Justice and Human Rights in the African Imagination

We, Too, Are Humans

Chielozona Eze

• Editore: Routledge
• Anno: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000376272
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Letteratura
• Categoria: Critica letteraria africana

Justice and Human Rights in the African Imagination is an interdisciplinary reading of justice in literary texts and memoirs, films, and social anthropological texts in postcolonial Africa.

Inspired by Nelson Mandela and South Africa's robust achievements in human rights, this book argues that the notion of restorative justice is integral to the proper functioning of participatory democracy and belongs to the moral architecture of any decent society. Focusing on the efforts by African writers, scholars, artists, and activists to build flourishing communities, the author discusses variousquests forjustice such as environmental justice, social justice, intimate justice, and restorative justice. It discusses in particular ecological violence, human rights abuses such as witchcraft accusations, the plight of people affected by disability, homophobia, misogyny, and sex trafficking, and forgiveness.

This book will be of interest to scholars of African literature and films, literature and human rights, and literature and the environment.

The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/e/9781003148272, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

1 Narratives and the common good

The fact that the notion of human rights is abstract and in many cases contentious is very much known. Different cultures and societies conceive of it in different ways. For example, most Africans associate it with Western moral imperialism and specifically with nongovernmental organizations headquartered in New York, London, or Paris. Human rights, they believe, is not original to Africa. Yet when confronted with the granular details of the contents of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), they admit that human rights is as African as African people’s respect for their elders and neighbors. What, then, accounts for the apparent disconnect between the noble aspirations of the UDHR and their instantiations in people’s lives?

Africans are not alone in this apparent mistrust of aspects of the human condition. Cynicism toward human rights is widespread in the West. Former leader of the Liberal Party of Canada Michael Ignatieff (2017a:4) does not believe in the universal claims of the Declaration either; rather, he proposes ordinary virtues as a better alternative, and, for him, ordinary virtues mean “the common practices of trust and tolerance, forgiveness and reconciliation that are the essence of private moral behavior.” In June 2013, he led a small team of moral inquirers on a journey of discovery, which took them to four continents, specifically to villages, shantytowns, favelas, and poor neighborhoods, where they interviewed citizens and dwellers about their views of the world and human rights. He states that the most outstanding feature in the expression of morality among the people he interviewed is how little the people used the universal principles of any kind to justify their relationship to their fellow humans. On the contrary, “they reasoned in terms of the local, the contingent, the here and now” (Ignatieff 2017b:208). Rather than organize their moral life according to abstract principles of justice, or imagining “the human race beyond the veil of ignorance […they imagined] themselves: their own reflection in the mirror” (208). It is as difficult to disprove this observation as it is to believe that humans do not care much about other humans outside their immediate circle.

In light of the above, I wonder whether we can truly manage our increasingly complex world without recourse to some idioms that transcend the idols of the tribe, idioms rooted in universality. I duly acknowledge the African (and postcolonial) mistrust of the discourse of universality because of its provenance in Western modernity. However, I argue that we also need universals, even while holding on to the virtues rooted in the world we know. How then can we bridge the gap between the grandiose language of justice and human rights and its practical relevance to people’s lives? How do we explain to an average African that accusing his or her neighbor of witchcraft is unjust and a gross abuse of the other’s human rights and that this other deserves those rights because he or she has intrinsic dignity as a human being, a universal property?

I think it is safe to say that any proper understanding of universal human rights must take into account its origins in the ordinary virtues of co-feeling, care, tolerance, and so on. This much is obvious in the many versions of the history of human rights in Europe. For example, Lynn Hunt (2007:34–39) argues that eighteenth-century European sentimental novels such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Julie or the New Héloïse and Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1740) and Clarissa (1747–1748) provoked a “torrent of emotions” and co-feeling in their readers because of the way they shed light on the pains of their protagonists and so contributed to the thoughts captured in the proclamation of “the rights of man.” Ultimately the notion of empathy, this most basic of the ordinary virtues, was an integral part in the thinking about universal human rights. As Hunt states,

novels made the point that all people are fundamentally similar because of their inner feelings, and many novels showcased in particular the desire for autonomy. In this way, reading novels created a sense of equality and empathy through passionate involvement in the narrative.

