"We Had Been Fooled into Thinking that the UN Watches over the Entire World": Human Rights, UN Trust Territories, and Africa's Decolonization

This article uses empirical evidence to engage recent scholarship on the historical place of human rights in decolonization. The case of the British and French Cameroons demonstrates that African nationalists and the Western anti-imperial human rights advocates who supported them viewed UN Trust Territories as the most politically and legally viable channel through which to address the human rights abuses particular to colonial rule. Yet, because of the political deformations arising out of decolonization, the transition to independence was accompanied by a widespread disappointment in the United Nations, the disintegration of collaborative, transregional activists' networks, and a withering away of human rights ideas.