Why is the human rights situation so dismal in Africa? Scholarly answers to this question have typically fallen into two categories. An accounting literature concerned with statistics generally proposes a disheartening list of human rights abuses, while offering poor hopes of progress on a continent described as submitted to increasing poverty, collapsing states, and spreading violence. A second literature reacts against such a perspective by arguing that human rights have a place in African philosophy and social practice. A common trend of this defensive literature, however, is to discard the universal validity of Western ideas of human rights by stating that they can neither account for nor be compatible with indigenous ideas of individual dignity and human value.
These perspectives convey the magnitude of the issue, but they usually end up stumbling over the evidence they both demonstrate and criticize: the absence, or exteriority, of human rights in Africa. Based on the underlying assumption that the continent is imprisoned into such absence, either by virtue of its political depravity or moral distinction, these approaches ignore the complex historical circumstances surrounding the emergence of human rights on the continent. From the end of the nineteenth century to the 1960s the representatives of colonial domination used human rights as political tools to exert control over local societies and to reserve political privileges to the whites. During this crucial period, therefore, human rights developed less as philosophical ideas of human dignity than as specific, historical relationships between emerging modern states (colonial governments) and reluctant civilians (the “natives”). Throughout the twentieth century, these relations shed light on the difficult emergence of a viable civil society in the context of an ever-enduring state oppression—a trend hardly stopped by postcolonial regimes.
Human rights served as a core principle during the colonial invasion in Africa. This implied a major distortion of the eighteenth-century ideas of human rights: Instead of being equalizing and liberating concepts, human rights became a philosophical basis for racial hierarchy.
Historians have long studied how the colonization of Africa rested upon a composite set of economic and diplomatic factors. The European industrial and capitalist revolution required new markets for manufactured goods as well as cheap raw materials to supply factories. Diplomatic rivalries focused on securing strategic routes and fueling stations for steamers en route to India and Southeast Asia as well as on designing large “spheres of influence” in the largely unknown though potentially rich areas of the African hinterland. But less known is how those incentives were grounded in a large set of ideological assumptions that served to anchor the colonial project in European public opinions. African dependence was organized not only along the lines of global economic conquest but also through its relocation within master narratives that promoted a negative image of the continent and its peoples. By the end of the nineteenth century, Europe’s interest in Africa had shifted from the abolition of the slave trade to the partition of the continent, from a debate framed by the universal nature of human beings and their right to freedom and equality to a project whose ideological bases depended on the assumption that African people were located outside (in chronological, geographical, or racial terms) the sphere of human rights. This ideological displacement was instrumental in legitimizing the colonial enterprise and answering its central contradiction: How could enlightened European nations engage in the forceful subjugation of an entire continent?
Beginning at the end of the eighteenth century, Europe progressively confined Africa to the sphere of cultural backwardness, social immobility, and historical impotence. Social Darwinists classified human beings racially, placing blacks at the bottom and whites at the top of physiological and cultural achievement. Historians and philosophers, reflecting on the human past and future as a linear progression toward complex social structures, began to perceive Africa as embedded in historical paralysis. According to this new spirit of theological classification, Africans were primarily organized in tribes (communities based on race and kinship) and Europeans in nations (communities based on a social contract between citizens and the state). Such perceptions stereotyped African societies as based on inequality and submission, symbolized by slavery. In contrast, freedom and equality constituted the heritage and political horizon of European nations, embodied by human rights. Innovation was therefore confined to the unique place where it could flourish and spread: Europe.
