Paper long abstract:

Author: Tunde Awosanmi

Africa’s 21st century challenge is human-centered self-governance for true global prestige. The continent’s current failed-state status originated from its immediate postcolonial past. Militocracy, a contra-democratic force, is a monumental prism for interrogating the Nigerian past for the ultra-colonial arrest and detention of its right and freedom to genuine statehood.

Resistance by human rights activists was a logical justification of the systemic anomaly of military despotism. Subsequently, social critics like Wole Soyinka, Gani Fawehinmi, Beko Ransome-Kuti, Femi Falana, Tunde Thompson, Sunny Irabor, Kunle Ajibade and Chris Anyanwu were imprisoned without trial under criticism-intolerant regimes and decrees, while the less fortunate like Dele Giwa and Saro Wiwa were letter-bombed and hanged, respectively. Accounts by some of the surviving scapegoats: hereby classified as literature of detention or detention narratives – a faction of the Nigerian military-citizens relationship - thus deserves worthy explication.

Though the Nigerian military tyranny had been thematically appraised from several social and humanistic angles, the study of detention narratives as a body of faction had been excluded. Privileging it as the analytical center of my discourse, the prison chronicle objectivizes the Nigerian past by describing the process and actual accomplishment of the horrific microwaving of the citizenry via denial of human rights, and the ultimate symbolic assassination of the state.

I shall argue that detention narratives such as Ige’s Detainees’ Diary, Wiwa’s A Month an a Day, Ajibade’s Jailed for Life, Anyanwu’s Days of Terror, etc., are not just emotive rendering of a political prisoner’s psychological ordeal. Apart from being historical, social, political and literary documents, they can be scriptural mechanism for a nation’s introspective rebecoming, thus an aperture for the retrieval of the already condemned future of an African state.

Paper long abstract:

Author: Solomon Berhane

The paper deals with the activities and roles that have been played by the international community in the protection of human rights and the impacts and effectiveness of such activities on the lives of those people whose rights are violated. There have been some efforts and activities from organization such as the Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and other UN organs in the form of revealing the human rights violations in Eritrea and accusing and exposing the government of Eritrea to the external world. The Eritrean government has been, on the one hand, denying the existence of such violations of human rights and, on the other hand, justifying for the current human rights situation in Eritrea. The efforts by the international organization neither brought about the necessary changes or improvement in the human rights situation in country nor led to any practical solutions to the Eritrean people. The paper will elucidate as to why such efforts have not being effective in improving the human rights situation in the country and will shed light into some of the possible initiatives which should be considered for positive outcome.

Paper long abstract:

The antinomy of Human Rights Practices: The Case of Peripheral Populations in Africa discusses concisely the issue of the human rights of marginalized peoples in Africa—particularly the indigenous populace whose population is less than a million—within the following themes: 1.Some general theories of human rights; 2. International human rights instruments relating to the rights of indigenous populations; 3. Marginalized minorities, indigenous peoples and human rights: a brief overview; 4. Human rights of indigenous inhabitants in select countries; and 5. Conclusion.

Generally, in spite of the participation of African nations in the United Nations and the Organization of African Unity—now African Union—that approved instruments for the advancement of the human rights of African peoples, the guardians of the African states, overall, have been unsuccessful in implementing the tenets of the documents they signed for the protection of rights. Moreover, the outcome of this research suggests that African governments seldom respect their national constitutions on the issue of the human rights of minority groups. This political attitude tends to exacerbate political angst and mitigate the quest for peaceful co-existence needed for the agglutination of the sub-national units in the nation-state in particular and African polities in general.