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LAW AND HUMAN RIGHTS Bonny Ibhawoh. Imperialism and Human Rights: Colonial Discourses of Rights and Liberties in African History. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007. xvi + 226 pp. Photographs. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $60.00. Cloth.
This is an important contribution to the historical analysis of human rights discourses-and particularly to the discussion of human rights before the 1948 United Nations Declaration of Human Rights. Using colonial Nigeria under British rule as a case study, Ibhawoh sets his study in the context of the earlier traditions of human rights, arguing that the contemporary focus on universal human rights indeed had antecedents in African traditional political and social institutions as much as in earlier European encounters. The conceptual framework of the book centers on this complex link between African notions of rights and the formalized discourses of human rights that emerged with the colonial encounter. The major strength of this work is the way it challenges the view that human rights discourse is almost exclusively a Western affair.
Ibhawoh's analysis of Pax Britannica in relation to the issue...