 African political thought, part nine. Last week we looked at the work of famous novelists such as Nguki Wathiongo and compared him to someone like Nigeria's Waiya Shijinka, the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, and in particular in talking about Shijinka's work we are trying to discuss the complexity of society as reflected by African writers. The complexity of society and the psychological havoc that this complexity can play, particularly on the next generation of young Africans emerging from the years of independence and going forward into a future that no longer remembers the struggle for independence. All the same be set by all of the great difficulties of modern government including corruption, including marginalization, and including alienation. And while trying to seek for a modernity that makes sense for tomorrow, at the same time haunted by the motifs of the past as rehearsed constantly by an older generation, even though the younger generation no longer has a memory of what happened before. So that kind of psychological condition was very very well captured by Waiya Shijinka who all the same was a very very stern critic of corruption and of bad management and bad government in Nigeria. He called Nigeria the running sore of the continent. But have there been other writers who have tried to make exactly the same point? Oh yes someone like Amar who wrote one of the very early novels about the African condition, the beautiful ones and not yet born, using the metaphor of feces, a copper-filiac novel about how difficult it was to navigate the sewers of development, the sewers of corrupt administration, and what it means to be one lone man trying to navigate this complete enclosure which was shit filled. The novel finishes with literally the protagonist emerging from a sewer pipe and seeing one flower. And of course we don't know is this one flower at the end of the sewer pipe a beacon of hope, petals of hope, or is all of the shit going to drown this flower? This kind of ambivalence in terms of facing the world is something that haunts the African novel. And it's a novel also that has a form used by female writers. I'm thinking here in terms of the late Yvonne Vera, the Zimbabwean novelist who but for her early death might also have been a contender for a future Nobel Prize for literature. And particularly her very great novel, her last fully complete novel before she died called The Stone Virgins. Here she does borrow from the liberation struggles of the past but the veterans of this liberation struggle and don't forget it was a dangerous time in Mugabe Zimbabwe at the moment when he was using the war veterans for his own political purposes. In the novel The Stone Virgin the veterans are all traumatized and they perform acts of great atrocity. There is a particularly haunting dance scene in the novel where the height of what seems to be a tango in which the two protagonists almost seem to be embraced to the point of making love. He cuts off her head and you don't know this has happened because the language is so elegant. It takes two or three pages of reflection before one realizes that the technique that he used is exactly that technique with which we are now familiar in terms of ISIS executioners in Syria and in Iraq. But the extent that trauma takes a person, the extent to which trauma deforms a person that all the same had sufficient integrity as a person in the first place to be a fighter for liberation, that kind of moment of huge ambivalence whether human anymore or now a monster is perfectly captured and rendered in Yvonne Vera's book The Stone Virgins which opens with the chapter set in the streets of Bulawayo, the jazz clubs harking back to an era when Africa and its struggle for emancipation was truly cosmopolitan. The jazz clubs that were infected by New Orleans jazz, infected by Louis Armstrong, infected by Hot Racing Club jazz in Paris. The huge jazz classic Skokian was in fact composed by Zimbabwean musician in Bulawayo. All of that infuses into her work a contemporary ethos that all the same as part of the struggle against the traumas that come from the past. We mentioned someone like Vera as an almost archetypical novelist drawing from the past but drawing from the world all around her and pointing away despite trauma and ambivalence towards the future. There have not been a huge number of African female writers who have written politically outside of the novel form. Only very very recently have we had African presidents for instance Ellen Sirleaf Johnson in L'Aberia, Joyce Banda in Malawi, wannabe presidents in Zimbabwe, two of the great contenders for the succession to Robert Mugabe, Joyce Mujuru and of course Mugabe's own wife Grace Mugabe shared the characteristic of being held up by some as a feminist hope for the future of Africa. Whether either of them will succeed, whether either of them will be able to do anything that is truly what we would regard as feminist, that is not only emancipatory for women but emancipatory for women as part of the human race and emancipation as a desirable part of the human condition remains to be seen. Similarly the place of women in African political philosophy, the actual writing of the manifestos, the thought, the programs and the philosophical reflections of what emancipation means, that also remains a project to be realized for the future. But I want to spend a couple of minutes at this stage talking about a different kind of writer, one which is often ignored, neglected, passed over in terms of conceptions of what it means to be a person in Africa who writes. And here I'm thinking primarily of writers of African jurisprudence, that is those who set about writing the constitutions of Africa. Those constitutions that guarantee emancipation, that guarantee above all equality, ever since the landmark constitution of majority rule South Africa, where a greater array of equalities was embedded in that constitution than in any other constitution on earth, the world in general has had as it were a litmus test of what it means to be constitutionally enabled to be equal. Even the Zimbabweans underneath Robert Mugabe recently took on board this idea of equality and the new constitution in that country, although not as extensive as the one in South Africa, nevertheless is a trailblazer in terms of its guarantees for the equality of women. But constitutions in recent times have come about in African countries usually because of crisis. The 2007 electoral crisis, ethnic violence in Kenya, saw the need for a new constitution to be written which would limit the powers of the presidency to make as it were governance more pluralistic in terms of a greater number of centers of power. So there would not be this grasping for one position onto which an incumbent held with might and main forever and ever. People like Yash Guy from the University of Dar es Salaam, people like Jaloka Bayani, a jurist at London School of Economics, but originally from University of Zambia, were very much involved in a constitution making that took the process of consultation out to the furthest reaches of the Kenyan countryside. The idea that there should be not only constitutional provisions that were modern, transparent, equal and free, but a constitutional provision that resonated with people who would be affected by the provisions of that constitution takes us into a particular era of nationalism, nationhood and nation building in Africa, pioneered by African thinkers of a legal sort.