This powerful myth—studied by Edward Said under the name of Orientalism—emerged in direct connection with the intellectual needs of imperial expansion. The scientific and philosophical necessity of bringing barbarian societies to civilization and history justified Europe’s mission overseas. Colonial inequality could be envisioned as a necessary step to engage Africa on the path of freedom and modernity, and to build the conditions for the emergence of human rights in Africa. However, such a project completely transformed the notion of human rights itself, displacing them from the realm of essence to historical contingency. Freedom and equality were not essential, sacred features of the human condition, but a contingent stage of human history. In this altered form, they provided the core dogma of the colonial enterprise. Political and economic domination in Africa was organized around authoritarian state apparatuses, discriminatory laws, limited citizenship, and racial segregation. European propaganda and the popular imagination, however, pictured colonial rule as campaigns of pacification, the ending of domestic slavery, the replacement of tyrannical rulers by benevolent administrators and enlightened chiefs, economic development, the diffusion of hygiene and medical science, literary education, Christianity, and the adoption of liberating codes of behavior such as monogamy and female emancipation.1 The expulsion of Africa from the sphere of human rights betrayed in fact the tremendous alteration of European principles of human rights—a failure brilliantly denounced by the black writer Aimé Césaire.2
Accordingly, the expression human rights itself largely disappeared from the vocabulary of the colonial milieus in reference to Africa between 1885 and 1941. Neither in international debates about Africa nor in the colonies themselves was the term to be used again before the Atlantic Charter (1941); it was replaced by notions that carried the idea of historical accomplishment: usually “civilization” and “progress,” The exclusion of Africa from the sphere of human rights had immediate consequences. On the judicial level, Europeans denied African peoples legal international existence. Consider the Berlin Conference Act (1885) that established regulations for free trade, missionary activities, and navigation on the continent, as well as the diplomatic rules for recognizing a Western nation’s sovereignty over a colony. The meeting stands famous in relegating Africa as res nullius in international affairs, as not a single African representative was invited to attend. The treaty devoted a few passages to the fate of Africans. The “indigenous populations” did not hold rights, but were to be protected by the European rulers desiring “to promote [. . .] the most favorable conditions for the development of trade and civilization in certain regions of Africa.” Chapter 1, article 6, was more explicit and assigned colonial powers the mission to preserve Africans as a backward human stock, worthy primarily of material care, and marginally of benevolent moral paternalism: “All powers exerting sovereign rights or influence in these territories promise to protect the conservation of all native populations as well as to improve their moral and material living conditions, and to work toward suppressing slavery and especially slave-trading” (emphasis mine).
On the ground, the denial of Africans as equal human beings followed more complex lines. The colonized, it was argued, did not have a sufficient level of civilization to be granted rights. But Europeans were also influenced by pseudo-historical theories about African societies. Living in stateless societies, people were considered as having no need to develop individual rights against a potentially threatening central authority. European pacification having defeated predatory empires and rulers, the colonized would be protected enough by the customs as well as small size of their decentralized communities, “tribes,” “clans,” and the like—perfect examples of the primitive and happy natural societies that enlightened Europeans had imagined in their reflection on human rights at the end of the eighteenth century. The colonial mind constantly balanced between a vision of Africans as the “happy savage” and the “primitive barbarian.” However, a more homogenous mind-set presided over colonizers’ image of their own government. They fantasized the colonial state (never named as such by them), in regards to Africans, as a benevolent “administration,” a governing tool aimed not at organizing the sordid economy of domination upon conquered territories but at building material and moral progress for the sake of the Africans. As a consequence, no individual protection for the natives appeared necessary, while colonial states envisioned themselves as the primary vectors of modernization, civilization, and social reform.
In the African colonial empires the terms revotution, rights, and their colonial euphemisms civilization and progress, became paradoxically some of the most important ideological pillars of the autocratic state. While the idea of human rights had emerged in Europe and in America from the bottom up, and worked historically as a new self-consciousness of civil society and as a challenge to the old regime’s privileges and abuses, the colonial project bound the realization of human rights in Africa to a governmental enterprise of political tutelage.
Besides the omnipotent state, no civil society was allowed to form as a licit counterpart of colonial governments, not even among Europeans. Local citizenship did not exist in the colonies, even for the whites, until after World War II. As a result, colonial states invaded the whole legal sphere and tried to monopolize most political initiatives.
At the time of their formation colonies had been given the facade of a nation: a central government, boundaries, and a “national” territory. However, sovereignty and legislative capacity belonged to the metropolitan government, delegated to the colonial administration (appointed by overseas government and not elected by local settlers). A double vacuum characterized citizenship. Whites were considered part of the larger metropole, not citizens of the colony. They retained their British, Belgian, or French nationalities and citizenship privileges in Europe, but they usually could not elect representatives in the colony itself. The colonial administration, under tight control from the metropole, retained the entire monopoly of executive and legislative power and functioned as the only legal institution in the colonies. In French Equatorial Africa, local settlers became so frustrated with this exclusive state power that in 1944 they organized a lobby association and a conference, named after the first French Revolutionary Assembly, the Etats généraux de la colonisation.
