Conclusion

Summary

It is somewhat surprising that the 1977 UNGA resolution should come as a shock to international human rights activists. The African states had after all been fairly consistent in their approach to human rights on the international stage. An approach that cannot simply be reduced to the natural desire of dictators to evade outside scrutiny as, for example, suggested by Howard when posing the otherwise reasonable question: ‘Is the argument that civil/political liberties may be suspended in favour of economic rights in underdeveloped African countries a reflection of basic economic and human needs, or is it a self-serving justification for the centralized power of an elite? May civil and political rights ever justifiably be suspended?’

The answer is that African political leaders saw this question in altogether different binary terms and therefore largely rejected the UDHR. In the first instance, the UDHR had accommodated colonialism and apartheid and its application had not been extended to the colonial territories. It therefore played only a minor part in the decolonisation process, the preferred references being the Atlantic Charter and the self-determination clauses of the UN Charter. Thereafter, as the decolonisation process moved on, African political leaders repeatedly reminded the Western world that the African states had not contributed to the formulation of the UDHR's content. What had therefore emerged was an ethical playbook wholly at odds with the political and economic priorities of the newly independent but underdeveloped African states and the African way of life. It therefore followed that Africa could not accept that the current set-up of human rights was universal in any sense.

There was also a sentiment, as had been argued in the debate within the Christian church in Africa and in respect of African socialism, that Africans had always had a sense of human rights going back to pre-colonial African societies. It was therefore patronising to suggest that Africa needed to be taught human rights. Even Asante, despite his support of the UDHR, felt that: ‘The concept of human rights is by no means alien to indigenous African legal process. The African conception of human rights was an essential aspect of African humanism sustained by religious doctrine and the principle of accountability to the ancestral spirits.’