THINKING BEYOND THE NEO-COLONIAL

To conclude Part 2 of this book, I wish to note that, despite the limitations of human rights discourse, which are sometimes admitted in the liberal literature, it is regularly assumed that these are of unquestioned benefit in transforming ‘tradition’, in enabling the previously ‘rightless’ under tradition to ‘acquire human rights’ and thus to assert their humanity in the face of a presumed ‘state of nature’ which, in the famous Hobbesian formulation, is seen as ‘nasty, brutish and short’. The assumption that the character of liberal democracy today is liberatory and universal relative to tradition, which is seen as invariably particularistic, is reflected, implicitly or explicitly, in a number of interrelated discourses on the continuing relevance of tradition in modern society, particularly in South Africa, where the idea often dominates feminist politics in relation to tradition. It is such thinking, when associated with the capacity to deploy power, that lies at the heart of the neo-colonial conception of ‘the responsibility to protect’. On the other hand, alternative feminist positions – reacting to women's oppression ‘from within’, so to speak – point in the direction of recognising popular ‘voice’. I wish to briefly address these arguments here.

At issue particularly in South Africa is the role of traditional institutions, such as the chieftaincy, in a modern secular state. Also important is the issue of women's ‘rights to land’ under ‘traditional tenure’ in conditions of legally prescribed liberal gender equality. Both of these issues are regularly the subjects of debate within liberal- democratic discourse in post-apartheid South Africa. They seem to have relatively ‘obvious’ answers from a democratic perspective, yet in both cases I suggest that such ‘obviousness’ is superficial and ultimately misleading.