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Abstract
This article compares differential African religious responses to United Nations initiatives on human rights versus UN development and peace-promoting activities. From family planning to gay rights, what some UN members have promoted as human rights others have characterized as neo-cultural imperialism. In West Africa, the 1979 Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) was seen as anti-Islamic and triggered mass demonstrations. UN Human Rights Committee attempts to extend the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) to LGBT rights have generated parallel acrimony among Protestant churches in East Africa. African religious leaders nevertheless support UN faith-based initiatives to support peace and development.
Notes
1 See also Clarke (Citation2006, Citation2008), Clarke and Jennings (Citation2008), Deneulin and Bano (Citation2009), Goldwijk (Citation2007), Tyndale (Citation2006), Ver Beek (Citation2000).
2 My thanks to Professor Alan Verskin for drawing my attention to this literature.
3 Neither has one other (major) Muslim nation: Iran. (Inexplicably, two micro-states in the Pacific – Nauru and Tonga also fall into this category.)
4 UNAOC itself was formed in 2005 under the initiative of the Ghanaian former Secretary-General of the U.N., Kofi Anan, to foster “mutual respect among peoples of different cultural and religious identities.”
5 The United Religions Initiative is an NGO with UNESCO consultative status.
6 Coincidentally, this was the same year, we have seen above, that the U.N. Human Rights Council took its hard line against what conservative member states viewed as a radical LGBTQ movement.
7 President Bingu wa Mutharika nevertheless used the announcement of his pardon to reiterate the crime committed “against our culture, our religion and our laws” See Bearak (Citation2010).
8 See Cheney (Citation2012) who focuses on Uganda’s proposed “Gay Death Penalty.” Of particular interest for the present article is her casting of homophobia in East Africa as a colonial imposition and revived anti-gay sentiment today as neocolonialism.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
William F. S. Miles
William F. S. Miles is a professor of political science at Northeastern University in Boston, where he teaches on religion and politics and on third world development. In addition to his monographs (Elections in Nigeria; Hausaland Divided) and numerous essays on Nigeria and Niger, he is contributing editor to Political Islam in West Africa. My African Horse Problem is Miles’s memoir of his efforts to settle an inheritance dispute in a Muslim village in the Niger-Nigeria borderlands.