Religion and the Inculturation of Human Rights in Ghana

Abamfo Ofori Atiemo

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781472589934
• eBook ISBN: 9781441134561
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: African History

It has been maintained that the secular nature of modern human rights makes them incompatible with the religious orientation of African and non-Western societies. However, in view of the resilience of religion in the global and local public sphere, it is important to explore how religion can contribute to the promotion and enjoyment of human rights. Based on fieldwork conducted in Ghana, Abamfo Ofori Atiemo here establishes a convergence between human rights and local religious and cultural values in African societies. He argues that human rights represent universal 'dream values'. This allows for a cultural embedding of human rights in Ghana and other non-Western societies. He argues that 'dream values' are usually presented in religious language and proclaimed, for example, by prophets and seers or expressed in certain forms of taboo, proverbs or legal norms. He employs the concept of inculturation, adaptation of the way Church teachings are presented to non-Christian cultures, as a hermeneutical tool for developing a model to understand the encounter between universal human rights and local cultures. Offering a new model for explaining the relation between religion and human rights, Religion and the Inculturation of Human Rights in Ghana offers a novel perspective on the links between global trends and local cultures underpinned by strong currents of religious ideas.

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Introduction: Embedding Human Rights in Local Cultures – An African Imperative

A critical development in international affairs in modern times is the evolution of human rights law into an overarching ethical framework guiding interpersonal and interstate relations. The notion that all human beings are the concern of the global community, and that the violation of the rights of anyone anywhere, is a violation of international law is indeed revolutionary. The global conviction is that when the human rights of all people are assured, conflicts will be minimized and the peace and stability of the world will improve.

This development has also affected Africa. Human rights have become prominent in the politics of Africa, and although in some instances politicians have argued against what they perceive to be an imposition of a foreign understanding of human rights on their people, most African countries are signatories to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), and several other instruments. With the coming into being of the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights (ACHPR),¹ Africa has not only voted in favour of a global human rights regime but has also made a distinctive contribution to its development. In spite of the criticisms² the Charter has attracted, it serves as evidence that African states take seriously the global concern for the implementation of human rights and are ready to submit to a common standard for holding their governments accountable on issues of human rights.

African governments have also become more sensitive to their democratic and human rights credentials than they used to be in the immediate post-independence period up to about the early 1990s. The linking of human rights to development cooperation,³ the proliferation of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) dedicated to advocacy for the rights of the marginalized and the fresh attempts to re-establish constitutional rule in Africa have combined to give a new impetus to the pursuit of human rights. Consequently, African nations have been quick to sign human rights instruments.⁴ Ghana, for example, is said to have been the first country to ratify the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC).

Yet the ratification of human rights instruments does not normally translate into compliance by states. There is often a gap between human rights laws that are supposed to be in force and their application. Weiss and Jacobson have identified some factors that undermine the capacity of nations to implement international treaties.⁵ They include the lack of administrative capacity, absence of rigorous enforcement mechanisms and unfavourable political and economic environment. African nations face additional challenges. They are also confronted by factors such as high rate of illiteracy and the persistence of cultural and customary beliefs and attitudes that restrict the growth of a healthy human rights regime.

Since the 1960s, most African countries have been in transition from originally separate ethnic states to modern democratic nation-states. The long period of transition has meant that the customary arrangements for the enforcement of norms such as those that could assure basic human rights have been allowed to lie fallow, while modern equivalents have not been properly integrated. For example, in Ghana, which forms the immediate context of this work, human rights issues have largely been the concern of a few lawyers, politicians and NGOs. In most cases, ordinary citizens do not seem enthusiastic about pursuing their own rights or those of others; or, if they are concerned, they often do not have the capacity to pursue them.

