Deconstructing the Dominant Human Rights Grammar: An Alter-Native Narrative based on Indigenous Peoples’ World-Views

Abstract

This article contests the dominant ethnocentric Human Rights grammar and proposes a decentred alternative by focusing on the legal epistemologies of Southern African Indigenous Peoples. Increasing inequalities, aggravated poverty, environmental degradation, unsustainable life-styles and socio-cultural polarisation are compelling challenges that demand approaches grounded on new narratives, beyond the framework provided by Western centric theorisation, binary logic, the individual liberal human rights paradigm and neo-liberal development and justice models. The cultural specificity of human rights as well as their rise as normative instruments and assertions of universal entitlements, stripped human rights off the political and transformative potential to challenge the economic, social and political structures at the core of the imbalances they aim at remedying. In an attempt to transcend the limitations of the current hegemonic human rights paradigm (centred on the individual, rights and legalistic approaches), the proposal advanced here aims at reclaiming and recapturing the insights and values of African Indigenous Peoples as intellectual capital to reconfigure the prevailing human rights discourse. This article strives to rework and enlarge the notion and content of human rights with elements from counter hegemonic alternative world-views informed by peripheral knowledge(s), subaltern legalities and epistemologies. It seeks to revert epistemic injustice by formulating an alter-native narrative based on Indigenous Peoples’ world-views.