Human rights critique in post-colonial Africa: practices among Luo in Western Kenya

Abstract

This paper is written at a time when post-colonial Kenya has largely embraced the language of rights as both a means and an end to organising twenty-first century states and societies. The idea of rights traverses the human rights discourse as theory and builds on notions of ethnography of the particular. The post-colonial African subjects of human rights develop these notions of human rights by living a life of betwixt: by mingling the “modern” and “traditional” into a genre of rights they produce an approach that is not necessarily reflected in the United Nations-centred international human rights instruments. The paper calls for a re-reading of human rights in post-colonial Africa, not based on its philosophical origins or traces of “African imprints,” but rather by observing how ordinary people import, recast and produce ideas of human rights in their life worlds and everyday Kenya. This is what I call post-colonial critique.