INTRODUCTION

We could not try to understand the changes happening in Galle Toubaaco as it went through the CEP without an understanding of both the Senegalese context at large, and the ethnic group that people living in the community identified themselves with. I obviously also owe to the reader a critical description of the Tostan programme, with its strengths and limitations. This chapter analyses the emergence of the human rights discourse in Senegal, the current status of ratification of international human rights conventions, and the human rights violations in the country against which human rights activists advocate. The adoption of human rights law represents a jurisprudential legitimation for the HRE programme. On the other hand, the emergence of the human rights discourse in Senegal helps understand how participants might have made sense of human rights in their local reality (e.g. as something completely new or something heard before).

Second, the chapter looks at current Senegalese human development issues, with particular reference to gender issues, decision-making processes and other human rights-relevant practices in the country. The dynamics fostered by HRE are likely to intertwine with wider contextual factors: local gender roles and relations may, for instance, be influenced by wider traditional roles or, instead, by national processes of social change that challenge those traditional roles.

Third, the chapter examines Tostan's HRE approach in Senegal by looking at history, pedagogy and limitations of the programme. This analysis helps make sense of its intended structure as created by the NGO and its actual delivery in the rural community of Galle Toubaaco.

Finally, the last section gives an understanding of the traditional characteristics of the Fulɓe ethnic group in Senegal. In the process of vernacularisation, HRE interacts with the values in place that can be influenced by how a community understands and preserves those values on the basis of its (perceived) ethnic identity and the need to protect it. The section therefore analyses the threat posed to Fulɓe's ethnic identity by the ‘Wolofisation’ process coming into being and how the Fulɓe in Senegal respond to it by showing resistance to change and adherence to local traditional values that they deem contribute to defining their ethnic identity.