Due to this general apathy, or incapacity (as the case may very well be), many violations of human rights continue to occur. Reports issued periodically by institutions reveal extensive abuse of human rights in Ghana.⁶ It appears that the human rights of people are so easily denied to them or abused, especially by governments and their institutions, because many citizens seem to have no sense of being entitled to them. Traditional customary norms, administrative bottlenecks, poverty and physical and psychological distance between the people and state agencies serve as barriers to the realization of human rights. However, if the human rights regime is to enjoy any good fortune in Africa, and for that matter, Ghana, the concept must acquire a clearer contextual meaning and expression.⁷

Religion and human rights

The modern human rights system seeks to achieve for the world general ethical and legal principles to which everybody would subscribe, and which when upheld and protected can lead to stability between and within nations. This means that modern human rights may be regarded as a tool for social engineering. They aim at the transformation of the behaviour of people and societies to conform to the ideals they represent. Human rights have often been presented as a legal issue. Yet legal regimes alone have not ensured adequate protection of human rights.⁸ Legislation and legal enforcement alone have not always proved sufficiently effective in changing people’s behaviour and transforming societies.⁹ In fact, the law and institutions related to it have sometimes been used to legitimize and maintain ‘policies and practices of political exclusion and marginalization of minorities or economically disadvantaged groups throughout Africa’.¹⁰ Although once a law is passed, it may be considered valid, even so its provisions may not necessarily enjoy automatic compliance.¹¹ The mere existence of a law does not ensure effective enforcement. Voluntary compliance with the law is better assured when laws fit properly into the value system of a society.

Value systems often converge with custom and religion. This raises the question of the role of religion in the promotion of human rights. According to Gerrie ter Haar,

it is becoming clear that legal instruments are not enough if human rights are to be firmly grounded in different cultures, as people’s understanding of human rights is informed by their own world views and cosmologies. It is plain that in many countries human rights ideology finds its theoretical justification in religion.¹²

The position taken here does not represent a diminishing of the significance of the law in the promotion and protection of human rights. The law is important, among other things, for the implementation and enforcement of human rights norms.¹³

Human rights have been thought of in various previous declarations as ‘natural’, ‘self-evident’, and ‘Creator-endorsed’.¹⁴ From the very beginning, the framers of human rights instruments sought to ground them in foundations. Conventional attempts to ground human rights seek to provide grand foundations that presume a universal validity.¹⁵ Instead of such a grand scheme, we propose what may be called a ‘validating foundation’. This is slightly different from foundationalism in the conventional sense. What we call a ‘validating foundation’ refers to grounds from which human rights could draw their legitimacy in a given context. In agreement with Gutmann, we maintain that ‘there is . . . good reason for a human rights regime to welcome a plurality of nonexclusive claims concerning the ways in which human rights can legitimately be grounded, in religious and secular claims of various sorts.’¹⁶ We shall discuss in detail the idea of a validating foundation in the next chapter.

Modern formulations that are contained in such instruments as the UDHR and related covenants as well as most regional instruments, avoid the use of explicit religious categories. Yet the attempt to construct a purely secular scheme of human rights seems ruined by the use of such terms and phrases as, ‘inherent dignity . . . of all members of the human family’ and ‘the dignity and worth of the person’. For example, the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights (1986) states, as part of its preamble, that ‘fundamental human rights stem from the attributes of human beings’. In relation to human rights, the human being is also spoken of as being ‘sacred’ and ‘inviolable’. Based on a critical examination of such terms and phrases, Perry concludes that human rights are ‘ineliminably religious’.¹⁷ He rejects Dworkin’s position that there can be secular versions of the conviction that every human being is sacred.¹⁸

While we do not take sides in this debate, we proceed on the conviction that in the case of Africa, establishing essential and relevant linkages between religion and human rights is crucial. The purely secular presentation of the concept does not fit the context of African societies in which religion remains the point of reference for most fundamental issues. In Ghana, for example, the religious factor has always exerted considerable influence on processes of social transformation because the culture is largely religious.¹⁹ In most of sub-Sahara Africa, religion and customary norms remain the immediate context within which strictly personal matters related to important stages in life are settled.²⁰ Hence, if, in the promotion of human rights, the religious factor is neglected, these rights will continue to remain unenforceable claims that the intellectual elites make on behalf of the masses that neither know about them nor understand them.

Admittedly, religions may not be ‘easy allies to engage’; yet ‘the struggle for human rights cannot be won without them, particularly in Africa’.²¹ The human rights record of many religious traditions over the years has been very poor. It has not been easy for them to accommodate human rights in their theologies. With respect to issues of gender equality, the right of people to change their religion and the treatment of minorities, religious traditions have been found wanting in the past.²² Nevertheless, these traditions have rich resources that can be harnessed to serve the interest of human rights. Witte Jr. sees religions as ‘indispensable allies in the modern struggle for human rights’.²³ Focusing, mainly, on Ghana, this book discusses how religion may help, or is already helping, in the inculturation of human rights in African societies. It is basically, an explorative work, seeking ways in which the largely religious cultural environment of contemporary Ghana may translate, or is already translating, the modern concept of human rights into its peculiar context without undermining the concept’s universal orientation.