Yet in all colonies the state acted as the guardian of white domination. European rule rested upon the radical separation of whites and Africans, and this remained a fundamental configuration of the colony. Racial discrimination took many diverse forms, from spatial isolation to legal segregation, yet always confined Africans to subaltern status. In the British Empire, no assumption existed that Africans could eventually gain British citizenship and rights. Whites and blacks lived and developed in two different spheres. Under the principle of “indirect rule,” Africans were supposed to govern themselves, under the ultimate tutelage of the white administration. Human rights were only marginally invoked in this context, while Africans were not supposed to share or to participate in the same historical development as colonizers.3 In contrast, in French, Belgian, and Portuguese colonies, the separation between Africans and Europeans set off a different ideology: It consolidated the constituent gap between colonizers and the colonized by justifying the colonial mission through the principle of “assimilation,” a vision of Africans evolving progressively to full integration as citizens into the white public realm. In fact, since successful assimilation would dissolve colonial domination, imperial policies took pains to reproduce and reshape the racial fault line, while presenting it as a temporary, historically defined, and contingent boundary.
In the French colonies, for example, Africans were legal sujets (subjects), liable to special civil and penal laws, forced labor, and specific taxes. French administrators could sentence African sujets without trial to up to fifteen days of jail. No African political representation was allowed. Yet, to justify the colonial mission and comply with the assimilation ideals, access to the sphere of full citizenship had to be implemented. Examining how these channels opened for Africans helps one to understand how French colonization managed to retain full control of the racial hiatus. In theory, Africans could apply for full French citizenship, granted by a special decree of the French government in Paris. Only a handful of them achieved this before World War II, with the exception of natives of the four communes of Senegal.4 Nevertheless, colonizers resented the possibility as too important a threat to their racial superiority. To prevent Africans from applying for full citizenship, intermediate but subaltern categories were designed in the 1940s. In the Belgian Congo, the administration devised a new status for Africans called évoluants (evolving persons). In Portuguese Angola and Mozambique, such categories existed under the name of assimilados. In the French colonies, the law defined the status of évolué in 1942, explicitly to prevent Africans from demanding full citizenship. Evolués were not French citizens, yet they were not sujets anymore. They could not be submitted to forced labor or to arbitrary arrest, and they could serve as appointed members of the few municipal councils allowed in African urban districts during the same period. However, they were still liable to customary laws and tribunals and not to the French Code civil and Code pénal. Acquiring the status involved holding a primary school diploma, writing a scholarly exam, and passing an administrative inquiry about personal habits, morality, and Westernized standards of living. Not only did the colonial state entirely control the process, but the administrations kept the number of évolués at significantly low numbers. In the two colonies of Gabon and Congo-Brazzaville, for example, fewer than 320 candidates were awarded the status between 1941 and 1946 from a total population of 2.5 million.
In 1946, the newly adopted French Constitution introduced a major rupture in colonial citizenship. Article 44 transformed all former sujets of the French Empire into citizens: “All natives of the French Union [the new name for the French Empire] enjoy the rights and privileges of human beings guaranteed by Articles 1–39 of the present Constitution. All national citizens and all natives in the metropole and overseas territories [the new name for the colonies] enjoy the rights of citizens.”
The racial division between Europeans and Africans apparently dissolved. The new Constitution, however, located legal discrimination at a new level. Articles 80 and 82 provided that Africans would still retain a “personal status” while Europeans (whites) would own “civil status.” Personal status submitted Africans to customary tribunals and restricted their voting privileges and political representation.5 Legal provision established that Africans could freely renounce their “personal status” to acquire “civil status.” In practice, none of the applications were examined by the French administration. As a former high-ranking civil servant of the government of Congo recalls: “The administration bureaus in Brazzaville received thousands of demands [for renunciation of personal status]. They stacked them in filing cabinets and never examined them.”6
The colonial state’s control over the formation of a citizenry remained seemingly undefeated even after Africans were granted access to citizenship and voting rights.
