Towards an African path to disability justice

I had intended to write about the human rights of people with disabilities in Africa, but my book1 took a different path after I begun to engage with arguably the most attractive literature in African philosophy. I became fascinated by a conception of community, constituted by individuals in ethical relation to each other, a characteristic that I found more attractive than the abstract, ahistorical and autonomous individual that has dominated the Western philosophical and legal philosophical tradition. Although intrigued by this idea of community, I was nevertheless puzzled by it since it appeared inattentive to disability or people with disabilities. Rather than the orthodox human rights approach (or Martha Nussbaum’s capabilities approach), I found it more interesting to explore and understand what a legal philosophy of disability justice would look like if it mirrored what I describe below as the African relational community ideal.