Viewing international concepts through local eyes: activist understandings of human rights in Botswana and South Africa

ABSTRACT

Human rights are an increasingly common language of advocacy for civil society organisations, but are these groups using the same words to mean different things? Although the spread of human rights has been well examined, little attention has been paid to the content of these rights as understood by civil society actors in diverse settings. Focusing on this gap in the literature, this paper examines how personnel in human rights-based non-governmental organisations (NGOs) in Botswana and neighbouring South Africa perceive human rights. Drawing on interview-based case studies of two human rights-based organisations operating at the national level, I analyse how activists draw on domestic context to interpret human rights. This paper argues that personnel in these NGOs understand and articulate human rights in distinct ways that are shaped by and responsive to the contexts in which they live and work. Emerging from a more homogenous consensus-based culture, Botswana respondents are more likely to integrate cultural concepts, emphasise inclusion and understand human rights as timeless and innate. Reflecting South Africa’s progressive constitution, unequal society and a history of struggle, South African respondents highlight contrast, agency, change over time and the law.

KEYWORDS:

• Botswana
• South Africa
• civil society
• activism
• localisation
• translation

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Acknowledgements

Drafts of this paper were presented at the Prairie Political Science Association Conference, the American Political Science Association Conference, the Canadian Political Science Association, the International Studies Association Conference and the International Political Science Association Conference, and greatly benefited from feedback in each of these venues. A related paper was presented at the Global Rights and Democracy workshop at UBC (a summary of which was subsequently featured as a blog post on Open Global Rights) and some of that feedback helped to strengthen this piece. This paper benefited from the support of colleagues at the Centre for Human Rights at the University of Pretoria and the Department of Political Science at Dalhousie University, and from the careful proofreading eye of Joyce Sato-Reinhold.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Kristi Heather Kenyon is Assistant Professor in the Human Rights Program at the University of Winnipeg’s Global College. She conducted this research while a postdoctoral fellow in the Centre for Human Rights at the University of Pretoria and in the Department of Political Science at Dalhousie University. Her research focuses on human rights activism in sub-Saharan Africa, with a particular interest in language and framing.

ORCID

Kristi Heather Kenyon http://orcid.org/0000-0003-1024-6074

Notes

1. This paper is a small piece of a larger project examining five organisations. A short blog post based on the same research project and examining implications for the global human rights system was featured on Open Global Rights (Kristi Heather Kenyon, ‘Building Down versus Trickling Up’, November 16, 2017, Open Global Rights website, https://www.openglobalrights.org/building-up-vs-trickling-down-human-rights-in-southern-africa/).

2. Thomas Risse, Stephen C. Ropp, and Kathryn Sikkink, The Power of Human Rights: International Norms of Domestic Change (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Thomas Risse, Stephen C. Ropp, and Kathryn Sikkink, The Persistent Power of Human Rights: From Commitment to Compliance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013); and Beth Simmons, Mobilizing for Human Rights: International Law in Domestic Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).

3. Jack Donnelly, ‘Human Rights and Human Dignity: An Analytic Critique of Non-Western Conceptions of Human Rights’, American Political Science Review 76, no. 2 (1982): 303–16; Jack Donnelly, ‘Cultural Relativism and Universal Human Rights’, Human Rights Quarterly 6, no. 4 (1984): 400–19; Jack Donnelly, Universal Human Rights in Theory and Practice (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003); and Alison Renteln, ‘Relativism and the Search for Human Rights’, American Anthropologist 90, no. 1 (1988): 56–72.

4. Risse, Ropp, and Sikkink, Power of Human Rights; and Risse, Ropp, and Sikkink, Persistent Power.

5. See discussions in Renteln, ‘Relativism and the Search for Human Rights’; Donnelly, ‘Human Rights and Human Dignity’; Donnelly, ‘Cultural Relativism and Universal Human Rights’.

6. Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na’im, ‘Introduction’, in Human Rights in Cross-cultural Perspectives: A Quest for Consensus, ed. Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na’im and Francis M. Deng (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990), 1.

7. Tom Zwart, ‘Using Local Culture to Further the Implementation of International Human Rights: The Receptor Approach’, Human Rights Quarterly 34, no. 2 (2012): 546–69.

