Proposed in 1979 and adopted in 1981, the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights (ACHPR) finally came into effect on 21 October 1986 three months after a simple majority of OAU member states had deposited their instruments of ratification with the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) Secretary-General. With Africa essentially absent in 1948 when the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) was adopted, the ACHPR thereby represented the first official statement of an African human rights perspective; and also the first non-Western declaration of human rights. It will become increasingly evident as the account of its origins unfolds that the ACHPR was quite deliberately intended as an explicit political and cultural reproach to the Western conception of universal human rights. For that reason alone, it is undoubtedly one of the most important documents in modern African history and a significant moment in Africa’s relentless confrontation with neo-colonialism in all its forms and the assertion of an African self-identity and personality.

Although, therefore, it might be thought that an appreciation of the origins of the ACHPR was essential to even the most basic commentary on the ACHPR, it is an appreciation that most African human rights commentators, that is commentators on African human rights, have nonetheless been largely happy to sidestep. In the main, their preferred areas of focus have been legal and comparative analysis and critiques of the ACHPR's legal and operational effectiveness. As a result, notwithstanding several book-length treatments of the ACHPR by Bello, Jallow, Kufuor, Murray, Nmehielle, Ouguergouz, Umozurike and Yemet, and specific chapters on its origins by Baricako and Kannyo, more than thirty-five years after it came into force no comprehensive investigation aimed primarily at identifying a detailed narrative of how and why the ACHPR came into being has even been attempted.

To the extent that the origins of the ACHPR are described, an explanation of the ‘how’ is usually limited to a cursory outline of the political process.