ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the process through which African countries have attained their constitutions, rather than the content of those constitutions. Constitutional reconfiguring or renewal is subsumed under the notion of an African Renaissance. Swaziland is another country which has had a 30-member government appointed constitutional review commission in place since late 1996. The chapter explains Cornwell, Liebenberg and Zuern included in this reader address some of the issues relating to civil society. The centralised nation-state or state-nation is accepted as the primary political unit of organisation on the continent of Africa as elsewhere in the world. The African state has been subjected to a process of liberalisation since the early 1990s. Increasingly one comes across references in the literature on the politics of Africa, to the state and the need to reconfigure it or to reform it and its institutions or to reconstitute political orders.
