Constitutionalism in Africa: Creating Opportunities, Facing Challenges

Abstract

LAW Joe Oloka-Onyango. Constitutionalism in Africa: Creating Opportunities, Facing Challenges. Kampala: Fountain Publishers, 2001. Distributed by African Books Collective Ltd., The Jam Factory, 27 Park End Street, Oxford OXl 1HU. xi + 345 pp. Index. $41.95. Paper. The growing interest in African law is long overdue. Political scientists, for most part, abandoned law in 1970s when military coups rendered study of law seemingly irrelevant. With a new spurt of constitution writing, we should expect more scholarly output on this topic in future. This volume of eighteen papers, edited by Joe Oloka-Onyango, former dean of Faculty of Law at Makerere University, has its origins in a 1998 conference held in Uganda. Readers will benefit most from chapters on gender and contemporary constitution writing. Unfortunately, earlier sections of book, Challenges, New Opportunities and Ethnicity, Identity and Role of Civil Society, suffer from a degree of vagueness that limits their usefulness. The central weakness is an apparent unwillingness to define constitutionalism. This is not a call for a common definition to be carried throughout volume. Rather, in view of diverse backgrounds of authors, attempting to wrestle with this murky concept could have served as a focal point for discussing meanings of constitutionalism in African context, how those meanings relate to specificities of African politics and society, and why constitutionalism might take a different path in Africa from one has taken elsewhere. As is, links between particular qualities of African politics, such as ethnicity, and constitutionalism, are not always clear. There is also a ten- .;' dency to equate paper constitutions with constitutionalism. I was particularly intrigued by inclusion of Rwanda in two of chapters on ethnicity. Does ethnicity make constitutionalism in places like postgenocidal Rwanda unlikely, or is constitutionalism an instrument for preventing ethnic conflict? It is not clear whether even makes sense to talk about constitutionalism in Rwanda. Kamatali does, however, talk briefly about consequences of indirect rule on Rwandans' attitudes toward law. He suggests that ability of traditional authorities to resist legal orders of colonial officers left impression that the law was not obligatory and enforceable by itself. Rather, depended on attitude of authority who... enforced it (112-13). I am hoping that he has written more expansively on this elsewhere because what people think about law matters immensely. …