Six chapters dealing with human rights in selected African states are sandwiched in this book between sections on ‘the democracy project’. E. Ike Udogu examines South Africa, Kenya, Ethiopia, Mozambique, Liberia and Nigeria – a good geographic spread across the 48 Sub-Saharan states, though not focused on countries with the most massive human rights abuses. He concentrates primarily on protection of civil and political rights. His ambitions are high. However, the results fall short of what might have been achieved.
Examining Human Rights Issues and the Democracy Project reflects the strengths and weaknesses of Udogu's primary source. He draws overwhelmingly from the 2010 US State Department's ‘Reports of Human Rights Practices’. Published annually since 1977, these voluminous analyses have strengths of continuity, geographic breadth and detail. The country reports give far less attention to economic rights than to civil and political rights, however. The State Department relegates economic factors to a section of ‘worker rights’, including freedom of association and collective bargaining, prohibition of child labour, and acceptable conditions of work. Arguably, however, consolidated democratic systems rest upon economic systems governed by legal norms, in which individuals have reasonable opportunities for upward mobility and governmental policies do not discriminate against particular groups or persons. ‘Human rights begin with breakfast’, many assert.
In the struggle for independence, ethnic, class and other differences were subordinated to seeking the ‘political kingdom’. Once self-government had been achieved, however, military coups, major civil wars or massive human rights abuses occurred or continued through most of Africa. Udogu notes that the ‘consolidation of ethnic nationalism’ resulted in major human rights abuses. Left unexamined, however, is how economic disparities exacerbate cultural divisions. ‘Class’, in other words, becomes expressed in large part through ethnic antagonisms. Udogu also says little about how rentier income – as from governmental office, oil revenues and the like – intensifies corruption and struggles for control, which results in major human rights abuses.
Some minor errors or oversights should have been caught. The 1834 ‘Great Trek’ in South Africa went northeast, not northwest. Udogu gives short shrift to external pressures against apartheid. Far more than ‘hundreds’ were jailed in Kenya's Mau Mau ‘emergency’; Caroline Elkins found that between 130,000 and 300,000 Kikuyu were ‘unaccounted for’ as result of these events. Civil unrest in Ethiopia involved Oromo and Somalis, not only Eritreans or Tigrinyans. RENAMO in Mozambique received significant support from pre-majority rule Rhodesia and South Africa. An otherwise useful chronology of Nigeria's political change omits the unexpected death of Sani Abacha, leading directly to the end of military rule.
