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Periodical article | Leiden University catalogue | WorldCat |
Title: | The Fall and Rise of Constitutionalism in West Africa |
Author: | Le Vine, Victor T. |
Year: | 1997 |
Periodical: | Journal of Modern African Studies |
Volume: | 35 |
Issue: | 2 |
Period: | June |
Pages: | 181-206 |
Language: | English |
Geographic term: | West Africa |
Subjects: | constitutions constitutional amendments Law, Human Rights and Violence Politics and Government |
External link: | https://www.jstor.org/stable/161678 |
Abstract: | The conventional wisdom has it that European/Western constitutional forms cannot be expected to take root in African political soil, since they are based on essentially alien predicates and principles. That is why, it is further claimed, practically all the so-called 'independence' constitutions were quickly annulled, abrogated, or simply put aside. Although submitting that the forms of these constitutions were preordained by the postwar political initiatives of the metropoles during the years 1946-1960, the present author argues that what happened thereafter had more to do with the political penumbra cast by that period and by the ambitions and agendas of those in power, than with any intrinsic flaws in the constitutional arrangements themselves. Since those initial 'failures' to this day, African experimentation continues apace, and almost invariably with variants of the very forms once rejected as inappropriate. The article examines these theses as they relate to West Africa, paying attention to the independence constitutions, the constitutions after independence, experiments in the period 1963-1989, especially those involving the Afro-Marxist regimes in Benin and Burkina Faso and the democratic interludes in Ghana (1969-1972, 1979-1981) and Nigeria (1979-1983), and the post-1989 democratic revival. Notes, ref. |