Africa’s receptiveness to Western fashionable concepts and theories appears to have suffered little from repeated demonstration of inappropriateness. The list of inapt imports is long and quite familiar to the older generation of Africanist academics who had a hand in fashioning and disseminating them. It began with the imperative of the “nation-state” that was to be forged in the process of national integration and institution building. Economic development was to come via industrialization, “import substitution” and diversification of exports, and social modernization would follow the passing of traditional society. Political development had a complex formula: “constitutionalism” and “rational legitimacy,” “interest articulation, aggregation and representation,” “functionally specific” bureaucratic institutions, and “prescriptive” as opposed to “ascriptive” recruitment.

In a report released on September 16, 1993, Amnesty International came up with an apt description of the current human rights situation in Zaire as consisting of “violence against democracy.” In a violent backlash against the democratization process, the regime of President Mobutu Sese Seko has plunged the country into “its worst human rights crisis since the end of the civil war in the early 1960s.” More than 5,000 people have been killed and more than 100,000 displaced in ethnic cleansing in the Shaba and North Kivu provinces. Moreover, repeated looting, extortion, and other acts of violence by Mobutu’s army have endangered the lives of millions of people all over the country, particularly in the major cities.

This paper focuses on the issue of human rights with respect to women’s land rights in Zimbabwe. The concept of human rights is particularly pertinent because of the debates on land reform and the activities of the land Commission exploring possibilities for the reform of land use in Zimbabwe.

This paper takes the position that the human rights of women are inalienable and an integral and indivisible part of universal human rights, which we define to include the right to full and equal participation of women with men, in the political civil, economic, social and cultural life at all levels. The International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), which is one of the International instruments that explicitly focuses on women’s human rights, is quite comprehensive in its coverage. Consisting of 30 articles, CEDAW covers women’s human rights in all aspects of their lives—political, economic, social and cultural rights.

Human rights is an issue that is broader than ordinarily understood. Its ramifications cover political, economic, social and cultural rights. Almost every nation has made constitutional provisions guaranteeing these rights. The purpose of the constitutional provisions is to defend, by institutionalized means, the rights of human beings against abuses of power committed by the organs and agencies of the state. Notably enough, however, each nation emphasizes those human rights that it frequently respects and observes. Thus, the United States emphasizes, for example, freedom of the press, freedom of expression, freedom of religion as if those aspects that it emphasizes constitute the entire human rights.

A meaningful understanding of the causes of political violence in South Africa and youth’s role in its dénouement must consider some of the historical background to the national struggle for human rights and youth’s specific involvement thereof. The phenomenon of adolescent marchers and activists who characterized the resistance to Apartheid over the last decade has had sequelae and antecedents that reflect the core of the South African dilemma.

The modern human rights movement, as it is known today, is largely the product of the horrors of the mainly European war of 1939-45. Its rise is mostly a direct result of the abominations committed by the Third Reich during that war. Drawing on the Western liberal tradition, the human rights movement arose primarily to control and contain state action against the individual. The two principal documents of the movement—the 1948 Universal Declaration on Human Rights (UDHR) and the 1966 International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR)—largely establish negative rights that either limit or prohibit altogether government intrusion into the so-called “private realm.”

In an article I wrote in the pages of this journal in 1976, I expressed considerable scepticism about the prospect of African governments drafting a human rights convention for Africa or establishing a regional human rights body similar to the European and Inter-American Commissions on Human Rights. Even though there had been calls for the creation of such a human rights mechanism as early as 1961, at the Lagos Conference on the Rule of Law, organized by the International Commission of Jurists (ICJ), I thought that the time did not yet “seem propitious for such a move.”