Reviewer: Kofi Akosah-Sarpong in Ottawa, Canada

" That a university has a leading role to play in promoting human rights and democracy is indisputable. Education determines the lines along which development will take place. But for this to happen it is ‘necessary that education be regarded as a global project, involving all of society. And the university is the doorstep […]. It provides the space for reflection on the deeper matters of social movements.

"It was the American and the French Revolutions that ‘radically changed the relationship between governors and governed by shifting the emphasis from the duties of the governed to the rights of the citizen. Thus human rights have become a point of equilibrium in the relationship between the governors and the governed. It is here that the university must exert pressure on the governments so that they will always have present[…] "the right of having rights."

The above two quotes reveal the core aims of papers presented at the conference on cultivating co-operation amongst human rights institutions in southern Africa. The conference which papers form this book specifically looks at how the university can be a platform for human rights in the larger society.

For many an African university has been accused variously of being too much of an Ivory Tower, behaving as if they are not part of the society when there are brutal violations of human, grand-scale corruption, tribalism, promotions of policies that are sharply at variance with local African knowledge.

As one reads through this book one gets the impression that the African university, despite its numerous problems and the fact that they were founded and operates on Eurocentric structures, are beginning to see light in confronting the daunting task facing Africa.

For on recent times the African elite have had negative experience; they are variously seen as mal-educated and misfit in grappling the nuances of African culture for development. They are seen as corrupt, deceitful, liars, tribalistic and divisive, imperial, impractical, arrogant, childish, and, among others, unAfrican in their reasoning and thinking.

Rights to its mission, the book written by top African academics, as the papers inside reveal, using human rights and the university as its forte in addressing problems like promotion of democracy, research and documentation, education, governance, consolidation of human rights, sustainable development, civil society, gender, customary law.