Abstract
This lesson first situates lineage-based societies within a universal theoretical framework. Like all human societies, the lineage-based societies in question not only possess systems of positive law, as established by legal anthropology, but they also possess a minimal core of human rights while simultaneously violating human rights in specific ways.
Next, this lesson elucidates the indigenous foundations of these rights before articulating the rights themselves. While, for the modern philosopher, the dignity that underpins rights lies in the infinite value of metaphysical freedom, for the people of the lineage-based societies under consideration here, this dignity—denoted by the spirit and the name—has two sources: one, religious, refers to the person as a figure and messenger of the divine; the other, moral, is the absolute will of good and evil— gozê, gu, ag-n —which its possessor may misuse, as is the case with the gozêgnon, gugnon, agnu —incorrectly called a sorcerer.
The rights inherent to this dignity for all are human, social, economic, and cultural rights before they are political rights. These include the right to life, the right to a human life (food, shelter, clothing, health, education, play), the right to fatherhood, motherhood, and filial piety, and the right to brotherhood or sisterhood. These include the rights to marriage, to a home, to a family, to heritage, and to matrimony. They also include the rights to participate in public life, to share in the common good, to a dignified death, and to the inviolability of children, women, and the elderly in times of war.
Finally, this lesson introduces the analytical concepts of slavery from the perspective of this anthropology. Based on this possession of rights—which constitutes social fulfillment—we can distinguish two levels of deprivation of rights or forfeiture. The first level is that of free men and women. This includes male and female prisoners of war who can be ransomed; it also includes criminals or offenders whose sentences may come to an end.
The second level of forfeiture or dispossession is that which befalls slaves. Through the sale that effectively finalizes captivity, social excommunication, or a sentence, a forfeited woman or man is irrevocably cast into slavery. There, as long as fate keeps them alive within the relations of reproduction, production, and as a political instrument, their forfeiture remains incomplete. On the day fate destines them for immolation and sacrifice, their dispossession is complete and becomes perfect. Survivors who engage in resistance or protest participate in the cycle of reclaiming lost rights or rehabilitation. Some experience subjective rehabilitation if they are active agents and subjects of that reclaiming; through objective rehabilitation, on the other hand, others benefit from redemption; the most famous and happiest of those redeemed remains the handsome Kweni slave, bought for his beauty by a Bété chief, freed for his medical knowledge, and who became village chief, succeeding his master: Guédé Titiku “the Black.”
This anthropology of rights frees us from two illusions. First of all, there is no clean slate: lineage-based societies have produced and lived by human rights. But these rights remain marred by two flaws: they are limited by androcentrism and senocracy, and they contain contradictions with their own principles. Second, legal and political abolition does not mark the end of slavery from an anthropological perspective.
