African Communitarianism and Human Rights: Towards a Compatibilist View

Munamato Chemhuru

doi:10.3167/th.2018.6515704

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African Communitarianism and Human Rights

Towards a Compatibilist View

in Theoria

Author:

Munamato Chemhuru

Munamato Chemhuru Great Zimbabwe University munamatochemhuru@gmail.com

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DOI:: https://doi.org/10.3167/th.2018.6515704

Keywords:: African; Afro-communitarianism; community; existence; individual; rights

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That human rights are new, alien, and incompatible with African social and political reality is pervasive in much of African social and political thinking. This supposition is based on the assumption that African societies are inherently communitarian, and hence inconsiderate to the guaranteeing and safeguarding of individual human rights. However, I seek to dispel this essentialist notion in African social and political thinking. I consider how the human rights discourse could be reasonably understood in the African traditional context if the thinking that is salient in the African communitarian view of existence is properly understood. After considering the way in which human rights are guaranteed within an African communitarian framework, I give reasons why the quest for individualistic human rights in Afro-communitarian society could be considered to be an oxymoron. Overall, I seek to establish that an Afro-communitarian model is compatible with the quest for the universality of human rights.

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