Introduction

The adoption of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) signalled a paradigm shift in international human rights. Apart from marking a shift from the medical and welfare approach to the social and rights approach to disability, the convention reframed disability as a human rights issue within international law and grassroots advocacy movements. It marked the global recognition of the importance of advancing the human rights of persons with disabilities (PwDs). In Africa, these shifts have influenced national and regional initiatives aimed at protecting disability rights and prompted broader debates about human rights. However, the key developments in disability rights have been limited to advocacy and policymaking. Gaps remain in implementation, and disability rights remain disconnected from other human rights and development interventions. Although the CRPD takes a holistic approach, disability rights continue to be framed mainly in social welfare terms rather than as economic, civil, and political rights entitlements. This framing impedes the mainstreaming of disability rights within the broader human rights movement.

This chapter locates disability rights within the broader trajectory of human rights discourses and movements. The disability rights movement represents the latest phase in longstanding struggles for human rights inclusion and expansion. Locating the disability rights movement within this historical and discursive context, I argue that the CRPD disability rights framework addresses three central tensions in human rights discourse and practice. The first tension is that between rights inclusion and exclusion, between rights expansion and restriction. This relates to the debate over whether the international human rights system should be expanded to include new provisions for ‘specialized rights’. While the CRPD emerged from a global consensus on the need for a specialized covenant to protect PwDs, questions persist about ‘rights inflation’ and the rationale for crafting a new covenant for persons already covered by extant human rights instruments. The second tension that the CRPD framework addresses is that between civil and political rights, on one hand, and economic and social rights, on the other. In adopting a holistic approach that links all these rights, the CRPD affirms the indivisibility and interdependence of human rights.

This chapters surveys the place of human rights in African nationalist thought during the 1940s and 1950s. Responding to the shifts in recent human rights historiography, it seeks parity for voices that have been cast to the narrative periphery. Locating African nationalist icons, Kwame Nkrumah, Sekou Touré, and Julius Nyerere, within the debate, rather than accessories to it, the chapter finds an indissoluble connection between collective and individual liberty. Human rights were embedded in African nationalist discourse, but with a different inflection. Genealogies which select their evolutionary line derived from a particular Western variant of the discourse necessarily narrow the concept and its meaning, applying a selection test which is potentially more normative than it is historical. African invocations of human rights, which emerged in a setting of colonial hypocrisy and collective political marginalization, were less animated by individual protection from the state – their lodestar was securing a state to protect their rights.