A STUDY OF KWAME GYEKYE’S NOTION OF PERSONHOOD AND ITS RELATIONSHIP TO RIGHTS IN AFRICAN COMMUNITARIAN STRUCTURE
A STUDY OF KWAME GYEKYE’S NOTION OF PERSONHOOD AND ITS RELATIONSHIP TO RIGHTS IN AFRICAN COMMUNITARIAN STRUCTURE

Summary/Abstract: This work presents Kwame Gyekye’s notion of personhood and how it relates to rights in Africancommunitarian structure. Personhood for some scholars can be culturally defined if the attainmentof it is fully embedded in a cultural community; likewise partially defined if the realization of it ispartially embedded in a cultural community. For Gyekye, personhood is not fully embedded in acultural community; for him, those individual rights and interests are meaningful and achievableonly within the context of human society, and must, therefore, be matched with social responsibilities.Our aim, therefore, is to understand Gyekye’s discourse on personhood and sieve out thoserecognition and equal moral standing between the individual and the community in terms of rights,ethical principles, tolerance, and choice. Using an evaluative method, it is argued that Gyekye’snotion of personhood is partially defined by communal structure which defends individual rights,describes an individual as a communal being and also as an autonomous, self-determining, selfassertivebeing with a capacity for evaluation and choice. Gyekye’s rejection that personhood isabsolutely conferred on the individual by the community, does not mean absolute individualism,the kind that results in “moral egoism. However, the study found that Gyekye’s view on personhoodrequires the recognition of equal moral standing between an individual and a cultural communitywhich results in responsibility to oneself as an individual as well as the responsibility to the group.We contend that individual rights, as opposed to role-structural rights, guarantee cordial relationshipsamong members of the community, and the various ethnocultural structures should be transcendedfor the sake of building the community and the emphasis should be on individual constitutionalpatriotism, rather than on ethnic loyalty.

• Details
• Contents