The place of individual rights in communal Africa

Given the urgency to transcend its image as a "dark continent," every African should be concerned about the need to arrest the level of disorder which has made corruption and ethnic warfare the trade mark of most African states. The problem of African development has been traced among other factors to political instability, economic crises, societal breakdown, demographic pressures, Christian, Moslem and pagan religious conflicts, and the incompatible ethnic configuration of African states due to amalgamation of diverse tribal and ethnic groups within political borders established under colonial rule. We therefore argue that the traditional African emphasis on communal values needs to be reinvigorated while remembering that African leaders need to be more ready to adopt new values and ideas such as will promote future development.

Ultimate Reality and Meaning

International Journal of Humanities and Social Science, 2019

The African person has changed his way of looking at himself and the universe due to modernity. At the heart of life in the traditional African community was the collective and communal formation of the person. Emerging issues in the contemporary society have caused disintegration of the moral fabric of society giving rise to an individualistic society. This paper provides a detailed analysis of consequences of priority of the individual over the community in the contemporary African context. It is established that the community"s involvement in the formation of the individual is ignored. Modern education caters for the development of individual despising responsible participation in community"s activities and peaceful coexistence. The close link between elders and youth has been severed. This paper concludes that the community is important to the individual since from it a person draws personhood. The need to salvage and enrich some traditional African values is also underscored.

2018

This paper critically examines the dogmatic claim that Africans are by nature communalistic –exhibiting a sense of brotherhood among themselves and sharing things equally in common. However, considering the phenomenological evidence of the level of individualism and inter-tribal hatred and hostilities in the continent in this contemporary times, one could conclude, that the above claim cannot be sustained. It is the position of this paper that whether communalism is essentially African, contextual or not is not so much an issue, that there is nothing wrong with an idea that seeks to accord universal equality and humanity, but it must however be backed by genuineness of purpose instead of being a subterfuge for the selfish to perpetrate themselves. The paper concludes that, for Africa/Africans to exhibit more humancentered social relations, it/they therefore, must unite to protect it/themselves from gradual extinction by clamping down on excessive individualism and tribal hatred by p...

The chapter addresses a long-standing conflict in African political philosophy over rights and custom, such as the relative standing of the bill of rights and customary law in South Africa. In its transition from colonialism and apartheid, South Africa successfully secured an independent, democratic framework of formal, negative legal rights for citizens. However, there has been relatively less successful democratic deepening, in terms of securing effective citizenship, substantive social rights and broad-based economic development. Part of the problem is that government is mired in maladministration caused by corrupt factional politics. The country faces a typical predicament for many developing nations: the post-colonial state is deeply “bifurcated” (Mamdani 1996). While citizens’ civil rights are protected by judicial authorities in urban areas, rural subjects continue to abide by customary law under traditional authorities. High inequality heightens division between “citizens and subjects” yet the two systems are also intermeshed. Whether networks of corruption and patronage are tolerated or minor bureaucratic infractions punished depends on contexts of relative power. Depending on various political and economic factors, one system may be substituted for the other, whichever proves more or less convenient. Traditionalists and nationalists argue that such corruption follows the imposition of institutionalised western civil liberties that do not suit deliberative and communitarian African customary norms. Modernists and liberal democrats argue that neo-patrimonial African customary practices foster the corruption which undermines universal public welfare and social rights. Both sides agree on the cause: incompatibility between the African and Western ethical frameworks. I argue that conflict between rights and custom, which fosters corruption and hinders sustainable, equitable, democratic socio-economic development in Africa, is poorly conceived in terms of incongruity between western liberal and autochthonous communitarian ontologies of personhood. More so, tension between rights and custom follows an internal conflict in African communitarian political philosophy between an essentialist conception and a recognition theory of social rights. In the end I advance the latter.

The principle of communality is denoted as the ability of the originally and essentially communal worldview, consciousness, behavioral pattern, socio-political norms and relations to spread on all the levels of societal complexity including, though in modified or sometimes even corrupted form, sociologically supra- and non-communal. As a pivotal socio-cultural foundation, the principle of communality has a direct impact on all subsystems of the African society at all the levels of its being throughout its whole history. Precisely this is what can explain to a large extent the originality of African culture. In the embodiment of the principle of communality it can also make sense to seek the roots of specificity of the historical process in sub-Saharan Africa.

In an article previously published in this Journal, Anthony Oyowe critically engages with my attempt to demonstrate how the human rights characteristic of South Africa's Constitution can be grounded on a certain interpretation of Afro-communitarian values that are often associated with talk of ubuntu. Drawing on recurrent themes of human dignity and communal relationships in the sub-Saharan tradition, I have advanced a moral-philosophical principle that I argue entails and plausibly explains a wide array of individual rights to civil liberties, political power, criminal procedures and economic resources. Oyowe's most important criticism of my theory is in effect that it is caught in a dilemma: Either the principle I articulate can account for human rights, in which case it does not count as communitarian, or it does count as the latter, but cannot account for the former. In this article, I reply to Oyowe, contending that he misinterprets key facets of my theory to the point of not yet engaging with its core strategy for deriving human rights from salient elements of ubuntu. I conclude that Oyowe is unjustified in claiming that there are 'theoretical lapses' that 'cast enormous doubts' on my project of deriving human rights from a basic moral principle with a recognisably sub-Saharan and communitarian pedigree.

It is generally accepted that the normative idea of personhood is central to African moral thought, but what has not been done in the literature is to explicate its relationship to the Western idea of rights. In this article, I investigate this relationship between rights and an African normative conception of personhood. My aim, ultimately, is to give us a cursory sense why duties engendered by rights and those by the idea of personhood will tend to clash. To facilitate a meaningful philosophical discussion, I locate this engagement in the context of a debate between Ifeanyi Menkiti and Kwame Gyekye about the nature of Afrocommunitarianism, whether it will ground rights as primary or secondary. I endorse Menkiti's stance that duties are primary and rights secondary; and, I also problematise moderate communitarianism for taking a Western stance by employing a naturalist approach to rights.