Modalities of personhood among the baganda and their cross- cultural human rights implications

Abstract

Personhood is a philosophical concept apparently so clear yet imbued with intricate complexity. One of the questions it attracts is whether it should be understood in absolute universalistic or contextual relativistic terms. The objective of this paper is to demonstrate by use of a case of an African culture that personhood is contextual, and also to show the practical complexities arising from such a conception. As a member of the ethnic group, I use insights from an autoethnographic study of the Baganda to argue that a universalistic approach to personhood is helpful for cross-cultural recognition to avoid the human rights pitfalls of judgement of ‘others’ basing on an exclusive moral standard of personhood, but that such cross-cultural dialogue should be based on knowledge
and understanding of each other’s logics. Grounding on findings that descriptively characterise the Baganda communalistic setup, I demonstrate how personhood is perceived in terms of the achievement of moral excellence (obuntubulamu), which in turn gravitates around the virtue of having a sense of shame. As such, not every human is a person. Personhood thus becomes a site for the construction of social moral order and the common good. The Baganda case serves us with insights into personhood that could not only be instructive for understanding the case in particular but also serve as material for comparative dialogue with other notions of personhood. It also helps to explain why in some African settings, the notion of human rights, which is grounded on the idea of a universal human, may be received with some ambivalence owing to how it practically conflates humanhood and personhood.