Rights as Usual

This post by Dr Nojeem Amodu is part of the Symposium: The Many Faces of Human Rights: Revisiting Imperialist Legacies? Dr Amodu is a research fellow for the project Imperialism, Business & Human Rights, hosted at Tilburg University.

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While rights are entitlements, human rights are considered as claims until backed by law when they become entitlements. Human rights are universal to some arguable extent, yet still, some insist they are rather culturally relative. In this regard, some have contended that Africa, for instance, may not claim any normative contribution to the human rights corpus as human rights were alien to precolonial African societies.

This blog post investigates how human rights are articulated in Africa, especially within the prevalent philosophical framework of Afro-communitarianism. The post reiterates Africa’s fingerprint on the human rights corpus and highlights the features of the Afro-communitarian Face of human rights.

Africa’s Fingerprint on Human Rights

Early commentators had argued that human rights tradition was foreign to Africa until Western ‘modernizing’ intrusions dislocated communities and denied newly isolated individuals access to customary ways of protecting their lives and human dignity. The argument here was that human rights must be alien to Africa, which was largely characterized by precapitalist and preindustrial communal forms of social organization. The commentators reject the notion that in the search for guarantees to uphold human life and dignity, precolonial Africans formulated or correlated such claims to protection in terms of human rights.

However, these early comments have been labelled by other scholars as subtly imperialist. They could lie in the desire either to assert cultural superiority or to deny it while recommending vigorous study of other cultures and seeking to understand how they protect—and also abuse—human rights. Africa, these scholars argue, contributes to the human rights corpus as it is indeed the notion, common to all societies, that human beings are special and worthy of protection that distinguishes humans from animals. The rights of individual, beyond any group or collective rights, were definitely accounted for in (precolonial) Africa, as a lack of concern for other persons is generally considered a violation of individual rights of such others. 

Philosophical Underlay

The African philosophical base, Afro-communitarianism, places emphasis on the activity and success of the wider society rather than, though not necessarily at the expense of, or to the detriment of, the individual. It does not negate the individualist notion of rights – the necessity of self-preservation – rather, it denies the individual person the sacrosanct standing and denounces reverence of the private sphere that Western thoughts excessively accord. It recognizes that the individual is not an isolated or abstracted entity, she is part and parcel of the community. Afro-communitarianism underpins all aspects of human life on the continent and finds expression across Africa in constructs such as ubuntu in southern Africa; in the eastern African notions of dhaqan in Somalia and umundu among the Kikuyu in Kenya, in the Yoruba construct of omọlúàbí or the Hausa kirki (both of Nigeria) in West Africa, in the Dinka concept of cieng in Northeast Africa, among many others. Afro-communitarianism displaces atomism, i.e. the postulate that human persons are always in conflict with the immediate society, warranting the intervention of governmental authority. By insisting on solidarity, not individualism, the African approach confronts and exposes the flaws and myths inherent in the Western/liberal conception of rights.

The Afro-communitarian Face of Human Rights

Human rights in precolonial Africa were communitarian in the sense that they provided protection based on ascribed status and membership of the community, and sought a vindication of communal well-being even though individual rights were also recognized. Rights and duties in indigenous African conception were therefore inseparable. They served to highlight the reciprocal relationship between the individual and the community to which he or she belonged. These rights and obligations were not framed as legal entitlements because African societies did not make clear-cut distinctions between morality, religious values and laws, which all formed part of a ‘homogenous cosmology’. However, they were enforceable within the existing procedures of societies. The African face of human rights was therefore a unitary, integrated conception in which the extreme individualism of (current) human rights norms is tempered by the individual’s obligation to the society.

In the West, the language of rights primarily developed along the trajectory of claims against the state, i.e. entitlements which imply the right to seek an individual remedy for a wrong. The African language of duty, however, offered a different meaning for individual / state-society relations: while people had rights, they also bore duties. The resolution of a claim was not necessarily directed at satisfying or remedying an individual wrong. It was an opportunity for society to contemplate the complex web of individual and community duties and rights to seek a balance between the competing claims of the individual and society.

Conclusion

This post aligns with the view on the universality of human rights, as a language, not that human rights were derived or originated from the West alone, but that rights are applicable throughout the world. In Africa, the conception of an individual who is utterly free, such as to be irresponsible and opposed to society, is not consonant with the Afro-communitarian face of human rights, as the realization of individual rights seems to specifically find the fullest expression and fulfillment within the context of participation in communal life. In closing, the African face of human rights endures from its precolonial tradition, and remains so unifying as a mirror of the contextual social, political and economic realities among the peoples of Africa that it underpins the unique peoples’ rights and individual duties of Articles 27 to 29 within the central human rights instrument on the continent, the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights.