Human Rights Modernities: Practices of Luo Councils of Elders in Contemporary Western Kenya

Abstract

This dissertation is ethnography of human rights discourse in postcolonial Kenya. It situates itself in the inexorable rise of the application of International Human Rights Law witnessed in the 21st century. For this reason, many contemporary observers refer to this period as an ‘era of Human Rights’. With an ethnographic account centred primarily in Luo Nyanza, western Kenya, the dissertation seeks to open up questions about the practice of Human Rights by reference not to their philosophical origin but their practical manifestations. It conceptualizes Human Rights as a discourse of ongoing conversations of ‘multiple realities’ thus resulting to an empirical rather than ideological account of manifestations of personhoods and modernities. It is a study of the production of human rights that journeys in particular contexts and moments but conscious enough not to be circumscribed by its specific location. With this strategy, the dissertation is based on some sort of dialogue. On the one hand is a notion of Human Rights as rooted in Western enligthmenent discourse which one can describe as a Eurocentric perspective visible through the International Human Rights Instruments promulgated by the United Nations (UN) and its agencies and the other a perspective common among a section of Luo people of western Kenya visible through chike, kido and kwero that are articulated and safeguarded by Luo Councils of Elders. In suggesting the distinction between ‘the Western’ and ‘the Luo’ notions of personhood, the researcher is aware that both frameworks are manifestly plural and ‘intercivilizational’ in their conceptualization