The African cultural relativists should have known that culture is not necessarily a majoritarian concept. Rightly viewed, it is the values, norms or ideals that the elite or dominant class propagates at a given time. Both liberal and marxist students agree on this point. It can safely be asserted that in every African state the bulk of the peasant folk look up to the elite or middle class (politicians, intellegentsia, bureaucrats, and businessmen) as their role models and what it entails in cultural terms. The factor which can be rightly argued, in my opinion, with reasonable justification, is that because of the inequitable nature of structural capitalist relations at the global level, the whole package, which constitutes and contains the international human rights standards cannot be enforced even though they appear to present valid claims in all the societies undergoing modernisation. The degree to which African concepts and the realisation of human rights is going to differ, is explicable by the degree of her peripheralization within the global capitalist system.
Posted on: Thu, 09 Oct 2014 07:44:22 +0000
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