Providing the Context for the Debate on the “Human” Imagined in the Drafting of the ANC’S Constitutional Guidelines in Lusaka, 1985–89

This article attempts to provide an historical context for current debates on South Africa’s 1996 constitution. It argues that the template for the new Constitution was forged by the anc in Lusaka, Zambia between 1985 and 1989, well before the ‘unbannings’ of February 1990 which are generally assumed to have been the starting point of the constitution-making process. The author outlines how the organisation and its allies wove constitutionalism in as one of the distinct threads of an enormously complex, multifaceted and sometimes contradictory process of struggle and constitutional planning that finally pushed the regime into a corner and led to the unbannings of 1990. Besides re-periodising the constitution-making narrative, the article stresses the African ‘essence’ of this struggle and the importance of African agency and ideas in forging the constitutional foundations for the future. Multiple levels of intergenerational experience, thinking and nuance are not catered for in often sloganised debates about the Constitution’s origins. This will require scholars interested in the decolonial project to self-interrogate sometimes mechanistic assumptions about the “inherited” Western underpinnings of the Constitution, it concludes.