THE SHADOW OF RULE: Colonial Power and Modern Punishment in Africa

Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 2019

The international conference held in Lisbon, Portugal in 2016 on Colonial Incarceration in the Twentieth Century: a comparative approach’, provided a platform to engage with ongoing debate on political persecution, confinement and colonial rule in empire. The present papers which resulted from the above-mentioned conference provide valuable insights into recent research on politically motivated punishment and internment in several colonial contexts. Mainly concerned with Africa, they focus on the organisation, discourse and practice regarding political internment in Portuguese, German, British and French empires with reference to Angola, Tanzania, Rhodesia, South Africa, as well as Guyana and New Caledonia. The papers engage with the historiography of political incarceration in prisons and detention camps during the colonial period, from the late nineteenth century to the end of empire, while building upon the remarkable dynamic in scientific research over the last decades. Penal legislation, policies of convict transport and political imprisonment, resettlement, prison regimes, resistance and liberation struggles, counter insurgency, prisoner agency, prisons as cultural spaces and memory are discussed here in different time periods and locations from a variety of multidisciplinary angles.

ABSTRACT The international conference held in Lisbon, Portugal in 2016 on Colonial Incarceration in the Twentieth Century: a comparative approach’, provided a platform to engage with ongoing debate on political persecution, confinement and colonial rule in empire. The present papers which resulted from the above-mentioned conference provide valuable insights into recent research on politically motivated punishment and internment in several colonial contexts. Mainly concerned with Africa, they focus on the organisation, discourse and practice regarding political internment in Portuguese, German, British and French empires with reference to Angola, Tanzania, Rhodesia, South Africa, as well as Guyana and New Caledonia. The papers engage with the historiography of political incarceration in prisons and detention camps during the colonial period, from the late nineteenth century to the end of empire, while building upon the remarkable dynamic in scientific research over the last decades. Penal legislation, policies of convict transport and political imprisonment, resettlement, prison regimes, resistance and liberation struggles, counter insurgency, prisoner agency, prisons as cultural spaces and memory are discussed here in different time periods and locations from a variety of multidisciplinary angles

A History of Prison and Confinement in Africa, Portsmouth, N.J.: Heinemann, pp. 1-53., 2003

This introduction to Bernault's edited volume A History of Prison and Confinement in Africa (Portsmouth, N.J., Heinemann, 2003) attempts to provide an broad understanding of the birth of the custodial imprisonment in sub-Saharan Africa, and to highlight some of the main patterns displayed by colonial and postcolonial prisons.

Global Convict Labour, 2015

In 1937 Charles Clifton Roberts, a former magistrate and attorney-general in Nyasaland and Uganda, argued in his reformist critique of the colonial justice system that 'prison labour is a weapon of immense value in the campaign against crime'. 2 Roberts, like many other colonial officials viewed productive labour as the key to creating a modern African citizen and developing the continent. The question is what the true 'value' of prison labour was to colonial African states: was it merely conceptualized in economic terms, or did it also have an acknowledged penal and political value? As Lichtenstein argues for the American South, convict labour operated 'as a system of labour recruitment, control and exploitation particularly suited to the political economy of a post-emancipation society', being in effect 'a system of forced labour in an age of emancipation'. 3 In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Africa was experiencing its own abolition of slavery, but within a context of colonization and coercion by European powers. The quest of European governments to define a progressive mission for themselves in the era of high imperialism led to a focus on free labour as the basic test of the responsible colonizer. But a legal dichotomy of 'free' and 'forced' labour offered little guidance to the daily practice of colonial administration and left obscured the ambiguous terrain in which colonial governments exercised power over the labour of Africans. 4 With African labour key to the establishment and development of colonial states, it soon became clear that compulsory labour-of one sort or another-would have to coexist with more humanitarian and 'civilized' rationales for rule. As slavery was gradually abolished, and forced labour ended in effect after 1921 in British Africa, the role of convict labour in colonial prisons slowly shifted into focus. Although they formed a key component of the coercive networks of colonial state, imprisonment-and penality more widely-have only recently emerged as topics of historical interest. 5 Criminal justice and penal practices across British Africa were characterized by a 1

The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 2019

In and beyond anti-colonial struggles, the repressive institutions of prison are variously defined, contested, and recast by law, including through prisoner resistance. The likelihood of resistance and the necessity of the rule of law in prisons apply irrespective of whether people are incarcerated as criminals, terrorists, or political prisoners. The paper articulates four sets of relationships concerning law and prison: a normative aspiration to law as justice; the diversity of law; the necessity of universal rights irrespective of particular actors or institutions; and the role of prisonbased struggles in challenging colonial, neo-colonial, and other legal regimes. The relationship between state power in constituting prison rule is considered through the work of John DiIulio's endorsement of authoritarian prison governance and Giorgio Agamben's dystopian concerns about zones of lawlessness applied to prisons. Various examples, including colonial Malaya, French Indochina, apartheid South Africa, Northern Ireland, Egypt, and the contemporary United States (including Guantanamo Bay), are considered in the paper to examine and develop arguments. These exemplars illustrate overlapping elements of prison repression and resistance vis-à-vis law despite very different contexts. The normative, theoretical, and empirical perspectives and cases underscore the need for universal rules to protect all prisoners. The goal of universal legal protections is highlighted in the 2015 'Nelson Mandela Rules', an expansion of the United Nations' 'Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners'. Mandela's name underscores the role of resistance, including resistance through law and against law, to achieve at least minimum standards of treatment of all incarcerated people.