Yet the existence of discursive frameworks concerning human rights, controlled and biased as they were, still provided Africans with a potential entry into the colonial system of references, and, more important, into its contradictions. In the French colonies, the myth of 1789 provided Africans with a surrealist episode of administrative self-celebration and a dramatic moment of exposure. French officials in all parts of the colonies carefully controlled the annual celebration of the 14th of July: It constituted a display of France’s prestige and legitimacy as the “country of human rights.”
Ceremonies began usually with a military salute to the French flag, in the town’s public square, and were followed by marches led by scout organizations, associations, missions, etc. Fireworks and a torch parade formed the high point of the celebration at night. Throughout the day, administrators, officers, and guards kept a close watch for possible disturbances. The 14th of July ceremonies opened a place and time when the colonized could remember the discrepancy between French ideals and the practice of colonial rule and engage in physical confrontation and revolt. Such tension appears in reports of the 14th of July in the local newspapers, such as this one in the Congo colony: “We thank our two dynamic administrators for bringing more aura to the ceremony. We are also happy to note that no incident disturbed the manifestations.”7
The French administration nominated a handful of Africans évolués and chiefs to win a trip to France, where they were greeted as official guests for the ceremonies of the 14th of July in Paris. They then spent a week or two touring France under official guidance and were expected to bring back to Africa living testimonies of the grandeur of the metropole. Most of the guests complied with these expectations, but some, publishing their impressions, brought up embarrassing questions. They wrote about a country where French men and women had shown attention and sympathy to the African delegates. In contrast, the general disregard and attitude of superiority Africans experienced in the colonies led a deputy of Chad to ask a crucial question: Were local colonists real Frenchmen?8 This put the ideological premises of colonization upside down. The white men were not, after all, the guardians or the conveyors of better civilization and human rights. They proved an illegitimate extension of metropolitan France, organizers of domination and racism, unworthy of real French citizenship.
Within the white community itself, the subversive power of human rights promoted internal tensions and divisions. It is important to remember that colonial rule never achieved total and coherent domination over Africans and that the white community, moreover, was divided socially and by conflicting political and ideological projects. During the Etats généraux de la colonisation (1945), the conservative settlers used the rhetoric of the Revolution as a tool against colonial reforms. In contrast, missionary and liberal administrative reforms could point to African women as recipients of new rights and emancipation and launch new legislation on polygamy, bride wealth, marriage, and inheritance, but they did so by strictly limiting their initiatives to narrow, specific segments of the African population.9 A more radical challenge existed among white liberals and Marxists, such as the Groupes d’études communistes, which in the early 1940s initiated the formation of local political workshops for Africans. Some used their positions as teachers to diffuse the concept of revolution and human rights among students and to inject it with a renewed invigorating power, such as this secondary school professor mentioned in a secret police report in 1948, who taught “tendentious opinions during her history classes” and identified “montagnards’ ideas to the ones of contemporary communists.”10
Such provocations proved exceptional. And the myth of 1789, while providing Africans and liberal whites with a potential tool to resist colonial rule, remained essentially ambivalent, used by conservative forces as well as progressive ones. For this reason, African nationalists proved increasingly reluctant to use it during the final period of colonization.
The evolution of the tiny elite of African activists in France, nucleus of the first nationalists who would eventually lead independence movements, is revealing of this trajectory. During an early phase, in the 1920s, students such as Aimé Césaire and Léopold Sédar Senghor and workers such as Lamine Senghor and Tiémoko Kouyaté did not ask for independence but linked the promotion of Africans to the colonial concept of assimilation: access to the sphere of full citizenship and civil and political rights. Lamine Senghor founded in 1926 in Paris a Committee for the Defense of the Negro Race to lobby the government. As early as 1927, the committee split into two constituencies. One, increasingly isolated and weak, carried an enduring assimilationist program. A more radical branch, under the leadership of Lamine Senghor, and later Tiémoko Kouyaté, took on a new name as the Ligue for the Defense of the Negro Race. In 1931, the Ligue published a newspaper named The Cry of the Negroes in reference to the famous newspaper published during the French Revolution, Le Cri du Peuple (The Cry of the People). But the crucial move was that the Ligue had affiliated with the French Communist Party and was pressing for immediate self-government in the colonies.11 Among the African intelligentsia in France—a trend that also held true among African nationalists in the British Empire—Marxist ideas proved a far stronger vehicle than the myths of 1776 or 1789 to formulate nationalist resistance.
