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The Social Basis of Constitutionalism in Africa

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 November 2008

Mahmood Mamdani
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Extract

Are human rights a western invention? Is their very conception, and the accompanying notion of a legal process that sets definite limits on the exercise of political power, an invention of the seventeenth-century Enlightenment philosophers, and an ideological product of the French and the American Revolutions? And thus, is any talk of human rights in Africa tantamount to a mechanical importation of a western bourgeois ideological conception without the struggles and the relations that gave rise to it in the first place?

Type
Articles
Information
The Journal of Modern African Studies , Volume 28 , Issue 3 , September 1990 , pp. 359 - 374
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1990

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References

1 Hountondji, Paulin J., ‘The Master's Voice – Remarks on the Problem of Human Rights in Africa’, reprinted by the National University of Benin, Nigeria, p. 320.Google Scholar

2 Ibid. p. 323.

3 The transition and the process are analytically captured in Polanyi's, Karl seminal work, The Great Transformation (Boston, 1957).Google Scholar

4 Thus, the ‘rights of man’ so closely identified with the French Revolution were opposed by ‘a new version of the rights of man and Citizen’ proposed by Robespierre, who appealed directly to ‘the poor class…of sans-culottes’, defining property as a ‘social’ rather than a ‘natural’ right. See Jordan, David P., The Revolutionary Career of Maximilien Robespierre (Chicago, 1985), pp.126–7 and 142Google Scholar

5 See Tocqueville, Alexis de, Democracy in America (New York, 1945 edn.)Google Scholar and The French Revolution and the Old Social Classes (New York, 1955 edn.).Google Scholar

6 For an excellent analysis, see Meister, Robert, ‘The Logic and Legacy of Dred Scott:Marshall, Taney, and the sublimation of Republican thought’, in Studies in American Development (New Haven), 3, 1989, pp. 206–11.Google Scholar

7 In the learning process whereby the United States moved from a disorganised retreat in the years following the defeat in Indochina to an ideological and then a political offensive, a central rôle was played by Andrew Young, who pointed out America's strategic weakness vis-à-vis the Soviet Union in Africa by being able neither to speak the language of ‘liberation’ nor to boast closeness to any ‘liberation movement’. It was Young who also explained that there was no better effective protector of American oil interests in Cabinda than the Movimento Popular de Liberaçao de Angola (M.P.L.A.) and the Cubans, despite their revolutionary language! Young, in other words, taught U.S. ruling circles both to modernise their demagogy and to see through modem demagogy. Although he paid professionally for being a few steps ahead of official thinking — Young was replaced as U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations — subsequent developments have confirmed that his point of view was not lost on his employers.

8 See Report of the Commission of Inquiry into the Local Government System in Uganda (Kampala, 1988).Google Scholar

9 See Mamdani, Mahmood, ‘Extreme but not Exceptional: towards an analysis of the agrarian question in Uganda’, in Journal of Peasant Studies (London), 01 1987, pp. 191–225.Google Scholar

10 See Egerö, Bertil, Mozambique: a dream undone. ThePolitical Economy of Democracy, 1975–84 (Uppsala, 1987);Google ScholarRahmato, Dessalegn, Agrarian Reform in Ethiopia (Uppsala, 1984);Google Scholar and Coulson, Andrew, Tanzania: a political economy (Oxford, 1982).Google Scholar

11 See Africa's Refugee Crisis: what's to be done (London, 1986), the authors of which come from Cimade, founded during World War II to help displaced persons, Inodep, an N.G.O. working in development education, and Mink, the International Nkrumahist Movement.Google Scholar

12 See Kothari, Rajni, The State Against Democracy: in search of humane governance (Delhi, 1988).Google Scholar