Stones of Hope: How African Activists Reclaim Human Rights to Challenge Global Poverty by Lucie White & Jeremy Perelman

Author:Lucie White & Jeremy Perelman [White, Lucie & Perelman, Jeremy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, General, Political Science, Human Rights, Political Process, Political Advocacy
ISBN: 9780804769204
Google: U7dE74mEZq8C
Goodreads: 9911618
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: 2010-10-25T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 4

Freeing Mohammed Zakari

Rights as Footprints

Jeremy Perelman and Katharine Young, with the participation of Mahama Ayariga

So the Zakari case has been one of the biggest achievements of what legal aid has done in this community. And because everyone, almost all the community members were involved, it became like a footprint in everybody's mind: anybody you ask around knows the story.

Nihad Swallah, Community Organizer, Legal Resources Center

This chapter begins and ends with a metaphor. The metaphor is not our own; rather, it was first articulated during an interview with Nihad Swallah, a community organizer with whom we had worked on the Zakari case. We use it as a metaphor of rights, as “footprints” of remembered facts and values, rather than as normatively charged interests or as bundles of entitlements. This metaphor helps us to understand the process of rights-claiming in a new way. The Zakari story—and with it, the story of a community's battle for “access to healthcare” in Ghana—serves to illustrate the meaning of the footprints metaphor and its departure from current representations of rights. It demonstrates how multiple communities assimilate and incorporate ideas of “rights” and how this assimilation works over time.

This story features a series of encounters. It involves an encounter between a legal norm-encapsulating the internationally recognized “right of everyone to the enjoyment of the highest attainable standard of physical and mental health”1 and the constitutionally endorsed “right to good health care”2—and the community in Nima, Ghana. It describes encounters among subsistence farmers, innovative Ghanaian lawyer-activists, community leaders from organizations of mothers and youth, as well as foreign law-student interns and their professor. It also speculates about encounters between rights and collective memory, and between pessimism and hope. Finally, it seeks to make sense of encounters between writers and the fields of action in which they participate.

The case of Mohammed Zakari began and ended formally in one month, but its significance lies in a pursuit of rights-claiming that is still under way. The chapter is organized into two parts. The first part tells the story of Mohammed Zakari, an elderly subsistence farmer detained in a public hospital for failure to pay his medical expenses. In this part, the story is told through four significant moments, which represent the choices and turning points of advocacy and mobilization.

The second part of the chapter uses three analytical lenses to explore the significance of rights-claiming to the social movement to which the Zakari case gave rise. In this part, we show how the “rights as footprints” metaphor allows us to emphasize three characteristics of rights claims that move beyond conventional conceptions.

First, the footprints image helps us to see that the meaning of a right can endure. As the community repeatedly recalls the history of Mohammed Zakari's rights struggle, the meaning of that memory will change over time.3 Such symbolic work done by rights is not a new idea.4 Yet the footprints image shows how the symbolic meaning of a right can both anchor and transform legal consciousness, at the same time.

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