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.

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The story of freedom fighter Jean Djonteu provides a new approach to the history of Union des populations du Cameroun (UPC) nationalism in the Grassfields and Mungo regions of Cameroon. Within the context of Baham, his village of origin, Djonteu's actions and tracts reveal his politico-spiritual reasons for joining the UPC militia in its revolutionary fight against Franco-Cameroonian state administration. UPC nationalism and village political culture formed a hybrid of political ideologies, or a ‘village nationalism’ articulating UPC anti-colonialism with Grassfields political concepts of nation and sovereignty that pre-dated European occupation. As this articulation disintegrated, Grassfields populations disengaged from state politics and turned inwards towards village political culture and spirituality rekindled by popular involvement in the UPC nationalist movement.

This article reassesses the political alternatives imagined by African nationalists in the ‘first wave’ of Africa's decolonization through the lens of Cameroonian nationalism. After the proscription of Cameroon's popular nationalist movement, the Union des Populations du Cameroun (UPC), in the mid-1950s, thousands of Cameroonian nationalists went into exile, most to Accra, where they gained the support of Kwame Nkrumah's Pan-African Bureau for African Affairs. The UPC's external support fed Cameroon's internal maquis (as UPC members called the underground resistance camps within the territories), rooted in culturally particular conceptions of freedom and sovereignty. With such deeply local and broadly international foundations, the political future that Cameroonian nationalists envisaged seemed achievable: even after the Cameroon territories' official independence, UPC nationalists kept fighting. But, by the mid-1960s, postcolonial states prioritized territorial sovereignty over ‘African unity’ and Ghana's support of the UPC became unsustainable, leading to the movement's disintegration.

Cet article examine l’activité professionnelle et politique de de Félice au travers de la cause anti-Apartheid qu’il défendait, cause qui se situe à la fois au centre et aux marges de son activité professionnelle d’avocat. Au centre car l’analyse de son rôle de Secrétaire et ensuite Président du Comité français contre l’Apartheid de 1963 à 1975 nous permet de comprendre l’enchevêtrement des causes de l’avocat-défenseur dans celles de l’homme public. Aux marges car il s’agit d’un milieu géographique qu’il connaissait peu et qui en outre se situait fort loin de la conscience publique française.