The Right to Development in the African Human Rights System

Serges Djoyou Kamga

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351142465
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Droit
• Subtopic: Théorie et pratique du droit

The right to development (RTD) seeks to address global inequities hidden in world politics and global institutions through the game of influences played by powerful actors. The negative impacts of the Atlantic slave trade, colonialism, and the subjugation of Africa through globalisation and its institutions are key factors that have caused Africa and African people claiming their RTD.

This book examines how the African continent protects the right to development, examining the nature of the RTD and controversies surrounding it and how it is implemented. The book then goes onto explore the RTD at the regional level including through the jurisprudence of the African Commission and the African Court on Human Rights, at the sub-regional level including in sub-regional courts and tribunals, at the national levels through case studies and through the African Union governance institutions. Through this examination, the author unveils what are the prospects and challenges to the realisation of the RTD in Africa.

1 Introduction

1.1. Introduction and overview

There is a plethora of scholarly works and especially books on the right to development (RTD). Nevertheless, these books focus mostly on the RTD at the global level. Although there are some chapters in books¹ and articles² on the RTD in Africa, the only book on the RTD on the continent is a 34-page book written back in 1989³ when the contents and the justiciability of the RTD were yet to be tested. Therefore, there is absolutely no doubt that there is a gap on the literature on RTD in the African human rights system. This book seeks to close this gap by providing the first volume that explores the RTD in its entirety in Africa. This introductory chapter is divided into five parts including this introduction. The second part examines the historical development of the RTD; the third subsection focuses on its theoretical foundation; the fourth part presents the scope of the book and the fifth part provides concluding remarks.

1.2. The right to development: historical background

To trace the historical background of the RTD, it is important to understand the subjugation of Africa through the slave trade, colonialism and the economic alienation of Africa in post-colonial time.

1.2.1. The slave trade

Through slave trade that could be qualified as the most shameful trade of all times, or rather ‘the moral decay of the modern world’⁴ African people were exploited, abused and dehumanised. They were brutalised and sold like cattle; their families which are ‘the epicenter of African social existence’⁵ and the glue that hold communities together, were broken. Cultures and traditions were destroyed or to use Ama’s words, Africans were victims of a ‘cultural genocide’⁶ as they were loaded into ships to be taken across the Atlantic as slaves. In this process of ‘destruction of black civilisation’,⁷ the continent lost its men and women power, its human resources that could have been used for its development.⁸ The shipping of Africans (mostly men) from the continent reduced the population of Africa. In this respect, although Africa is huge in terms of land, its population is less than 800 million and the slave trade played a major role in depopulating the continent, even though some human lives were lost to wars and diseases.⁹

Moreover, as result of slave trade, African people lost their dignity. In his analysis of the South African example, Terreblanche shows how the Dutch, Portuguese, English and the French stole the dignity or self-worth of the South African people by trading them like mere animals while stealing their resources to build the global North.¹⁰

Similarly, West African communities were devastated. Out of about 12 million Africans shipped across the Atlantic, almost 6.3 million were from West Africa.¹¹ Like in Southern Africa, the West of the continent was torn apart and looted by the architects of the slave trade who captured the populations and their freedoms through ‘wars and raiding expeditions’ to use Falola’s words.¹² The impact of the slave trade on Africa in general cannot be overemphasised. Taking Africans from their communities was disruptive ‘to traditional patterns of trade and seasonal movements’.¹³ Nunn demonstrates the direct correlation between present-day Africa’s development challenges and the slave trade.¹⁴ He provides empirical evidence to the fact that the poorest African countries are those that produced the highest number of slaves.¹⁵

Even though a narrow African political elite was involved in and sustained the slave trade for their self-interest, the entire trade was informed by a Western-sponsored global economy in which Africans were to provide the labour force, Europe the capital and the Americas the land to produce sugar cane, cotton and tobacco.¹⁶ Consequently, as correctly observed by Falola, ‘[t]he African chiefs, no matter how much blame is apportioned to them, neither created this global economy nor served as its main financial managers’¹⁷ or its main architects. Some of these local agents who participated in the transatlantic slave trade were either forced to be involved, or threatened or corrupt, but they were never the primary designers of the capitalist system which needed the shipping of Africans across the Atlantic to survive.

In the final analysis, not only the Atlantic slave trade has frustrated Africa’s development throughout the four centuries of its operations, it has equally prepared the ground for further underdevelopment by Europeans through colonialism.

1.2.2. Colonialism

Subsequent to the slave trade, in 1884 in Berlin, the African continent was shared like a piece of cake by Western powers. Qualified as savage in need of ‘civilisation’, the peoples of Africa witnessed the entry of colonial masters in their territories. Building on the legacy of the slave trade, these invaders orchestrated the destruction of local communities and cultural identity as well as intensive looting of lands and other resources.¹⁸ The nature of forced labour used by colonialists to build infrastructure to export African goods and resources was similar to the one used by slave masters on farms and other enterprises. Echoing Lovejoy and Hogendorn,¹⁹ Falola points out that during the colonial area, the global quest for African goods and resources informed the continued reliance on ‘slave labor to produce and carry raw materials to the coastal cities’, and consequently ‘slavery had a slow death, surviving in some places till the 1930s’.²⁰ This is to say, the replacement of slavery by colonialism did not see the end of enslavement of Africans as numerous colonial administrations replicated slavery labour practices crafted in blatant inequity.²¹

The other highlight of colonialism was the implementation of Western-style administration and education. Although not always responsive to local realities, the Western-style administration was imposed on people who adapted or sank. The entire initiative was characterised by extreme violence and death. This is evidenced by the letters from Jarvis, a volunteer in Rhodes’s settler-army, during the establishment of the colony Rhodesia (current Zimbabwe).²² Explaining the situation to his family, Jarvis wrote:

I hope the natives will be pretty well exterminated. There are 5500 niggers in this district and … our plan of campaign will probably be to proceed against this lot and wipe them out, then move towards Bulawayo wiping out every nigger and every kraal we can find … you can be sure that there will be no quarter and everything black will have to die, for our men’s blood is fairly up.²³

Similarly in West Africa and specifically in Nigeria, brutality and extreme aggressiveness were the methods which led to the death of numerous kings who dared to resist the penetration of colonial masters.²⁴ Any resistance to such penetration was described as ‘barbaric’ acts of violence by ‘primitive’ people and needed to be addressed with more ferocity.²⁵ This clearly demonstrates the cruelty of the process which was simply inacceptable.

Even though the colonial masters invested in infrastructure and education, the former was generally made of roads needed to take the looted resources from the farm or mines to the habour and the so called-education aimed to teach Western languages to local people in order to communicate with them, brain-wash them and colonise ‘every aspect of [their] lives including their consciousness, mind, memory and intellect’.²⁶ In other words, infrastructure building in Africa was informed by Western interests and not the need to empower the native populations who after all did not really matter.²⁷ In reality, the underdevelopment of Africa was engineered by the colonial masters who disguised their evil deeds by building so-called infrastructure which ultimately aimed to ensure their supremacy.²⁸ In the process, they physically removed people from their land and natural resources. Daes writes:

The legacy of colonialism is probably most acute in the area of expropriation of indigenous lands, territories and resources for national economic and development interests. In every part of the globe, indigenous peoples are being impeded from proceeding with their own forms of development consistent with their own values, perspectives and interests.²⁹

Moreover, they developed a negative narrative on Africa to convince Africans and the world that people are of less value. Mbembe explains the narrative in these words:

the African human experience constantly appears in the discourse of our times as an experience that can only be understood through a negative interpretation. Africa is never seen as possessing things and attributes properly part of ‘human nature’. Or,...