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15 February 2000

The relationship between human rights and democracy in the very complex milieu of Africa is embodied in the dynamic tension between stability and justice. It pits the interests and expectations of an overwhelming majority of the continent’s pauperized peoples for better living conditions and accountable leadership on the one hand, against the desire of a powerful minority of entrenched local and international elite for predictability and privilege on the other. Regimes offering “stability” are rewarded with effusive international support that is often prepared to gloss over egregious violations of the most basic rights or relativize the goalposts of acceptable political behaviour, including, where necessary, conscious complicity in patent electoral fraud. In seeking to trade off (structural) justice for short term stability, the partnership of domestic and international interests that has so far shaped Africa’s destiny succeeds in damaging the prospects of both justice and stability and, with these, of human rights and democracy in Africa.

Severely steeped in the history, politics, cultures and economics of the continent, it is impossible to disinfect the fates of human rights and democracy in Africa in peroxide of political ‘neutrality’ and economic illiteracy. Although not interchangeable, human rights and democracy are cousins in a relationship not much different from the proverbial chicken-and-egg conundrum. In Africa, these concepts represent the project of realizing both economic and political justice for individuals as well as groups in the aftermath of colonialism. It is the search for a just stability.

To be fair, this was always going to entail hard toil and committed leadership. The tragedy of Africa is that we got neither. Across the continent, direct colonialism ended without resolving or even addressing the explosive problem of power sharing in the multi-national, multi-ethnic and, in some places, even multi-civilizational masterpiece of cartographic arbitrariness that became Africa. The elite of Africa’s nationalists who inherited the raft of dictatorial powers, legislation and attitudes that sustained colonialism were quick to experiment with their new-found powers with impatience only matched by the enthusiasm of a child trying out a new toy.

In less than the time it took colonial administrators to evacuate from the continent, the high sounding, high-minded rhetoric of the independence movement - perhaps, the second truly popular human rights movement with its origins or inspiration in Africa, the first being the anti-slavery movement - was replaced by the instinct of the political leaders to survive in power as the raison d’être of government. Towards this objective, the enormous powers of the post-colonial African State, together with all the goodwill that could be wrung from Cold War belligerents and post-colonial metropolitan powers, not to mention (in some countries) the odd presidential shaman or Marabou were pressed into service. Political patronage privileged persons with the right ethnic origins at the expense of merit. Dissent was criminalized, and the judiciary was abolished as in Sekou Toure’s Guinea, emasculated into irrelevance as in Banda’s Malawi or intimidated into obsequiousness as in Nkrumah’s Ghana. Onto this canvass, the unfinished, even virgin business of post-colonial power-sharing exploded with a vengeance, accounting for the cycle of zero-sum politics, military adventurism, gross human rights violations and instability that all appear to characterize Africa.

It is not for nothing that the widely advertised recent wave of democratization and non-governmental human rights initiatives in Africa roughly coincided with the end of the Cold War, the decimation of Africa’s middle-classes by post-colonial dictatorships, and the popularization of kitchen-ware for high intensity political violence. Across much of Africa, it is not unusual to hear advocates of pluralism of any sort being blamed by local communities for inflicting instability on the people. This sentiment deserves close examination. To many of our people, the “wave” of human rights and democratization that “swept” through Africa only meant optimal political turbulence and hardly a ripple of positive difference to their well being. These notions offered a terminally endangered middle and intellectual class a limited facility of protest where in the past, they were actively complicit in or indifferent to bad government. Anxious to preserve something of shrinking aid budgets from the weight of expectation imposed by domestic electorates unburdened by Cold War appropriations, Northern “philanthropies” made common cause with recently articulate voices of mainstream protest in Africa, consecrating them into ready beneficiaries of the post-Cold War dividend.

With the venom of a bushfire, the fate of Africa’s democratization was tied in country after country to the city-dwelling parvenu or disgruntled ex-apparatchik for whom democracy meant replacing existing power with a different face and human rights represented the prerogative to realize this ambition as theirs. They prosecuted the project of democratization “for”, defended human rights “on behalf of”, and sought power “in the name” of the “people” rather than “with” them. New fangled national constitutions entrenched partial franchise conferring the right to vote on everyone but restricting the right to be voted for to only those few who had gone to school and spoke English or French. And all this without providing for access to basic education that met the constitutional threshold for access to public office. Preferring the devils they know to unfamiliar and distant angels, our people have, where they have been allowed to do so in free and fair elections, mostly responded by voting with their feet in conferring electoral legitimacy on existing, defunct or resurrected dictatorships. Thus it is that democracy, which in the rest of the world represents, among other things, a choice between different visions of organizing society and protecting rights, is, in Africa, an experience that offers neither choice, nor change to our people. Moreover, democracy in Africa is still portrayed as an electoral event rather than a process of making society more just and government more respectful of law and our rights.

Consequently, with a few exceptions to be found mostly in the women’s movement and the faith-based, social justice initiatives and networks, Africa’s contemporary pluralism advocates – as human rights or pro-democracy advocates or opposition politicians - share a core of values as members of a narrow urban protest movement with approximately similar or convergent political outlook. Inspired and actively supported by Northern watchdog and advocacy initiatives in a marriage of convenience, and underwritten almost exclusively with funding from outside, they are economical in cultivating genuine domestic legitimacy outside a core urban, literate constituency, and have little real existence outside the cocktail, media and workshop circuits.

Towards the end of the last century, the slogan of the international human rights movement invited activists to “think global and act local”. Ostensibly underlying this slogan was the perfectly valid claim that human rights as norms asserted a universally valid common denominator of human values. In practice, however, this slogan also represented the co-option of the legitimizing language of human rights by a motley crowd of new incarnations of hegemony. It furthermore expressed the domination by Northern organizations of both the capital for and the identity (including the language and methods) of human rights advocacy everywhere with little respect for the divergent local realities confronted in different parts of the world.

At the beginning of this century, this is no longer a sustainable mantra for advocates of human rights anywhere, certainly not in Africa. Unlike their African counterparts whose mostly unviable national boundaries have been elevated to a form of unregulated geo-political ideology, the operations of Northern-based human rights activists and institutions are regulated by strict laws, trust deeds and mandates in deference to which they think local but act global. For Africa’s contemporary advocates and activists for pluralism and human rights, it is now more important to think economic and act political. We must be prepared to contemporaneously think global, think regional, think local and think the people. For, as long as we are encouraged to think of the global in opposition to the local, for so long will we and the rest of the world also think of stability in opposition to justice. And for so long will Africa’s people know neither democracy nor human rights.

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