1. Person and Person in African Thought
1.4. Implications for Human Rights
ends in themselves. As such, whatever rights or entitlements persons may have in virtue of possessing a dignity would be merely derivative and secondary in value relative to facts about communal belonging.
In conclusion, then, each of the four options poses a dilemma––i.e. there are costs associated with opting for any one of them. Even so, my proposal is that there are rational pressures, arising from contemporary concerns about grounding individual liberties and rights, prompting us in the direction of possibility #1 above. In other words, a theory of personhood that upholds the proposition that fundamental value is intrinsic rather than extrinsic to persons holds enormous promise with regards to the possibility of grounding dignity as well as basic rights and entitlements as non-instrumental goods, worth pursuing for their own sakes.
I begin with the observation that concern for human rights is a matter of urgency in contemporary Africa.28 This is in part because human violations are still widespread.
Despite the contribution of colonialism to the rupturing of belief in the value of collectivity in the consciousness of Africans, the suspicion remained that because African societies were communally oriented and African scholars were unwavering in their resolve to return to traditional values in a bid to forge a prosperous future, widespread human rights violations would prevail. The solution was to remain faithful to the positive aspects of traditional values in a manner that is responsive to the challenges of modern times. Thus Wiredu asserts that human rights violations cannot be ‘rationalized by appeal to any authentic aspect of African traditional politics.... How to devise a system of politics that, while being responsive to the developments of the modern world, will reflect the best traditional thinking about human rights (and other values) is one of the profoundest challenges facing modern Africa’ (1990:257, 260). To my mind, however, one of the main contributors to human rights violations in Africa comes from the ‘authentic aspect’ of tradition.
There is a reason why this insight has been lost in the discourse on rights in Africa. In part, it has to do with the fact that many African philosophers who have reflected on the challenge of human rights in African thought have focused attention on the wrong question––the question of whether traditional African culture being communally
28Francis Deng makes the point clearly when he states that ‘with the centralization of power in the modern state system, the need to protect individuals and groups against human rights abuses became urgent’
(2004:502).
constituted had recognized human rights at all. This led to a number of demonstrations that economic, political and civil rights were recognized in traditional African cultures.29 However, this question and the subsequent demonstrations were entirely unnecessary since the real issue was not whether rights were part of African traditions, for the indications are that there were. What is at issue is the normative status of such rights. And as far as this question was concerned, there was an apparent unanimity that rights were of secondary value relative to facts about the collective.30 This is how Menkiti makes the point, ‘In the African understanding, priority is given to the duties which individuals owe to the collectivity, and their rights, whatever these may be, are seen as secondary to their exercise of their duties’ (1984:180, my emphasis). And Gyekye, presenting a similar idea, is emphatic: ‘in the communitarian political morality, priority will not be given to rights if doing so will stand in the way of attaining a more highly ranked value or a more preferable goal of the community’ (1992:116, my emphasis)
All along the central point I have been advancing is that this secondary, lowly ranked, less preferred normative status of human rights is a function of a certain of conceptualization personhood––the normative and communitarian one. Because this conception of person gives priority to community vis-à-vis the individual, and because human rights are basic entitlements of individuals, the implication is that such rights whatever they are, to use Gyekye’s dismissive description, can be overridden by a ‘highly ranked’ and ‘more
29See Wiredu (1996), in particular chap. 12; Francis Deng (2004); and Kwame Gyekye (1997), chap. 2 and (1992:115), all of which attempts to demonstrate that rights were recognized in traditional African societies.
30Here, I include Gyekye’s moderate communitarian response, which is essentially is a project aimed at paying lip service to the subject of rights in African thought since although it claimed that rights are recognized moderate communitarianism nevertheless is basically the theory that ‘will expectably give priority to duties rather than rights’ (1992:116).
preferable’ value––community. This way of thinking about human rights is the result of a conception of person that locates ultimate value in the community. This ultimately informs a socio-political ethic in which conflicts between individual rights and communal values are invariably decided in favour of the latter. And because individual rights would invariably be sacrificed in favour of communal values, the resulting socio-political ethic would engender a culture of widespread human rights violations.31
But that’s not all. The contemporary urgency about human rights in modern African states is premised upon a certain way of grounding rights. Since these basic rights embody goods and entitlements that are worth pursuing for their sake, an adequate philosophy of human rights must competently explain why it is the case that such rights are non-instrumentally valuable––that is, why such rights do not derive their value from something else or serve merely to promote a more preferable value namely, community or communal relationships.
A communitarian and normative theory of personhood in virtue of assigning greatest value to something other than that on which human dignity and rights are based cannot explain and justify why it is the case that human rights are non-instrumentally valuable. However, a metaphysical view (i.e. the first tier of the so-called two-tiered conception) can. Because on this view, ultimate value resides in something constitutive of the person, and upon which dignity and human rights are grounded, it can explain why it is the case that human rights are fundamentally and non-instrumentally good.
31I pursue this point in more detail in chapters five and six.
In sum, we have arrived at the end of what is akin to a cost-benefit analysis of the two levels of personhood. The cost of embracing the second level is quite high and potentially detrimental to contemporary efforts at grounding human rights as protections of fundamental and non-instrumental goods. I suggest that this may be a good reason why an African theory of personhood need not initiate a second level.