. Drawing from Nnamdi Azikiwe’s nationalist activism, this chapter argues that anticolonial struggles for self-determination were driven by both nationalist idealism and human rights impulses. In an age when European imperial powers sought to isolate struggles for independence in the colonies from the discourse of universal human rights, Azikiwe’s anticolonial activism reflected the fundamental interrelatedness of human rights and national liberation.KeywordsColonial RuleNational Liber ATIONNationalist MovementIdeological StrugglePolitical BlueprintThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.