(39)

Even before the eighteenth century, stories have always been a reliable means to appeal to people’s sense of solidarity, as I have already implied in my references to Mencius and Jesus. It is therefore worth posing the question: What can thoughts about justice and human rights in Africa learn from narratives about African lives?

I seek to achieve two main things in this chapter: First, establish the absolute importance of universal moral frameworks for the existence of decent societies and participatory democracy in Africa, and second, show how narratives can bring us closer to those moral frameworks, part of which is the notion of human rights. UDHR and all the subsequent Conventions and Covenants gesture toward universal moral frameworks that imagine all nations (indeed, all societies) as parts of a community. When people describe their conditions as threatened, they appeal to that community in the knowledge or assumption that all are bound by the frameworks that make us what we truly are as humans. As Kay Schaffer and Sidone Smith (2004:3) argue about life narratives in the context of human rights, “In the specific locales of rights violations and in the larger court of public opinion, life narrative becomes essential to affect recourse, mobilize action, forge communities of interest, and enable social change.” What they recognize as the larger court of public opinion, I call universal moral frameworks and which I understand further down within the context of the common good. In pursuit of these goals, I break down human rights in the idioms of ordinary virtues that are an essential part of African people’s lives, as surely they are a part of lives elsewhere.

Stories, values, and the community

James Dawes, the founding director of Human Rights and Humanitarianism at Macalester College, has observed that literature and human rights have increasingly gained attention in world literature. Much of that attention had been devoted to “ideology critique and moral normativization. Critics have framed texts by way of ethical paradoxes inherent to the broader human rights movement itself” (2018:4). I think such critiques are in order when dealing with developed societies of the West, which have some degree of ethical and legal standards.¹ The human rights situation in Africa and, perhaps increasingly in the West, given the growing coarseness of society, requires a return to the basis of society’s moral framework. After the end of apartheid, South Africa was faced with the colossal but fundamental and delicate task of demonstrating the humanity of all, despite the horrors of the past. The task was all the more complex because the colonial and apartheid systems had never granted black people that basic affirmation. On the other hand, it appears to be impossible to expect black people to extend equal humanity to those who had brutally oppressed them for centuries.

It is perhaps part of Nelson Mandela’s ingenuity and boundary-defying legacy that his government came up with a simple idea of people telling one another their stories of suffering in the now famous Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). The goal of the TRC was to provide a new context for understanding justice; it was to create a condition for restorative rather than retributive justice. It was to restore the humanity of all, the oppressors and the oppressed. As Dawes (2009:395) has observed, “The TRC was arguably one of the most visible acts of collective storytelling in the history of human rights endeavors.… It was quite self-consciously an exercise in narration and healing.” The TRC did not bring about a perfect peace or economic progress or the acceptance of the humanity of all South Africans. Its greatest achievement, though, was the creation of moral frameworks that would make the pursuance of those goals worthwhile and credible.

In his justification of the modalities of the TRC, Archbishop Desmond Tutu (1999:26) states: “Since we were exhorted by our enabling legislation to rehabilitate the human and civil dignity of victims, we allowed those who came to testify mainly to tell their stories in their own words.” Archbishop Tutu alludes to the special atmosphere surrounding the ritual of testimonies. The TRC created special context and condition that gave the victims the feeling of being taken seriously. The victims felt readmitted into the universal humanity. Of importance is Tutu’s interpretation of the humanistic reach of the mandate given to them. He underlines what he believes has been one of the immediate results of such an exercise when he relays the testimony provided by one of those who had told about their ordeals during apartheid. According to Tutu, the man said:

Archbishop, we have told our story to many on several occasions, to newspapers and to the TV. This is the first time though that after telling it we feel as if a heavy load has been removed from our shoulders.

