With the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989, and the simultaneous final shifts to the decolonisation of southern Africa with the independence of Namibia and South Africa’s progress towards freedom, an unprecedented era of constitution-making was launched. This activity focused on central and eastern Europe and western continental Asia as the Soviet empire was dismantled, and on the Namibian and South African ‘revolutions’ in formal governance structures, although this development soon gained traction widely in other states in southern and east Africa. It was as if the final steps in freeing the African continent from imperial rule with the overthrow of apartheid triggered the desire to ‘renew the vows’ under which formal freedom had been granted through constitutional arrangements imposed from London and Paris some thirty to forty years earlier.