Until the late 1950s, most colonial governments in Sub-Saharan Africa resisted the possibility of independence, even though they authorized the emergence of a constitutional life with political parties, trade unions, and partial elections. In this new context, born in part from increasing international criticisms of colonization, and in part from the local emergence of powerful political classes, all metropoles managed to prevent the radicalization of the opposition to imperialism. In French colonies, radical mass uprisings, backed by revolutionary intellectuals, such as the Madagascar revolt (1947) and the Sanaga rebellion in Cameroon (1955–1962), were immediately and forcefully smashed. In the Ivory Coast, the administration harassed the politicians of the Rassemblement démocratique africain, a pan-African party whose deputies had allied themselves with the French Communist Party in the National Assembly, until its leader, Félix Houphouët-Boigny, disengaged from the strategic alliance in 1950 and pursued collaborative policies. In Kenya, the Mau-Mau rebellion was ruthlessly repressed by British armed forces from 1955 to 1962. In these processes of controlled decolonization, independence was managed as a transfer of power from colonial governments anxious to avoid wars like those in Indochina and Algeria (France) to moderate African parties.
This is one of the reasons why, in the 1950s and 1960s, radical changes of regimes and/or social structures initiated by large mass movements were very few. Even later, no real popular revolutions happened in Africa. The violent independence wars in Angola, Mozambique, Zambia, and Zimbabwe (formerly Rhodesia) extended over long periods of time, and in the case of Angola and Mozambique, degenerated into armed civil conflicts among Africans. Mass resistance to apartheid in South Africa also lasted several decades, until its final victory in 1990. The final transfer of power from the Afrikaner government to the African National Congress was embedded in, and carefully complied with, constitutional reforms and procedures. In most independence cases, if the dramatic changes in the government personnel as well as the general democratization and the mass participation in civil and political life for Africans can be described as revolutionary, the process of change at the top of the government can hardly be. In other cases, radical changes triggered by popular uprisings soon transformed into the monopolization of power by a restrained political elite (Ethiopia, 1974) and a top-down, authoritarian imposition of social reforms over society. It is therefore difficult to trace the role of human rights ideas in a context where the emergence of strong civil mass movements almost never existed.
Even when political uprisings were labeled “revolutions,” the rhetoric of human rights proved to back extremely conservative changes. One striking example is the Hutu uprising in Rwanda in 1959, misread as a democratic “revolution” by Belgian administrators. Instead of promoting the emergence of a vigorous, homogenous civil society in this small country, the 1959 revolution locked Rwanda into racial hatred and dehumanization. In the mid-1950s, young Hutu intellectuals from the Parmehutu party, backed by dissatisfied Hutu peasants, denounced the political and social domination of the Tutsi. The Tutsi, imagined as the “natural” elite in Rwanda by Europeans at the end of the nineteenth century, had been granted extensive privileges and had been transformed from a fluid socioeconomic category into a racial group monopolizing authority over the Hutu, perceived by colonial experts as an inferior race of peasants. Cast in ethnic terms directly derived from the ethnicized structures of public power organized by colonialists, the 1959 Hutu mobilization won the paradoxical support of the Belgians. While the Belgians continued to see the Tutsi as the natural patricians of Rwanda, they became convinced that a democratization process was necessary. Such a shift would lead to the decline of the nobility (the Tutsi minority) and transform the Hutu majority into the natural and legitimate source of political sovereignty. The problem, of course, was that these two categories were still cast in racial terms. In November 1959, when Hutu militants organized violent uprisings against the Tutsi, the Belgian government appropriated a revolutionary analytical framework to promote access to central and local power for the Hutu. Colonel Guy Logiest, the key man of the Belgian armed forces in Rwanda, declared later: “Some among my assistants thought that I was wrong in being so partial against the Tutsi . . . Today, twenty-five years later, I ask myself what was it that made me act with such resolution. It was without doubt the will to give the people back their dignity. And it was probably just as much the desire to put down the morgue and expose the duplicity of a basically oppressive and unjust aristocracy.”12 The revolution that ended in 1960–1962 with the political victory of the Hutu and the independence of Rwanda led to mass killings and the mass exodus of Tutsi to neighboring countries and constituted a key phase in the racial gridlock of Rwandan politics.