8. Harri Englund, ‘Towards a Critique of Rights Talk in New Democracies: The Case of Legal Aid in Malawi’, Discourse & Society 15, no. 5 (2004): 527.

9. Harri Englund, ‘The Dead Hand of Human Rights: Contrasting Christianities in Post-Transition Malawi’, Journal of Modern African Studies 38, no. 4 (2000): 579.

10. Harri Englund, ‘Chinyanja and the Language of Rights’, Nordic Journal of African Studies 10, no. 3 (2001): 300.

11. Ibid.

12. Ibid.

13. Ibid., 303.

14. Ibid.

15. Peggy Levitt and Sally Merry, ‘Vernacularization on the Ground: Local Uses of Global Women’s Rights in Peru, China, India and the United States’, Global Network 9, no. 4 (2009): 446.

16. Ibid., 459.

17. Snow as cited in Doug McAdam, John D. McCarthy, and Mayer N. Zald, ‘Introduction: Opportunities, Mobilising Structures, and Framing Processes – Toward a Synthetic, Comparative Perspective on Social Movements’, in Comparative Perspectives on Social Movements: Political Opportunities, Mobilising Structures and Cultural Framings, ed. Doug McAdam, John D. McCarthy, and Mayer N. Zald (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 6.

18. Ann Swidler, ‘Culture in Action: Symbols and Strategies’, American Sociological Review 51, no. 2 (1986): 277.

19. Mayer N. Zald, ‘Culture, Ideology and Strategic Framing’, in Comparative Perspectives on Social Movements: Political opportunities, Mobilising Structures and Cultural Framings, ed. Doug McAdam, John D. McCarthy, and Mayer N. Zald (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 266.

20. Charli Carpenter, ‘Setting the Advocacy Agenda: Issues and Non-Issues Around Children and Armed Conflict’, International Studies Quarterly 51, no. 1 (2007): 99–120; Charli Carpenter, ‘Studying Issue (Non) Adoption in Transnational Networks’, International Organisation 61, no. 3 (2007): 643–67; and Clifford Bob, ‘Dalit Rights are Human Rights: Caste Discrimination, International Activism, and the Construction of a New Human Rights Issue’, Human Rights Quarterly 29, no. 1 (2007): 167–93.

21. Amitav Acharya, ‘How Ideas Spread: Whose Norms Matter? Norm Localisation and Institutional Change in Asian Regionalism’, International Organization 58, no. 2 (2004): 239–75.

22.  Levitt and Merry, ‘Vernacularization on the Ground’, 441–61.

23. Kirsten Hastrup, ‘Representing the Common Good: The Limits of Legal Language’, in Human Rights in Global Perspective: Anthropological Studies of Rights, Claims and Entitlements, ed. Richard A. Wilson and Jon P. Mitchell (New York: Routledge, 2003), 16–17.

24. Christof Heyns and Frans Viljoen, ‘The Regional Protection of Human Rights in Africa: An Overview and Evaluation’, in Human Rights, the Rule of Law, and Development in Africa, ed. Paul Tiyambe Zeleza and Philip J. McConnaughay (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 129–43.

25. Organization of African Unity (OAU), African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights (‘Banjul Charter’), June 27, 1981, CAB/LEG/67/3 rev. 5, Article 27.

26. Makau wa Mutua, ‘The Banjul Charter and the African Cultural Fingerprint: An Evaluation of the Language of Duties’, Virginia Journal of International Law 35 (1995): 339–80.

27. See Donnelly, ‘Human Rights and Human Dignity’; Donnelly, ‘Cultural Relativism’; and Christina M. Cerna, ‘Universality of Human Rights and Cultural Diversity: Implementation of Human Rights in Different Socio-Cultural Contexts’, Human Rights Quarterly 16 (1994): 740–57.

28. Rhoda Howard, Human Rights in Commonwealth Africa (Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield, 1986).

29. Sean Hawkins, ‘Rethinking Rights in Africa: The Struggle for Meaning and the Meaning of the Struggle’, Canadian Journal of African Studies/Revue Canadienne Des Etudes Africaines 41, no. 3 (2007): 394–5.

30. Tshepo Madlingozi, ‘Social Justice in a Time of Neo-apartheid Constitutionalism: Critiquing the Anti-black Economy of Recognition, Incorporation and Distribution’, Stellenbosch Law Review 28 (2017): 136.

