Traditional kingdoms and modern constitutions: parochialism, patriarchy, and despotism vs. indigenous safeguards against absolutism

Monday Talk

This chapter pursues three closely related but distinct scholarly aims. The first one is to provide a comparative look at the different ways Africa’s traditional structures of governance are brought into the fold of modern constitutions. There are two different ways of looking for this: the bird’s-eye-view and the in-depth. These different angles representing different analytical perspectives illuminate different parts of what is under study, and thus reveal different observations. We propose a way to combine the explanatory strengths of cross-country perspectives relying on select comparative variables on the one hand, with country-based in-depth studies on the other, while incorporating the historically evolving global and regional geopolitical dynamics into the scholarly inquiry. Section 1 pursues the first scholarly aim of constructing and finetuning the most appropriate approach to analyse traditional structures of governance, the formal constitutional prerogatives they enjoy, and the real political power they hold