By and large, African independences created regimes that reproduced the features of colonial power. In most countries, the state retained a disproportionate amount of authority, and within the dominant ideology of decolonization, Africans were still perceived as collective groups and legal communities rather than persons with individual rights.
The political project that dominated African decolonization rested upon the consolidation of unified, viable nations and the promises of economic development. In this context, the goal of nationalists was to promote the right of Africans to become legal communities: Parties and leaders focused primarily on “peoples’ rights,” not on individual rights. Colonization had ruled over Africans perceived as collective, backward masses. To some extent, decolonization fought back along the same framework, promoting the rise of the colonized as oppressed communities. The 1955 Bandung Conference organized in Indonesia by Nehru unfolded as an anti-Berlin event, to overturn the moment when colonized continents and peoples had been rejected from legal international existence. Bandung participants condemned colonialism in terms that combined Marxist influences and eighteenth-century revolutionary rhetoric: “The Afro-Asiatic man should conquer a world citizenship, from which he had been exiled by colonization. Afro-Asiatic peoples are the world’s proletariat.”13 The fusion of these two revolutionary traditions encouraged a vision of rights as those of communities and nations taken as a whole, a vision shared by Western liberals and conservatives since the days of the 1941 Atlantic Charter.14
This agenda successfully legitimized the rise of authoritarian regimes claiming to protect the consolidation of their fragile nations and denying rights to any political opposition that could weaken national unity. In the first years of independence, strong anti-imperialist statements warned against neocolonialist plots and stressed the necessity for the continent to free itself of all economic, political, and cultural Western influences. For decades, many African intellectuals along with the international community brought their support to this project.15 The trend culminated in the creation of the Organization of African Unity (OAU) in 1963, whose first task was to recognize and freeze all national frontiers and reinforce the stability of existing governments. The OAU refused to adopt the UN 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights and wrote its own declaration, known as the Banjul Charter, twenty years later (1981). The charter recognized the rights of the individual and his or her freedom of conscience, religion, information, and speech. The document, however, also spelled out duties for every individual, “towards his family and society, the State and other legally recognized communities and the international community.” Article 29 specified that “every individual must also preserve and strengthen positive African cultural values” and should “contribute to the best of his ability, at all times and at all levels, to the promotion and achievement of African unity.”16
The Banjul Charter’s invocation of the individual’s duty to defend his or her community was less a liberation from Western hegemony than a culminating moment in the state’s tentative monopoly over human rights. This pattern had been established by colonial rule. What human rights exist when individuals are denied the right to stand against their own community? Can human rights subsist when the state claims to be their only legitimate provider and arbitrator? In numerous African countries governments use human rights as an ideological tool directed toward civil society as well as a convenient facade to placate international scrutiny. In Congo-Brazzaville, for example, the government established in the early 1990s a Ministry for Democratic Culture and Human Rights that claimed to promote information and action; however, human rights violations by the state did not decline during this period, nor were precarious individual rights significantly strengthened.
Here appears again the fundamental ambivalence of the concept. Implementing human rights can be a political project, a moral agenda, and a collective ideal. In this sense, state agencies can legitimately carry forth such a program. But the rise of human rights also emerged historically as a particular configuration of politics as a specific relationship between the state and citizens. In the West, they helped articulate the rights of individual citizens as a powerful protection against potential state abuses. Today, African states largely function as dictatorships. Concentrating wealth and retaining a monopoly on legitimate violence, they present considerable threats to the freedom of individuals, while claiming to bear the sole initiative in handling human rights. The fact that some try to channel and capture legal recourse against state violence is, in this perspective, deeply troubling. The argument that human rights belong to a European project of cultural imperialism, and as such should be refused by Africans, is generally beneficial to dominant, not to dominated, categories within modern African nations.17 For many observers of African politics, the main continuity of the nationalist period was not an enduring, neocolonial influence of the West over Africa but a more surreptitious neocolonialism from within, that of an authoritarian, unchallenged state rule.