31. Josiah A.M. Cobbah, ‘African Values and the Human Rights Debate: An African Perspective’, Human Rights Quarterly 19, no. 3 (1987): 320.

32. Englund, ‘Rights Talk in New Democracies’, 17.

33. Rhoda Howard, ‘The Dilemma of Human Rights in sub-Saharan Africa’, International Journal 35, no. 4 (1980): 731.

34. Leslie London, ‘Can Human Rights Serve as a Tool for Equity?’, Equinet Discussion Paper 14 (Cape Town: Regional Network for Equity in Health in Southern Africa [Equinet] and the University of Cape Town School of Public Health and Family Medicine, 2003); Leslie London, ‘Issue of Equity are Also Issues of Rights: Lessons from Experiences in Southern Africa’, BMC Public Health 7, no. 14 (2007): 1–10.

35. Pansy Tlaluka, ‘Human Rights and Development’, in Human Rights, the Rule of Law and Development in Africa, ed. Paul Tiyambe Zeleza and Philip J. McConnaughay (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 109–19; Yemi Osinbajo, ‘Human Rights, Economic Development, and the Corruption Factor’, in Human Rights, the Rule of Law, and Development in Africa, ed. Paul Tiyambe Zeleza and Philip J. McConnaughay (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 120–8; Cassandra R. Veney, ‘A Sustainable U.S. Foreign Policy Toward Africa: Promoting Human Rights, Development and the Rule of Law’, in Human Rights, the Rule of Law, and Development in Africa, ed. Paul Tiyambe Zeleza and Philip J. McConnaughay (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 173–90.

36. Tlaluka, ‘Human Rights and Development’, 119; Krista Johnson and Sean Jacobs, ‘Democratization and the Rhetoric of Rights: Contradictions and Debate in Post-apartheid South Africa’, in Rights and the politics of recognition in Africa, ed. Harri Englund and Francis B. Nyamjoh (London: Zed Books, 2004), 100.

37. Kenyon, Kristi Heather, ‘Localizing the Global/Globalizing the Local: Reconciling Botho and Human Rights in Botswana’, in Social Practice of Human Rights, ed. Joel Pruce (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 101–120.

38. Botho is the Setswana name for this concept. It is more widely addressed in the literature by its Zulu name ubuntu.

39. Dumi Oafeta Mmualefhe, ‘Botho and HIV & AIDS: A Theological Reflection’, in The Concept of Botho and HIV & AIDS in Botswana, ed. Joseph B.R. Gaie and Sana K. Mmolai (Eldoret, Kenya: Zapf Chancery, 2007), 1.

40. Sana K. Mmolai, ‘Introduction’, in The Concept of Botho and HIV & AIDS in Botswana, ed. Joseph B.R. Gaie and Sana K. Mmolai (Eldoret, Kenya: Zapf Chancery, 2007), xi.

41. Joseph B.R. Gaie, ‘The Setswana Concept of Botho: Unpacking the Metaphysical and Moral Aspects’, in The Concept of Botho and HIV & AIDS in Botswana, ed. Joseph B.R. Gaie, Sana K. Mmolai (Eldoret, Kenya: Zapf Chancery, 2007), 30.

42. Mmualefh, ‘Botho and HIV & AIDS’, 3.

43. M. Munyaka and M. Mothlabi, ‘Ubuntu and Its Sociomoral Significance’, in African Ethics: An Anthology of Comparative and Applied Ethics, ed. M.F. Murove (Scotssville, South Africa: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2009), 68.

44. Augustine Shutte, Philosophy for Africa (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1995), vi.

45. Kristi Heather Kenyon, Resilience and Contagion: Invoking Human Rights in African HIV Advocacy (McGill-Queen’s Press – MQUP, 2017).

46. Robert Hitchcock, Melvin Johnson, and Christine Hanley, ‘Indigenous Women in Botswana: Changing Gender Roles in the Face of Dispossession and Modernization’, Indigenous People’s Rights in Southern Africa, ed. Robert Hitchcock and Diana Vinding (Copenhagen: IWGIA, 2004), 231.

47. Succeeded by Mokgweetsi Mosisi on 1 April 2018. Ian Khama’s brother Tshekedi Khama is a Member of Parliament and cabinet minister.

