Culture des "droits de l’homme" au Cameroun à l’épreuve de l’occidentalisation (1884-2020)

Abstract

Human rights undoubtedly constitutes a structuring element of international relations and are at the center of civilizational issues. While the west avails itself of the standard-bearer or better still, the center of dissemination of the so-called universal values in terms of respect for human dignity, other civilizations like those of the peoples of ancient Cameroon have developed principles and values that went in the direction of the promotion and protection of human values. But, these values, at least this perception of man and his rights in the different cultures of ancient Cameroonian societies are ignored, obliterated, and altered. He then erected a new perception of human rights centered on the western vision. Also, everywhere in Africa in general and in Cameroon in particular, we have witnessed the suppression of the values that structured the vision of the world, of man and of his rights. Three major historical sequences can serve as a framework for analyzing this perpetual subjugation of endogenous human values and their replacement by those from the western world. These include the period of the slave trade, colonization and the current period marked by various bedridden conditions imposed from outside. It is in the light of these three sequences of the history of the distorting encounter between the peoples of ancient Cameroon and the west that this thesis intends to examine the relationships to say the least, conflicting between endogenous cultural values of what can be perceived as human rights, and western culture. This thesis postulates that the distorting encounter with the west has put a strain on this endogenous conception of human rights and has even made many aspects disappear. To achieve this, a documentary framework made up of secondary sources on human rights issues, supplemented by empirical data collected through interviews, was requested. Culturalist, diffusionist and soft power theoretical postures enabled us to refine this study. It emerges overall that, if the societies of ancient Cameroon could not continue to live closed to themselves, the encounter with the west demonstrated their conception of human rights, which it subsequently subjugated to western values.