The late 1980s and early 1990s witnessed momentous changes in Africa. Apartheid came to an end in South Africa. Elsewhere, authoritarian regimes were overthrown, and in a number of countries (Gabon, Congo-Brazzaville, Congo-Kinshasa, Benin) a wave of national conferences debated the refashioning of national politics, public life, and civil liberties. Scholars predicted a “second independence” in Africa: After the “nationalist paradigm,” political initiatives were to be based on the liberation of civil society and the democratization of politics. Visions of the future moved from the postindependence ideas of nation building at any cost, while considering human and civil rights as an unnecessary luxury. Local intellectuals strongly denounced the abuses of dictatorial regimes, and many withdrew their support or remained silent.18 A dynamic, autonomous, and outspoken press flourished in countries where only official newspapers had been previously authorized.
International pressures also contributed to a changing human rights environment. Western financial and technical aid has become increasingly contingent on democratization efforts in Africa. Humanitarian initiatives discounted previous hesitations that had prevailed in interfering directly in domestic affairs: In Somalia or Liberia, aid interventions proved more and more visible and publicized, contributing to a general phenomenon labeled as “a proliferation of humanitarian aid” by political commentators on African affairs. More important, aid provided by Western governments, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and UN missions clearly targeted helpless individuals and civilians. Multilateral support adopted a new facade, bypassing intergovernmental deals to publicize direct access to citizens.
By the mid-1990s, however, bright hopes gave way to strong feelings of pessimism. From April to August 1994, the presence of UN, and later French, troops, who had been instructed not to interfere in Rwanda during the genocide, gave a terrible picture of the powerlessness of humanitarian structures. The Rwandan tragedy unfolded as a dramatic moment of ultimate denial of human rights through the systematic dehumanization of the victims and their ruthless killings orchestrated by Rwandan political extremists. International aid created further problems. When a Tutsi army took power in Kigali, millions of Hutu left the country. Refugee camps opened in eastern Zaire a few kilometers from the Rwandan frontier and unwillingly, but unavoidably, gave shelter to perpetrators of the genocide. Within a few weeks, extremists had managed to intimidate refugees, channeled food and drugs to buy weapons, and organized guerrillas to attack the new government in Rwanda. In 1996, Rwandan and Zairian soldiers attacked the camps in retaliation, killed thousands of refugees, and forced hundreds of thousands in Zaire to flee; many of whom starved to death. An apocalyptic failure had presided over the Great Lake crisis—a crisis that raised questions about the lack of political vision, historical advising, and clear agenda among international humanitarian agencies. No wonder recent conferences on humanitarian aid in Africa have placed the problem of “impunity” and the crisis of humanitarian aid on the agenda.19
In other parts of Africa, the democratization waves of the 1990s often ended up reinforcing previous regimes and strengthening state violence over individuals and communities. Numerous ethnic, political, economic, and ideological conflicts suggest that individuals, too, can impede human rights. The new European wars demonstrate that this is hardly, of course, an African particularity.
With the exception of South Africa, where human rights movements are strong, do such failures point out a structural weakness of African civil societies? If the mobilization around human rights is a good indicator of the strength of civil society and its capacity to crystallize against the state, does the apparent absence of recent victories condemn African citizenries to failure? Some scholars think so, and argue that African societies are primarily organized along patron/client relationships, reinforcing the strength of the powerful and preventing an autonomous civil society from challenging the state’s authority. But this is far from certain. The daily battles of African NGOs, intellectuals, and journalists remind us that Africa is no more constrained by determinist trends than any other part of the world. And to a large extent the long and ironic development of human rights on this continent demonstrates that the reinforcement of civil societies in the face of state violence is first and foremost bound to changing, historical rapports de force.