48. Holm et al. as cited in Gloria Somolekae, Democracy, Civil Society and Governance in Africa – The Case of Botswana (1998), http://unpan1.un.org/intradoc/groups/public/documents/CAFRAD/UNPAN009287.pdf.

49. Victor Shale, ‘Botswana Civil Society Actors’, in Compendium of Elections in Southern Africa 1989–2009: 20 years of Multiparty Democracy, ed. Denis Kadima and Susan Booysen (Johannesburg, South Africa: Electoral Institute of Southern Africa, 2009), 71–2.

50. Mogalakwe and Sebudubudi as cited in ibid.

51. Zibani Maudeni, ‘Mutual Criticism and State Society Interaction in Botswana’, The Journal of Modern African Studies 42, no. 4 (2004): 619.

52. Examples include academic Kenneth Good’s deportation allegedly over comments made related to the relocation of Kalahari San indigenous people and diamond mining, international petitions coordinated by international NGO Survival International on the same topics have resulted in unfavourable front page news coverage.

53. Samantha Fleming, Collette Herzenberg, and Cherrel Africa, Civil Society, Public Participation and Bridging the Inequity Gap in South Africa (Durban, South Africa: Centre for Civil Society, University of Natal/IDASA, 2003), 24.

54. Sarah Pugh, ‘Advocacy in the Time of Xenophobia: Civil Society, the State, and the Politics of Migration in South Africa’, Polikon 41, no. 2 (2014): 227–47.

55. Patrick Bond and Shauna Mottiar, ‘Movements, Protests and a Massacre in South Africa’, Journal of Contemporary African Studies 31, no. 2 (2013): 283–302.

56. Sally Matthews, ‘Privilege, Solidarity and Social Justice Struggles in South Africa: A View from Grahamstown’, Transformation: Critical Perspectives on Southern Africa 88 (2015): 1.

57. Bond and Mottiar, ‘Movements, Protests and a Massacre in South Africa’, 283–302.

58. As opposed to a decentralised structure with extensive local branches.

59. The term ‘employees’ is used to apply to all personnel carrying out organisational functions regardless of title (i.e. including employees, interns, volunteers).

60. Including nine people within ‘nested’ programmes and organisations.

61. Douglas Harper, ‘Talking About Pictures: A Case for Photo Elicitation’, Visual Studies 17, no. 1 (2002): 13.

62. John Collier Jr., ‘Photography in Anthropology: A Report on Two Experiments’, American Anthropologist 59, no. 5 (1957): 843–59.

63. Collier, ‘Photography in Anthropology’; Wendy D. Roth, ‘Studying Ethnic Schemas: Integrating Cognitive Schemas into Ethnicity Research Through Photo Elicitation’, in Studying Ethnic Identity: Methodological and Conceptual Approaches Across Disciplines, ed. Carlos E. Santos and Adriana J. Umaña-Taylor (Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 2015); John L. Oliffe and Joan L. Bottorff, ‘Further than the Eye Can See? Photo Elicitation and Research with Men’, Qualitative Health Research 17, no.6 (2007): 850–8; Liam Buckley, ‘Photography and Photo-Elicitation After Colonialism’, Cultural Anthropology 29, no. 4 (2014): 720–43; and Caroline Scarles, ‘Where Words Fail, Visuals Ignite: Opportunities for Visual Autoethnography in Tourism Research’, Annals of Tourism Research 37, no.4 (2010): 905–26.

64. Harper, ‘Talking About Pictures’.

65. Marisol Clark-Ibáñez, ‘Framing the Social World with Photo-Elicitation Interviews’, American Behavioral Scientist 47, no. 12 (2004): 1507.

66. Collier, ‘Photography in Anthropology’.

67. Keith C. Barton, ‘Elicitation Techniques: Getting People to Talk About Ideas They Don’t Usually Talk About’, Theory & Research in Social Education 43, no. 2 (2015): 195–205; Barbara Mandleco, ‘Research with Children as Participants: Photo Elicitation’, Journal for Specialists in Pediatric Nursing 18, no.1 (2013): 78–82; and Gloria Thupayagale-Tshweneagae and Zitha Mokomane, ‘Needs of South African Adolescents Orphaned by AIDS: Evidence from Photography and Photo-Elicitation’, International Nursing Review 60, no.1 (2012): 88–95.

