Monsieur Ireneo Omositson Namboka est un expert indépendant retraité du Haut Commissariat des Nations Unies pour les Droits de l'Homme et du Département du Maintien de la Paix DPKO. Cet ancien diplomate d'origine ougandaise est connu pour son expérience de terrain et son dynamisme dans l'animation des différentes rencontres internationales notamment sur des questions en rapport avec les Droits Humains et la jeunesse. Il est également Consultant de l'UNITAR sur les missions de formation des agents du maintien de la paix en Afrique.
Son intervention sur les Droits Humains, les valeurs et les pratiques traditionnelles a suscité beaucoup d'intérêt parmi les participants à la Table Ronde par sa profondeur et son originalité. Nous vous la livrons en version anglaise, langue dans laquelle l'intervenant s'est exprimé:
Mr. I.O. Namboka started by saying he grew up as a child in rural Africa, and therefore what he was going to share was lived experience rather than things he only read about. He stated the term “human rights” in itself is recognised to be recent according to researchers, and that the 1948 Universal Declaration on Human Rights is the basis for the discussions on the topic, but that most African Member States of the UN today did not exist as they were not yet independent at the time the Declaration was written.
He showed on the screen the image of 4 men who, he said, were the “voices on what the African heritage has to offer”, who inspired his presentation - namely: Chinua Achebe, Aimé Césaire, Cheikh Anta Diop and Nelson Mandela. Mr. N regretted that he had not found a woman to include.. He pointed out that the ancientness of the notion of right and wrong could be traced very far back to biblical times and earlier. For instance, he asserted that in the scriptures of the three religions we learn that God talked to man on Mount Sinai when the 10 commandments were handed to Moses. We know Moses was an African child born on the Nile River in Pharaonic Egypt. Africans therefore before anybody else had the values religions promote today. It is therefore a mistake that some Africans still consider Christianity a foreign religion. Revealing he is a Christian, he feels that, after working with the UN, if people were more spiritual, they would be “less cruel” and “more understanding” to others. He referred to the well-known “Golden Rule”. He gave evidence of the oldest available origin as being an epitaph engraved on the grave of ancient Egyptians, citing the Book of the Dead about 1500BC. This ,he said reveals the existence of the concept of just and appropriate relations between human beings within societies.
The value was universal as he gave other very old references to the Golden Rule from Asia, the Middle East and Europe. Mr. Namboka then said that as what is known to the Western world in terms of human rights values has its own background, it was normal that references on human rights providing the basis for the UDHR were Magna Carta, the American Declaration of Human Rights, the French Revolution and declaration of human rights etc… down to the inhumanities of the Second World War.
However, it should be acknowledged that traditional values in Africa, inspired by deep concern for justice, humanity and human solidarity, dating centuries earlier, existed which Africans too see as their own references., He then particularly cited the Manden or Kurukan Fuga Charter of 1235 elaborated in the vast ancient Mali Empire. He equally pointed out the ardent determination by African heroes in the resistance against oppression or negation of their human rights. He gave examples of those traditional human rights defenders from the Haitian war of independence; in Africa citing Samori Toure, Lobengula Jomo Kenyatta and Nelson Mandela.
Mr. Namboka then spoke of the African concept UBUNTU as being the single word summarises the philosophy of humanness or that which differentiates a human being from a mere animal. “Ubuntu”, he said, translates into “conscience” in his own Bantu mother tongue. He explained that searching for the meaning of the term “conscience” in the Webster Dictionary he found an elaborate explanation of the word. Conscience meant the innate capacity or sense of being able to distinguish right from wrong, and as a guide to personal, group or national behaviour.
Traditionally, most African societies were taught this right from childhood and grew up with a strong sense of Ubuntu. Schools, over time have abandoned this, and tragically, family units are disappearing where the inculcation of those human values was carried out by parents. The modern lifestyles are invading African societies and with modern education values which kept societies together are fading away. He also cited the system of Ujaama, brotherhood and societal solidarity which is he said the Tanzanian first president Julius Nyerere introduced and described as a form of “African socialism”. As an East African, he said Tanzania inherited this socio-political philosophy and follows it: He said despite the country’s relative less affluence compared to Uganda and Kenya in material terms, people’s living conditions are good and there is a relatively low level of violence. It is the only country within the Great Lakes region where there hasn’t been civil war, blood bath or generalized national tragedy – the stories of Uganda, Rwanda, Kenya, Burundi and the DRC are well documented.
Mr. Namboka concluded with an appeal to the World to accept that Africa has had values and traditions which if embraced and integrated into the international Human Rights thought would strengthen and facilitate understanding and compliance with the United Nations message and norms on the universality of Human Rights.
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