It is paradoxical, however, that this near universal recognition of the cruciality of human rights to democratic governance, and their inclusion in many constitutions, has not meant universal human rights practice.
The problem is that many in the Third World, especially in Africa, continue to view human rights and the democratic models they propose as a continuation of cultural imperialism. Abdullahi an-Naim, a rights scholar, best captures this view: " International standards on universal human rights have been primarily conceived, developed and established by the West. They cannot be accepted and implemented globally by peoples of other parts of the world." And Julius Nyerere, the chief intellectual proponent of African democracy, argued that Africans did not need to be taught democracy because democracy "was rooted in the traditional society which produced us."
Singly or in concert, these arguments make three fallacious assumptions.
One is that the West is a homogeneous entity undifferentiated in terms of class, intellect, morality and political ideology, and that this entity has global hegemony as its goal. Yet one need only visit any museum where medieval and renaissance Europe's torture instruments are displayed to appreciate the bestial lengths to which Europe's leaders went to discourage propagation of democratic ideas. This historical fact points to an important distinction - even though the modern concept of human rights was developed in the geographical space of Europe, it does not mean that human rights are a natural product of European culture. They were struggled for even in Europe. Over the years, the concept has been enriched , through word and deed, by people from different parts of the world, people who include Mahatma Gandhi and Nelson Mandela. Conversely, all ruling elites, African, Asian , European have , at some point, sought to defeat the concept or practice of human rights. Human rights, therefore, are the legacy of progressive humanity.
The other fallacy is the implication that regional interpretations of human rights have led to attainment - qualitatively - of the same human rights standards. Here one just needs to look at Africa's situation to appreciate the absurdity of such a claim. On the basis that different people required a human rights concept specific to their culture, many African states proscribed the allegedly divisive multipartyism of the West and adopted the 'consentaneous' single party model supposedly consistent with African culture.
The history of gross violations of human rights, the tragedies of civil strife, refugees and underdevelopment are the legacy of that relativist philosophy.
The third erroneous assumption is that pre-colonial African polity was democratic. In a powerful essay, "The Democratic Myth in The African Traditional Societies", V. C Simiyu writes : "In Africa, whether the political system was that of the highly centralised states or the amorphous non-centralised communities, it did not belong to a democratic tradition." Just as they had assumed that the modern concept of human rights was natural to European culture, the African relativists assumed there was a concept and practice of human rights that was natural to African traditional culture. In an essay, ' The Meaning and Foundations of Democracy', Afrifa Getonga argues that " democratic behaviour is not a genetically conditioned, inborn or inherited faculty - it is learned". But it is more than learned, it is, as proved during the transition from single- to multi-partyism in African states in the 1990s, struggled for.
It is time that we in Africa dispensed with the simplistic oppositional ideological paradigms with which we apprehend the world; Afrocentricity versus Eurocentricity, African versus the West, Traditional versus Modern. Such pure and absolute entities do not exist. The true picture is a lot more complex. There is a lot that is African or occidental in Europe and vice versa. There are Africans who shout all sorts of Africanisms but have actually pulled the continent back. I can think of no better illustration of this fact than the example of Mobutu Sese Seko. In the seventies, Mobutu propagated a kind of African ideology that he termed Authenticism as a counter to Westernism.
By the time Mobutu was overthrown in the nineties, he had reduced potentially the richest country in the world to a horrific political, social and economic disaster that will take decades to rectify.
Africa's ideology of change cannot be based on such simplifications and romanticized visions of the past. After decades of struggle against political philosophies based on such simplifications , and the ruination those had caused Africa, the great African democrat Jaramogi Oginga Odinga proposed that we should "model our systems of government today on our concrete realities and historical heritage, and not on some mythical and idyllic past." In order to achieve democracy, he added, "it will be necessary to liberate ourselves from such demagogues and propagators of backward ideologies."
What I infer from Odinga's declaration is that these simple philosophies that have informed all sorts of interpretations of democracy: Authenticism, Humanism, Nyayoism, African Democracy, Communalism and even Mbeki's version of the African Renaissance, are facades behind which Africa's parasitic political elite continues to steal our wealth and terrorize us.
Africa's governing philosophy and its ideology of change must have human rights and democracy as their core characteristics.