68. Harper, ‘Talking About Pictures’, 13.

69. Ibid.

70. Collier, ‘Photography in Anthropology’; Roth ‘Studying Ethnic Schemas’.

71. Barton, ‘Elicitation Techniques’, 179.

72. Author’s interview, BONELA Respondent #2.

73. Author’s interview, BONELA, Respondent #5.

74. Author’s interview, BONELA, Respondent #9.

75. Buthu and unhu, respectively.

76. For a more detailed discussion of the botho/human rights intersection see: Kristi Heather Kenyon, ‘Localizing the Global/Globalizing the Local: Reconciling Botho and Human Rights in Botswana’, in The Social Practice of Human Rights (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 101–19.

77. Author’s interview, BONELA, Respondent #3.

78. Author’s interview, BONELA, Respondent #3.

79. Author’s interview, BONELA, Respondent #2.

80. Author’s interview, BONELA, Respondent #2.

81. Author’s interview, BONELA, Respondent #2.

82. Author’s interview, BONELA, Respondent #3.

83. Who comes to mind when you think of human rights? It could be an individual, a group, an institution, a structure?

84. Author’s interview, BONELA, Respondent #4.

85. No respondents made mention of the San, a socio-economically disadvantaged ethnic minority.

86. International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.

87. Author’s interview, BONELA, Respondent #9.

88. Author’s interview, BONELA, Respondent #6.

89. Author’s interview, BONELA, Respondent #7.

90. A photograph of one woman kissing another woman on the cheek.

91. Crowd of people surrounded by police wielding batons, image from Sokkwanele-Zimbabwe and South West Radio Africa. https://www.flickr.com/photos/sokwanele/1725078903/in/album-72157602012405157/.

92. Author’s interview, BONELA, Respondent #3.

93. Author’s interview, +SECTION 27, Respondent #2.

94. Author’s interview, +SECTION 27, Respondent #5.

95. Author’s interview, +SECTION 27, Respondent #8.

96. Author’s interview, +SECTION 27, Respondent #3.

97. Author’s interview, +SECTION 27, Respondent #3.

98. Author’s interview, +SECTION 27, Respondent #5.

99. Author’s interview, +SECTION 27, Respondent #5.

100. Author’s interview, +SECTION 27, Respondent #10.

101. Author’s interview, +SECTION 27, Respondent #10.

102. Author’s interview, +SECTION 27, Respondents 1, 8, 10.

103. Author’s interview, +SECTION 27, Respondents 5, 10.

104. This is a Sesotho term but was given as the Tswana term by a Tswana speaker.

105. Author’s interview, +SECTION 27, Respondent #3.

106. Author’s interview, +SECTION 27, Respondent #4.

107. Author’s interview, +SECTION 27, Respondent #5.

108. Author’s interview, +SECTION 27, Respondent #6.

109. university.

110. Author’s interview, +SECTION 27, Respondent #4.

111. Author’s interview, +SECTION 27, Respondent #6.

112. Author’s interview, +SECTION 27, Respondent #3.

113. Author’s interview, +SECTION 27, Respondent #7.

114. Author’s interview, +SECTION 27, Respondent #5.

115. Author’s interview, +SECTION 27, Respondent #6.

116. Author’s interview, +SECTION 27, Respondent #5.

117. Author’s interview, +SECTION 27, Respondent #10.

118. Howard, ‘Dilemma of Human Rights’, 731.

119. Cobbah, ‘African Values and Human Rights’, 320.

120. Englund, ‘Rights Talk in New Democracies’, 17.

121. Kenyon, Kristi Heather, ‘Localizing the Global/Globalizing the Local: Reconciling Botho and Human Rights in Botswana’, in Social Practice of Human Rights, ed. Joel Pruce (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 101–120.

122. Despite significant inequalities between San and non-San, and high profile international campaigns.

123. Englund, ‘Dead Hand of Human Rights’, 579.

124. Author’s interview, +SECTION 27, Respondent #10.

125. Englund, ‘Chinyanja’, 303.

126. Max Weber, ‘Politics as Avocation’, in Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, ed. and trans. H.H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946), 77–128.

127. Englund, ‘Chinyanja’, 303.

128. Ibid.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by a post-doctoral fellowship from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada under Grant 756-2014-0553 and by postdoctoral funding from the Centre for Human Rights at the University of Pretoria.