Revealing Epistemic Injustice in the African Commission’s Reading of Indigeneity: The Case of the Endorois
摘要
The African Commission’s 2009 ruling in the case concerning the Endorois community, a pastoralist community based in the area around Lake Bogoria in Kenya, is hailed as one of the Commission’s most landmark achievements. In the case, the Commission found that the Endorois’s eviction from the Lake Bogoria reserve—their ancestral land—was in breach of their collective rights to consultation, cultural freedoms, and the right to property. There has been much praise for the Commission’s decision—especially its reading of indigeneity and cultural rights. This chapter explores a different dimension to the ruling: epistemic injustice. By viewing the Commission’s 2009 ruling in the Endorois case itself as a particular place, the chapter identifies instances of pre-emptive and testimonial injustice through the loss of voice, and hermeneutical injustice through the loss of vocabulary and grammar, inflicted on the Endorois community. These instances are drawn from interviews conducted with members of the Endorois Welfare Council, an entity set up in 1995 as the spokesperson for the Endorois in the legal complaints filed on behalf of the community.