Narrating Human Rights in Africa by Eleni Coundouriotis

Abstract

Reviewed by: Narrating Human Rights in Africa by Eleni Coundouriotis Bonny Ibhawoh (bio) Eleni Coundouriotis, Narrating Human Rights in Africa (Routledge, 2020), ISBN 9780367194666, 206 pages. Eleni Coundouriotis’s book is founded on an undeniable premise first espoused by Edward Said: “Facts do not at all speak for themselves, but require a socially acceptable narrative to absorb, sustain, and circulate them.”1 Because facts of abuse do not speak for themselves, we must rely on human rights narratives that testify to violations as the evidentiary foundations for redress and protection. The challenge of protecting and promoting human rights can only be met when the voices of victims and their interlocutors are heard, understood, and acted upon. Narratives of rights are the foundations upon which academics theorize, activists mobilize, and the state intervenes to protect human rights. This is why Coundouriotis’ focus on human rights narratives in this book marks an important contribution to human rights scholarship. The main contribution of this book is the centering of narrative in our understanding of human rights. Human rights scholars have not paid enough attention to the place of narrative in defining, contesting, and promoting human rights norms. Enough attention has also not been given to examining how narratives shape the protection of human rights and redress mechanisms for victims of abuse. We often take for granted the stories and testimonies of violations upon which human rights meanings and principles are founded. Narrating Human Rights seeks to bridge this gap by exploring how narratives affirm the values of social justice and human rights while at the same time creating new categories of thought that challenge human rights dogma. The author does this by examining human rights from the perspective of writers from the African continent and situating key theoretical concepts in African perspectives, undercutting the stereotypes of victimhood and voicelessness. The book takes as its starting point the imperative of challenging a methodology that positions narrative as peripheral rather than central to human rights scholarship. [End Page 865] Instead of positioning literary texts as illustrative of points already theorized elsewhere, Coundouriotis argues that “we must foreground the literature to show the concepts it offers, the ideas and responses stemming from complex historical circumstances in Africa and expressed by African writers.”2 Narrative in this context is a means of engaging with historical events, giving a complex account of how truth and reality are entangled. It portrays and mobilizes historical actors, reinscribing them into human rights discourses from which they have been omitted or their voices silenced. The book offers a useful schematization of human rights narrative. The author delineates three types of employment for human rights in literary narrative plots, each presenting a different construction of the heroic. The first type is the moral crusade, which is temporarily thwarted but holds a strong promise of future fulfillment. The second is the witness of a journalist or rapporteur who tells of unassimilable abuse and brutality and positions himself as a redeemer witness striving to create a vision of hope. The third is the collective story of a democratization movement which constructs a heroic and determined people whose efforts, though falling short, must be sustained. Common to all three human rights plots is that they convey teleological moral progress. They emphasize what the story moves toward and the kind of closure it proposes, despite the setbacks that are part of the historical account of events. The author takes up the key challenges to the narration of human rights in which the contribution of African writers is important. The objective is to show how African voices and perspectives shape how we think about human rights and how they have influenced their meanings. The perspective on human rights narration offered in this book is hybrid, engaged with both history and actual events. This is evident in the sustained readings of several topics offered in the chapters. Chapters examine the figure of the child soldier in relation to the history of conflict and state-building in Africa; the tension between flight and stasis in refugee and migrant; the challenge of testifying about rape in war; and narratives that evoke the disappeared in the context of resistance to state oppression...