The fact that historians and social scientists still have tremendous difficulties presenting these facts to most Westerners, who are usually ready to acknowledge the shortcomings of Western rule but remain strongly convinced of the positive integration of Africa in the global world, is a tribute to the power and endurance of the civilizing-mission myth.
“First we must study how colonization works to decivilize the colonizer, to brutalize him in the true sense of the word, to awaken him to buried instincts, to covetousness, violence, race hatred, and moral relativism...” Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism (Paris: 1955; trans. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972), 13.
They were primarily invoked to forbid any paramount chief and indigenous judicial system to use punishments, such as torture, mutilation, or death sentences, that did not comply with European “civilized” moral standards. Because French ideology explicitly used human rights and the myth of the 1789 revolution to impose its domination in Africa, we will use this case in a more extensive fashion.
In 1918, natives of the four communes of Senegal were granted French citizenship for complex historical reasons, the main one being the participation of African soldiers of French West Africa in World War I. They remained a tiny minority in French West Africa.
Whites under civil status and Africans under personal status voted in two separate colleges. Each college elected one deputy to the National Assembly in Paris. As local assemblies were organized in the colonies, the white population (Civil status) was granted a disproportionate number of local deputies (usually twelve against eighteen for the total African population). In the black electoral college, voting privileges were restricted to a minority of Africans who enjoyed personal status.
Interview with Pierre Bas, Paris, 1989.
Semaine de l‘AEF (Brazzaville), August 21, 1954, 103. See Marc Michel, “Mémoire officielle, discours et pratique coloniale. Le 14 juillet et le 11 novembre au Senegal entre les deux guerres,” Revue française d’histoire d‘outre-mer 77, no. 287 (1990): 145–58. On British rituals and ceremonies in Africa, see Terence Ranger’s chapter in The Invention of Tradition, ed. Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983).
Tao Thomas, “Souvenir du 14 juillet,” Le Progrès politique, économique et social du Moyen-Congo 12 (1956): 1–4.
However, most administrators worried about the emergence of free and “amoral” women in the colonies. They prevented women from settling in the cities and promoted patriarchal control in the countryside.
Daily Report, Sûreté, Direction des Affaires politiques, Government General of French Equatorial Africa. December 21, 1948. Archives Nationales, section outre-mer, Aix-en-Provence, 5D 241. Montagnards refers to the most radical constituency of French revolutionaries between 1792 and 1795.
In 1933, after the Nazi victory in Germany, the Communist International generally backed a strategy of building a common antifascist front. The Ligue for the Defense of the Negro Race returned to neo-assimilationism, defending French ideas of universalism against the fascist threat. For details, see the excellent study of Philippe Dewitte, Les mouvements nègres en France, 1919–1939 (Paris: Karthala, 1985).
Quoted in Gérard Prunier, The Rwanda Crisis: History of a Genocide (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 49.
Malice Beanbag, quoted in Elikia M’Bokolo, Afrique Noire, Histoire et Civilisations , vol. 2: XIXe-XXe siècles (Paris: Hatier-Aupelf, 1992), 451.
In August 1941, Roosevelt and Churchill pronounced the Atlantic Charter and proclaimed the right of self-determination for all peoples.
One example is the Nigerian political scientist, see Claude Ake, Social Science as Imperialism: A Theory of Political Development (Ibadan: Ibadan University Press, 1974).
The second part of the Banjul Charter established a Commission on Human and People’s Rights (Articles 30–62). The African Charter on Human and People’s Rights (New York: United Nations, 1990).
Goran Hyden, “The Challenges of Domesticating Rights in Africa,” in Human Rights and Governance in Africa, ed. Ronald Cohen, Goran Hyden, and Winston P. Nagan (Gainesville: The University of Florida Press, 1993), 261–62; Rhoda E. Howard in Human Rights in Commonwealth Africa (Totowa, N.J.: Rowman & Littlefield, 1986), particularly pp. 1–36.
Goran Hyden, chapter on academic freedom, and concluding chapter, in Human Rights and Governance in Africa, 235–80.
Human rights associations from twenty-two countries (seventeen from Africa) met in Ouagadougou (Burkina Faso) in March 1996 to debate human rights and impunity in Africa. See the report in Politique Africaine 62 (1996): 95–102.