In August 1936, 4,069 athletes from forty-nine countries participated in the Olympic Games in Berlin, hosted by the Nazi Fuehrer. It is true that the full bestiality of the Third Reich was not yet manifest in 1936; the gas ovens, the slave labor camps, and the rape of Europe were yet to come. However, by that year, Nazi ideology had already been articulated: blacks, Jews and gypsies had been declared sub-human; Hitler had issed his Nuremburg Laws depriving Jews of their citizenship and civil rights; German rearmament was well underway; and the National Socialists had brutally consolidated a racist despotism.

International concern with the rights of man is not new. During the 1800s the movement to abolish slavery was an emanation of this concern. In the mid-1800s the International Committee of the Red Cross was founded in reaction to the lack of care for wounded soldiers on battlefield. Under its aegis there developed humanitarian law, both the Law of Geneva and the Law of The Hague.

In the post World War I period, civil and political rights were given international protection in a series of “minorities treaties.” In addition, economic and social rights received international recognition with the creation of the International Labor Organization (I.L.O.) in 1919. Refugees received assistance with the establishment of a High Commissioner for Refugees. It has, however, only been in the post World War II period that international human rights, and their protection, have received extensive recognition.

When Lesotho approached independence in 1966, most Basotho intellectuals were confident that their country would not fall prey to the trend toward authoritarianism and the disregard for civil liberties evident in other parts of Africa. Such optimism was based on several unique dimensions of their national experience. Unlike most African states, Lesotho comprised a single people who shared common language, culture, and political identity. A long tradition of free speech and participatory government was reinforeced by considerable experience with competitive political parties and the Westminster parliamentary system. Broad political awareness, spurred by the highest literacy rate in Black Africa, enhanced Basotho determination to provide a model of stable, democratic institutions, in contrast to the repressive apartheid structure of the omnipresent Republic of South Africa.

Amnesty International is particularly concerned by the following human rights problems in Rhodesia:

1. 1. the use of preventive detention, imposed without charge or trial for periods of indefinite duration ...;

2. 2. the physical restriction of released prisoners and political detainees;

3. 3. the holding of trials and detention review tribunals in camera;

4. 4. the use of the death penalty, in some cases on a mandatory basis, for a wide range of offences, and the execution, in secret, of condemned prisoners;

5. 5. the torture of political prisoners;

6. 6. the government’s refusal to establish an independent inquiry into the allegations of atrocities committed by the Rhodesian security forces;

7. 7. the forced settlement of large numbers of rural Africans in so-called “protective villages” as part of the government’s counter-insurgency policy.

As a lawyer, a law-teacher, a Board-member of Amnesty International (U.S.A.) and, more importantly, as an African revolutionary, matters of human rights are of grave concern to me. With racism and fascism gaining ground in the West, reactionary bourgeois chauvinism on the rampage in many of the newly liberated states in Africa, the Middle East and Asia, and statist revisionist tyranny masquerading as revolutionary socialism in some of the socialist countries, few can afford ivory-tower debates involving human rights. Certainly I cannot, having spent seven years in Salisbury Maximum Security Prison as Ian Smith’s political prisoner.

The situation of human rights in Africa evokes the image of a parasitic vine, growing rapidly, its tentacles reaching into every crack, to wedge it open further, its broad leaves shading the ground and preventing healthy plants from maturing. This vine of human rights violations has its main root system in the epoch of colonialism and it is fed abundantly by the waters of neocolonialism. In order to cut back this tangle of violations, to eradicate it so that human rights and the rule of law and justice can flourish, it is not enough to hack at the branches. We must discover its roots and pull them up.