Human Rights in Africa

An interpretative history of human rights in Africa, exploring indigenous rights traditions, anti-slavery, anti-colonialism, post-colonial violations and pro-democracy movements.

Bonny Ibhawoh (Author)

9781107016316, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 25 January 2018

254 pages, 8 b/w illus.
23.5 x 15.7 x 1.7 cm, 0.54 kg

'How can human rights be universal if they originate in one place or are applied to only sector of humanity? This and related questions have occupied scholars of rights in and outside of Africa for generations. Bonny Ibhawoh's exciting new work sweeps past this redundancy by delving deeply into rights-based rhetoric, argument, and mobilization by Africans transnationally and transregionally. Ibhawoh connects rights visionaries of the African and diasporic past to the political challenges of the present in provocative and innovative ways and has written highly readable and teachable book.' Benjamin N. Lawrance, Rochester Institute of Technology

Human rights have a deep and tumultuous history that culminates in the age of rights we live in today, but where does Africa's story fit in with this global history? Here, Bonny Ibhawoh maps this story and offers a comprehensive and interpretative history of human rights in Africa. Rather than a tidy narrative of ruthless violators and benevolent protectors, this book reveals a complex account of indigenous African rights traditions embodied in the wisdom of elders and sages; of humanitarians and abolitionists who marshalled arguments about natural rights and human dignity in the cause of anti-slavery; of the conflictual encounters between natives and colonists in the age of Empire and the 'civilizing mission'; of nationalists and anti-colonialists who deployed an emergent lexicon of universal human rights to legitimize longstanding struggles for self-determination, and of dictators and dissidents locked in struggles over power in the era of independence and constitutional rights.

1. Visions and disputes
2. Elders and sages
3. Humanitarians and abolitionists
4. Natives and colonists
5. Nationalists and anti-colonists
6. Dictators and dissidents
7. Old struggles and new causes.

Subject Areas: Human rights [JPVH], African history [HBJH]