Human rights in the eighteenth-century travelogues of François Le Vaillant

Abstract

Human dignity and human rights, land restitution, inequality, development and the protection of the environment continue to dominate the political agenda in our postcolonial society. These issues are not new, however; they have been recognised ever since the early days of colonisation when legal minds and philosophers identified them in their writings and explorers and travellers discussed them in their travelogues. More than two hundred years ago, during the Age of Enlightenment, philosophers and legal thinkers such as John Locke in England, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Mirabeau and Montesquieu in France and Thomas Jefferson in the United States stood up for civil liberties and human rights. Their views have been well summarised by Mirabeau in his Adresse aux Bataves where he refers to a number of political and civil rights, to religious freedom and a free press as "inalienable and imprescriptible rights without which it is impossible for humankind in any climate to preserve dignity, to secure development or to enjoy in tranquility the blessings of nature".