Social Movements and Constitutionalism: The African Context

Abstract Are human rights a western invention? Is the very conception and accompanying notion of constitutionalism a legal process that sets definite limits on the exercise of political power, specifically inventions of the seventeenth-century enlightenment philosophers, and ideological products of the French and the American revolutions? And thus, is any talk of human rights in Africa tantamount to a mechanical import of a western bourgeois ideological conception without the struggles and the relations that gave rise to it in the first place? if one ignores this daily, universal fact of revolt. Only those aware of rights infringed and dignity flouted can be indignant. Only by remaining silent about this commonly experienced fact, or by considerably reducing its implications, is it possible to make human rights an invention of Western culture.