Constitutional Colonialism and Decolonization: Moving Toward a Decolonial African Constitutional Future
This Article is an attempt at theorizing Africa’s colonial constitutional legacies and post-colonial constitutionalism. The central argument of this article is that constitutional law in Africa is a colonial tool that was used to legalize the subjugation of Africans and Africa, and a post-colonial necessity for the “self-determination and statehood” of newly-minted African states, while at the same time, it remains a decolonial battlefield of epistemic colonization. This Article adopts a broader conception of colonialism that extends beyond the 19th-century understanding of European colonialism and interrogates constitutional law as both a colonial tool and an act of self-determination in the experiences of Third World and Settler colonialism. In building the central argument, this Article will demonstrate that the call for decolonized African constitutions and the current dissatisfaction with African constitutions stem from the colonists’ erasure of what I refer to as the precolonial laws and epistemologies of precolonial societies. Furthermore, this Article suggests that what is needed is not a dialectical, comparative North-South approach to comparative constitutional law, but rather, a multifocal and inward-looking methodology that evaluates the past, present, and future of Africans by Africans, for Africans.
Recommended Citation: Luwam Dirar, Constitutional Colonialism and Decolonization: Moving Toward a Decolonial African Constitution, 49 Fordham Int'l L.J. 839 (2026).