Fichamento do texto “The Concept of Human Rights in Africa” – Issa G.

Shivji

Preface
The Human Rights Discourse on and in Africa is intellectually backward […] (p. vii)
That would not matter if it was also ideologically innocent. That, it is not. Human rights
talk constitutes one of the main elements in the ideological armoury of imperialism. Yet
from the point of view of the African people, human rights struggles constitute the stuff
os their daily lives. For these two interconnected reasons, human rights talk needs to be
subjected to a closer historical and political scrutiny (p. vii).
Such a scrutiny cannot be politically neutral or intellectually uncommitted (p. vii).
Chapter One is mainly descriptive. It reviews the main debates of the dominant
discourse (p. vii).
[…] the objective is not to throw away, so to speak, the human rights talk. The aim is to
reconstruct the human rights ideology to legitimize and mobilise people’s struggles (p.
vii-viii).
The three chapters clearly evince the fact that two tendencies in human rights discourse
can be identified: the dominant tendency and what I have called, tha revolutionary
tendency (p. viii).
Introduction: rights ideology and rights struggle
Ideologies of domination/ideologies of resistance
Once upon a time, in the continent’s five centuries of domination and bleeding, “black
skins” were said to have no souls. […] They had no souls, like mules. That was the
ideology of domination. The transformation from a beast of burden to a laboring
colonial native was a process of complex struggle producing not only slave revolts and
heroes like Toussaint L’Ouverture but also its own ideologies of resistance (p. 3).
The transformation of the colonial native to an African “moderniser” was again a
complex process of struggle (p. 1).
In the intellectual scheme of things, the African intellectual slavishly parroted the
Africanist guru, whether of the right or of the left. This intellectual domination was of
course not a conspiracy of the intellect but a reflection of the continent’s domination by
imperialism (p. 1).
The colonial native who had earlier been saved from anthropology and inserted in
history was now to be tutored in democracy and human rights. His soul may have been
saved from the paganist satan but his humanity had still to be protected from the
totalitarian communist.[…] “Human rights ideology” is an ideology of domination and
part of the imperialist world outlook. Like other ideologies of domination in yester-
epochs, the dominant human rights ideology claims and proclaims universality,
immortality and immutability while promulgating in practice class-parochialism,
national oppression an “patronizing” authoritarianism. This work is about this particular
ideology of domination (p. 2-3).
[..] it is through a critique os the ideology of domination that the elements for the
reconstruction of the ideology of resistance and struggle are crystallized (p. 3).
The study
A central task of the present study is in fact to develop an alternative ideological
framework of “human rights” as an ideology of resistance and an ideology of struggle
of the large masses of Africa (p. 3).
I believe that the history and practice of struggles during the last three decades of
independence in Africa have inabled us to attempt this theoretical systematization (p. 4).
The struggle for democracy and the place of rights-struggle
The reconceptualization of the “human rights ideology” presented in this study is
contextualized as an ideology of resistance and struggle within a New Democratic
perspective (p. 6).
The task of this work is to demonstrate the contradictory perspectives on “human
rights” (p. 6).
It is in this larger picture that we have attempted to locate the “human rights ideology”
and rights-struggle. In this we see the reconstituted “rights ideology” at once as a
critique of the imperialist “human rights ideology” as at the same time an ideology of
mobilisation and legitimisation of the struggles of the workin people. Rights-struggles
and rights-ideology may then be seen as components of the new democratic struggles in
the process of a New Democratic Revolution (p.6).
1 The dominant discourse
Introduction