Giving Africa voice within global governance: oral history, human rights and the United Nations (UN) Human Rights Council

The African continent and its people occupy a 'subaltern' position in global politics where voices from the African continent remain on the peripheries of global governance. Since the United Nations Human Rights Council, set up in 1996, is envisaged to be a forum for dialogue on thematic issues on all human rights, Africans need to seize the opportunity to be heard, rather than remaining as a problem to be solved. This paper presents three key arguments that need to be taken into account during the process of the remaking of the world order and re-creation of a new global governance architecture. Firstly, it raises the key issue of the African continent and the African people being perceived as a problem to be solved rather than a voice to be heard within global politics. Secondly, it makes a case for the use of oral history as an ideal medium to bring the voices of the subaltern to the notice of the Human Rights Council and as a key methodology in the current endeavour to understand different situations of human rights violations. In particular, it examines three cases where oral history was utilized to highlight human rights issues, including one instance where oral testimonies led to the crafting of a democratic freedom charter (in South Africa). Thirdly, the paper grapples with the question of whose values and whose voice should underpin the universal human rights discourse and global governance. [ASC Leiden abstract]</p

Ethnicity or tribalism? : The discursive construction of Zimbabwean national identity

In Zimbabwe any attempt to discuss ethnicity risks being labelled as ‘tribalism’ and, therefore, divisive to a supposedly ‘united nation.’ But what is ethnicity? This paper will attempt to discuss this issue, with particular focus on its intersection with nationalism and the construction of national identity. It will illuminate the liminal process of the ‘criminalisation of ethnicity’ through some moves aimed at blocking open discourse on ethnicity as a form of identity. Furthermore, the paper illustrates how Zimbabwe’s Shona-dominated nationalist discourses tend to follow the social constructivist path, which publicly dismisses the existence of ethnicity while clandestinely embracing it for dubious political purposes. In the process, the paper will also challenge the Eurocentric-theoretical perspectives underlying the normative engagement of ethnicity within the political and culturalist perspectives in Africa for presenting ethnicity as retrogressive and divisive. It is further argued that the scarcity of indigenous theoretical lenses of understanding ethnicity, exacerbated by grotesque forms of nationalism, as seen in Zimbabwe and elsewhere in Africa sustains the suppression of ethnic minority voices and the shrift dismissal of their issues as peripheral or regional. This lack of proper vent has thus led to the continued resurgence of violent ethnic upheavals across the African continent.Peer reviewe