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

This work presents Kwame Gyekye’s notion of personhood and how it relates to rights in African communitarian structure. Personhood for some scholars can be culturally defined if the attainment of it is fully embedded in a cultural community; likewise partially defined if the realization of it is partially embedded in a cultural community. For Gyekye, personhood is not fully embedded in a cultural community; for him, those individual rights and interests are meaningful and achievable only 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 those recognition 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’s notion 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, self-assertive being with a capacity for evaluation and choice. Gyekye’s rejection that personhood is absolutely 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 personhood requires the recognition of equal moral standing between an individual and a cultural community which 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 relationships among members of the community, and the various ethnocultural structures should be transcended for the sake of building the community and the emphasis should be on individual constitutional patriotism, rather than on ethnic loyalty.