Many African regimes do, indeed, exert their power with egregious disregard for basic human rights.
Melville Herskovits was the author of the 1947 American Anthropological Association executive board's formal statement on human rights, which maintained that each society drew on its cultural genius in defining a social charter and providing its members with rights. In seeking indigenous sources for a globalizing Western concept, Herskovits confused local concepts of human dignity and worth with ideas about rights. What contemporary Western journalists draw on when invoking human rights and exposing human rights abuses are concepts that were enshrined from 1945 in United Nations documents and charters on human rights, including the prominence of the 1993 UN World Conference on Human Rights. These rights were formalized originally during the Enlightenment and came to have political saliency during the British and French revolutions. Human rights thus has a history and it is intimately linked to the political and cultural history of Western Europe.