Cultures of Confinement explains the spread of the prison globally through detailed regional historical studies. Modern prison in Africa argues that the institution emerged out of a longer extension of European coastal forts from the sixteenth century, the confinement practices of the slave trade, and the military lockups established as part of imperial conquests. The argument goes that colonial prisons in Africa were not aimed at rehabilitation of criminals but rather at resistance to the imposition of colonial rule and extraction of penal labour, while consolidating racial inequalities. In this regard, colonial regimes revived and extended the use of corporal punishment against Africans in native and colonial courts, contradicting the interpretation that incarceration replaced torture as a mode of social control and governance. Reform within post-colonial penal institutions in Africa has been mixed, and alternative and localized community tribunals have not fundamentally shifted the role of prisons as institutions of state violence and penal labor. At the end of the nineteenth century, European colonizers in Africa imposed prison systems on a massive scale as soon as they secured control over people and territories. Racial segregation and social distance between Europeans and Africans served as an enduring, though tacit, basis for the architectural, moral and bureaucratic management of the colonial penitentiary. The principle of repentance, one of the major sources of prison reform in the West, thus experienced considerable alteration in the colonies. While the Western penitentiary reframed free individuals as equal citizens and legal subjects, the colonial prison primarily constructed Africans as objects of power. In doing so, the history of the colonial prison speaks to a host of long-debated questions on the parallels between modern governance and the decline of state-inflicted destruction. To a large extent the advent of the custodial prison in African colonies can be described as a never-ending enterprise of territorial and human conquest.

PER, 2017

The discourse surrounding the punishment of offenders within a society reveals much about the particular ideological underpinnings of power within that society. Penal discourse within colonial societies is particularly interesting in that it traces the specific contours of the racist ideologies which characterise those societies. This article is focused upon penal discourse within the Colony of Natal towards the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries. Within the colony at this time, the race of an offender was becoming increasingly important in determining the type of punishment, treatment and training considered appropriate for that offender. This article is focused-in particular-upon the discourse surrounding the punishment of "European" offenders in colonial Natal. It is submitted that the punishment of these offenders raised all sorts of ideological problems for the colonists, since the offenders in question were members of the white "master race". The following central themes within the colonial penal discourse of the time are discussed: first, the role that "shame" and "degradation" were considered to play in the punishment of white-but not black-prisoners; second, the perceived need to train white-but not black-prisoners in skilled work, to enable white prisoners to find employment upon leaving prison; and, third, the perceived need to keep white-but not black-prisoners out of the public gaze, in particular avoiding situations in which white prisoners could be seen being punished alongside black prisoners and subject to the control of black prison guards. Examining the precise contours of the penal ideology which underpinned the punishment of offenders in colonial Natal may be useful in understanding certain of the foundations of racist penal thinking during subsequent periods of South African history, including the notorious apartheid era.

Potchefstroom Electronic Law Journal, 2018

The discourse surrounding the punishment of offenders within a society reveals much about the particular ideological underpinnings of power within that society. Penal discourse within colonial societies is particularly interesting in that it traces the specific contours of the racist ideologies which characterise those societies. This article is focused upon penal discourse within the Colony of Natal towards the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries. Within the colony at this time, the race of an offender was becoming increasingly important in determining the type of punishment, treatment and training considered appropriate for that offender. This article is focused-in particular-upon the discourse surrounding the punishment of "European" offenders in colonial Natal. It is submitted that the punishment of these offenders raised all sorts of ideological problems for the colonists, since the offenders in question were members of the white "master race". The following central themes within the colonial penal discourse of the time are discussed: first, the role that "shame" and "degradation" were considered to play in the punishment of white-but not black-prisoners; second, the perceived need to train white-but not black-prisoners in skilled work, to enable white prisoners to find employment upon leaving prison; and, third, the perceived need to keep white-but not black-prisoners out of the public gaze, in particular avoiding situations in which white prisoners could be seen being punished alongside black prisoners and subject to the control of black prison guards. Examining the precise contours of the penal ideology which underpinned the punishment of offenders in colonial Natal may be useful in understanding certain of the foundations of racist penal thinking during subsequent periods of South African history, including the notorious apartheid era.

The Journal of African History, 2008

ABSTRACTCapital punishment in British colonial Africa was not just a method of crime control or individual punishment, but an integral aspect of colonial networks of power and violence. The treatment of condemned criminals and the rituals of execution which brought their lives to an end illustrate the tensions within colonialism surrounding the relationship between these states and their subjects, and with their metropolitan overlords. The state may have had the legal right to kill its subjects, but this right and the manner in which it was enacted were contested. This article explores the interactions between various actors in this penal ‘theatre of death’, looking at the motivations behind changing uses of the death penalty, the treatment of the condemned convicts whilst they awaited death, and the performance of a hanging itself to show how British colonial governments in Africa attempted to create and manage the deaths of their condemned subjects.

2007

Part one of this article began by tracing the birth of the prison in colonial Natal. It then examined the investigation undertaken by the colonial authorities in the 1860s into the state of the colonial prisons, culminating in a set of penal reforms which were set out in the Imperial Blue Book ...