Priority of duties, substantive human rights, and African communalism

Abstract

I argue for a plausible view of the African idea and practice of substantive individual rights. This view indicates that rights are a means of enhancing individual dignity in the context of a communal system of correlativity of duties and rights. This view is exemplified in Menkiti’s idea of the priority of duties. I explicate this idea and indicate how it highlights the inherent social-communal nature of humans that is implicated in African normative conception of “personhood”.