General Introduction

This book is the outcome of peer-reviewed conference papers emanating from a Zoom conference organised under the auspices of the University of the Free State International Studies Group in 2020 plus invited experts to contribute. It invited contributors on the following theme: the making, unmaking, and remaking of the independence and postindependence constitutions of selected erstwhile British and French dependencies. The book is restricted to selected countries in Anglophone and Francophone Africa and deals with critical historical narratives of the independence constitutions of these states through the different historical phases of their evolution, in their full generality, as a distinctive object of positive analysis. A historical approach is needed to study the constitutions in the continent hitherto dominated and framed by political scientists and jurists.