Communitarian distinctness claims enabled regimes that suppressed individual rights in Africa

Evidence

The danger is that Africans are rendered prone to answering to a different standard or abiding by unusual dictates that require either a special understanding or an exclusive mode of operation. The belief that Africans are different and are deserving of their own standard has led to an unproductive exaggeration about the importance of the community in the individual’s identity, in shaping politics, and in determining the foundations of theory. In respect of the individual’s identity, it has become routine that the community is given priority over the individual. This is followed by the whittling down of the individual’s rights to a secondary status in comparison to the community’s rights. Thus, politically, the individual has no grounds of appeal to her rights save to infer them from the generosity of the community. This has led to the rise of socialist regimes (whose doctrines were built on such exaggerated views of the importance of the community) that ultimately operated to stifle individual freedoms and associated political practices. — Frans Dokman, Beyond Bantu Philosophy_…, 443

Categorization

• XREF: Directly parallels the perils of ‘authenticity’ discourse discussed in Parable of the Sower’s world-building and postcolonial critiques generally—identity claims weaponized to suppress dissent. — connects to: Regimes suppress group identity when it contradicts founding legitimation myths. — Manuel Borutta and Jan C. Jansen, Vertriebene and Pieds-Noirs in Postwar…, 188
• QUESTION: Which specific African socialist regimes does Dokman have in mind here—Nkrumah’s Ghana, Nyerere’s ujamaa Tanzania?