HUMAN RIGHTS AND TRADITION IN AFRICA

The core argument of this chapter and the next is that human rights discourse and traditional discourse, or what Mamdani (2000) calls ‘culture talk’, are expressions of two different modes of rule which operate within (and largely structure) two distinct domains of state politics: the first within a domain of civil society and the second within a domain of traditional society. In each specific domain expressive state politics differ, requiring somewhat different modes of thought in order to enable an alternative excessive politics. The argument deployed here is a conscious attempt to move away from considering tradition and modernity, citizenship rights and traditional entitlements, as in opposition to each other. Both suggest a distinct ‘culture’ in which political idioms are expressed as well as regulating and constraining the development of excessive thought, but in fundamentally different ways. Neither is more ‘democratic’ than the other, if by ‘democratic’ we mean its popular rather than its state manifestation.

Throughout this chapter, human rights discourse is considered as a mode of thought that demarcates a civil society of citizens; it is precisely through a discourse of human rights that the state can exercise its hegemony and hence its rule in civil society, with only marginal recourse to coercion.