Inculturation – our hermeneutical model

Although the term ‘inculturation’ has its origins in Christian theology, ‘religion’ in this work is not limited to Christianity. The focus is not on any specific religious tradition, but on ‘popular religion’ in Ghana, which has several strands that converge in common beliefs and practices and which generates important attitudes that cut across the various traditions. Thus our use of the term denotes religion that is common to a people but which is not institutionalized in a formal way. This is close in meaning to what Robin Williams has called ‘common religion’.²⁴ However, whereas Williams had in mind something similar to what has been designated elsewhere as ‘civil religion’, what we call ‘popular religion’ only shares with his ‘common religion’ the idea of a ‘religion that is common to a people’. The phenomenon we refer to as ‘popular religion’ is ‘common’ in the sense of a shared ‘set of ideas, rituals and symbols’ as used by Williams and ‘common’ in the sense of ‘those beliefs and practices of overtly religious nature which are not under the domination of a prevailing religious institution’, as used by Robert Towler.²⁵ ‘Popular religion’ is the realm from which most Ghanaians, ordinarily, draw resources to explain events and attempt to cope with life’s challenges. Largely, it forms the substratum of what we have described in this work as a ‘common Ghanaian culture’, which is hybrid and evolving (Chapter 4). Our discussion of the concept of ‘popular religion’ is revisited in Chapters 2 and 5.

The decision to use inculturation rather than the more general term enculturation, used in the social sciences, is deliberate. The relatively wide and growing acceptance of inculturation in theological discourse has already marked it out as a technical term with its own peculiar nuances employed in a field related to the study of religion. Indeed, one of the most notable usages of the term outside the context of Christian theology was by Gerrie ter Haar in her inaugural lecture where she talked about the ‘inculturation of human rights’.²⁶ Africa has, sometimes, been denied the claim that human rights are part of its indigenous cultural value systems.²⁷ Therefore, it is important to explore concepts cognate to human rights that existed in Africa before 1948, the year of the promulgation of the UDHR. However, it is even more important to explore elements in contemporary cultures that may facilitate a purposeful conversation with international human rights norms.

Ter Haar has argued forcefully in support of Vaclav Havel, calling for the highlighting of ‘the spiritual dimension and spiritual origins of the values guarded by the United Nations’ and their translation into the ‘organization’s practical activities’.²⁸ The basis of her argument is that the purely secular expression of human rights does not appear to be sufficiently meaningful to many cultures since the ‘human being’ – the central concern of human rights – is conceived by most cultures in religious terms. ‘Clearly’, she states, ‘if we wish for a successful inculturation of human rights, we must give serious thought to the role played by religion’.²⁹

Other people share Ter Haar’s views. In an article published in 1992, the Jewish Rabbi Julia Neuberger called on British Jews, Christians and Muslims, ‘who see themselves as within the prophetic tradition’ to press for the incorporation of the European Convention of Human Rights in British Law. She traced the ‘prophetic’ origins of human rights and argued for a commitment to human rights inspired by the prophets.³⁰ Pobee, in outlining what he calls ‘wells of Living Water’ from which human rights may flow, makes the following points among others: That ‘religion of one type or the other is a living spring of life, especially of homo africanus, and therefore has a special place in the nurturing and fostering of human rights’; and that ‘a tested and renewed...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series
• 1 Introduction: Embedding Human Rights in Local Cultures – An African Imperative
• 2 Religion and Human Rights: Linking Tradition and Modernity
• 3 Inculturating Human Rights: The Localization of a Global Culture
• 4 Does Ghana have a Common Culture? Exploring Historical Processes of a National Identity Construction
• 5 Locating Religion in Ghana: Exploring the Contours of Spiritual Capital
• 6 Human Rights in Traditional Ghana: Exploring Indigenous Ideas of Human Dignity and Rights
• 7 Human Rights in Contemporary Ghana: Fruitions and Possibilities
• 8 Translating Human Rights in Ghana: Rooting a Secular Idea in a Religious World View
• 9 Conclusion: Religion and the Inculturation of Human Rights in Ghana
• Notes
• Appendix
• Bibliography
• Index