ABSTRACT
A recent debate between Souleymane Bachir Diagne and Ajume Wingo, two of Africa’s most prominent philosophers, offers an illuminating entry into the state of politico-ethical theory in contemporary African philosophy. Senegalese philosopher Souleymane Bachir Diagne rejects claims by Orientalists and postcolonial cultural nationalists that particular civilizations have ownership of particular values. In an insightful critique of the then Organization of African Unity’s (OAU) African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights, he skillfully demonstrates the tensions at the heart of the charter’s attempt to reconcile individual rights and communal rights. For Diagne, the charter’s insistence on “the duties of the individual vis-àvis the community” raises the specter that freedom of conscience and speech will be subordinated or sacrificed to the dictates of the “community” (which Diagne notes is conflated in sections of the charter to the national security state). Diagne then brilliantly shatters the myth that African traditions univocally affirm a communal ethic. To do this, he turns to what he describes as the “most important and ancient document on human rights in Africa,” the thirteenth-century Malian document, the Oath of the Manden. Citing passages in the Manden oath, Diagne concludes that the Oath “is straightforwardly individualistic, because every life is individual and unique.”1
