Khadija Magardie BEYOND RIGHTS TALK AND CULTURE TALK: COMPARATIVE ESSAYS ON THE POLITICS OF RIGHTS AND CULTURE edited by Mahmood Mamdani (David Philip) The politics of rights and culture revolves around a specific question – can a culture of individual rights coexist with the right of every individual to practice one’s culture? The essays in Culture Talk provide useful insights into the problem of balancing a “universalist” concept of individual rights, with the demand by certain communities that their way of life be protected. Doing surprising justice to a debate that has widespread implications for a rapidly globalising world, these essays have vastly differing contexts, ranging from, say, land tenure reform in Tanzania to women’s rights in Islamist areas of Nigeria. But the common thread is that a “language of culture” does not necessarily or inevitably translate into defence of privilege.
University of Cape Town academic Thandabantu Nhlapo’s chapter on African customary marraige laws asks whether the notion of rights is more than a “Western cultural assertion”. The essay probes the link between the South African Constitution’s upholding of the individual’s right to dignity and how this is synonymous with the right to have one’s culture constitutionally protected. His thesis that a critique of local culture is nothing more than a culture-bound “assault on local dignity” is problematic because it may provide a tool for groups such as traditional leaders to monopolise interpretations of customary law.
>From Saudi Arabia forbidding Christians to practise their faith to customary law dictating that rural women in KwaZulu-Natal women cannot inherit from dead husbands, the entrenching of cultural rights above individual rights tends to set alarming precedents. Culture Talk is compulsory reading for anyone seeking to understand such issues.