(26)

I read the man’s metaphor of a heavy load being removed from his shoulders as a feeling of not only relief but also of becoming whole and being a member of the human community. I think it is fair to suggest that the man felt that justice has been served.²

Based on Archbishop Tutu’s testimony, it does appear that the ordinary act of narration links one’s humanity to that of others in society. It makes people, ordinary people, feel their mutual reliance on one another. Their dependence is not economic, social, or political; it is moral and to the degree that it helps people to appreciate their own dignity and that of others. We note in the man’s testimony the special context in which a heavy load has been removed from his shoulders. The context is the gathering of the community as distinct from an audience of one journalist. The gathering of the community recalls the origins of storytelling in the caves and small groups in the tribe, situations in which people told stories in order to live, as Joan Didion (2006) suggests. Every story assumes a community so that there is a special bond between the individual (the narrator) and the community (the listener). Commenting on Desmond Tutu’s reading of the testimonies of the TRC, Eleni Coundouriotis (2006) argues that how one understands dignity affects how one perceives political struggle and social and political power. It does appear, therefore, that Tutu interprets dignity first and foremost as being fully integrated into the human community. His whole political struggle has been the creation of a rainbow community.

What is communicated in the narrative act is the awareness of the moral presence of the others in our lives; that is, with the stories come the virtues of compassion, care, a common search for truth, and some shared sense of justice. Tutu makes a rigorous distinction between the type of justice that is communicated through the TRC, which is restorative, and the conventional Western understanding of the same, which is retributive. Dignity is integral to our understanding of human rights and belongs squarely in the sphere of restorative justice. What is restored is precisely what had been denied: the sense of worth. This understanding of dignity, highlighted in the preamble to the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), is enhanced when approached from the South African notion of ubuntu, which I discuss in the later part of this chapter.

As much as every society needs legal frameworks to assure that people’s dignity and rights are not trampled upon, laws cannot initiate or sustain these virtues in people; they must be initiated in interpersonal relationships outside the reach of laws. As Eleanor Roosevelt states, human rights and dignity must be sought “in small places, close to home” (Horton 2007). Human rights are therefore approached from the bottom up, not the other way around. Its approach emphasizes ordinary virtues, and it is in light of the ethical and human rights impulses of the TRC that this book examines the role of narrative in the promotion of justice and human rights in Africa. It asks: What is the relationship between the stories we tell about ourselves and others and the dignity we accord humans? What is the image of the human person in the stories we tell?

Literature is about the stories we tell. We do so for many reasons, some of which include entertainment, keeping ourselves company, and imparting lessons that could be religious, moral, or mundane. Sociologist Arthur W. Frank (2010:46) argues: “Stories teach people what to look for and what can be ignored; they teach what to value and what to hold in contempt.” Frank’s claim is true based alone on the material we select for our stories; every choice of material reveals the value system of the person who makes that choice. Also, the way a story is arranged—what is highlighted and what is suppressed—says much about what is important and what is less so. Through a subtle and often complex system of figures, signs, and symbols, stories thus shape our values and display our moral dispositions to the world.

Walter Fisher (1984:6) argues that regardless of the form our stories take, the primary thing in storytelling is “to establish a meaningful life-world.” There will be differences in character, conflicts, and so on, “but each mode of recounting and accounting for is but a way of relating a ‘truth’ about the human condition.” What is at stake here is the human community. Who deserves to stay in? Who is to be excluded? A person who tells about his pain wants that experience to be taken seriously. He or she wants others to feel what he or she has felt, if only vicariously. The assumption of co-feeling suggests the desire of the narrator to be welcomed into a world, out of which his or her experience of pain had forced him or her. He or she wants to know that he or she, too, is human.

At the most obvious and perhaps more immediately and ethically rewarding level, stories provide us with characters whose mere existence excites our curiosity and, when translated into everyday encounters, reads like the questions we might pose to ...