ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to contribute to the ecology of constitutional theories and praxes by suggesting that the heuristic metaphor of the ‘abyssal line’ put forth by Boaventura de Sousa Santos is a productive metaphor for constitutional analysis and praxis. The two enquiries at the heart of this chapter and the miserable reality of neo-colonial constitutional dispensations in many parts of Africa and neo-apartheid constitutionalism in South Africa—more on the latter shortly—have to do with the paradox that the author detect to be at the heart of post-colonial constitution-making endeavours. The main aim of the chapter is to tease out the key tenets of post-conquest constitutionness as framed by African nationalists before 1994 and as proposed by Ramose today. Today, state elites are constantly appealing to the rural electoral fodder presumably controlled by traditional leaders by seeking to reconfigure the regime of rural land governance or by granting more surrogate executive and judicial powers to traditional authorities.
