Brief History
The history of prisons in Africa, as elsewhere, cannot be disentangled from the history of colonization, the Atlantic Slave Trade, and nation formation.
It is usually accepted in existing scholarship that incarceration was not a common characteristic of systems of punishment in Africa until after European colonization and occupation began. Prisons across the continent weren’t really seen until the late 1800s,* and systems of justice were often organized around compensation for victims rather than time spent held against one’s will, or exile and ejection from social and familial circles (see Bernault 2003, and Morelle 2021).
Bernault warns against an oversimplification of that story. “This historical rupture tends to obscure complex, hidden correspondences between European doctrines and African ideas about punishment and physical enclosure. Some aspects of the penitentiary resonated with ancient, local forms of spatial captivity and physical seclusion. Military captivity, legal techniques of body constraint, and spiritual retreats existed in Africa alongside a series of architectures of confinement generated by the slave trade” (5). We must consider the prison at foreign to Africa, and at the same time in conversation with both preceding African forms of confinement and punishment and advancing carceral technologies in Europe. Implicitly, we must also understand how Africa and other parts of the colonized world acted as laboratories for those carceral technologies, where colonial administrators would experiment with new forms of social and physical control and punishment, removed from the ethical and legal restrictions they might face in Europe and enabled by a legal system which qualified Africans as not quite subjects or citizens and a racial discourse which understood them as less than human (approached as objects of power rather than subjects of a nation, according to Bernault). As the colonial project proceeded, both in its earlier years and then after Partition, the prison became an essential mechanism in colonial occupation, in punishing and controlling indigenous populations, and in the maintenance of racial order. As many countries in Africa gained independence from European powers in the mid 20th-century, the prison persisted as a method of maintaining social order as well as punishing political dissidents. As elsewhere, it was one of the remainders of European colonization and domination that, rather than done away with during decolonization, was repurposed to meet the needs of emerging systems of governance.
In their introduction to Confinement, Punishment and Prisons in Africa, authors Hornberger, Le Marcis, and Morelle describe two reigning and limiting framings for academic discussions of prisons in Africa. One, "as a site of exceptional horror, abject human conditions... Steeped in a paradigm of otherness, this makes for senationalistic (media) reports that feed into stereotypes about Africa as the 'dark continent.'" The other "foregrounds 'Northern' advances in prison rule and the humanistic mission of applying these to the African prison. This way sees the African prison as an institution in need of reconstruction and reform, and, as such, in need of international interventions and the pressuring of states" (XII, Morelle 2021). Rather than approach these systems in their own right, both these framings traffick in racialized Western conceptions of Africa as a place of unique instability and chaos. In the process, they relegate the prisons of Africa, the people who populate them, and the continent itself to a racialized position that presents those states as weak and their citizens as simultaneously dangerous, foolish, and racially predisposed to violence. Further academic work on prisons and carcerality in Africa will hopefully build on emerging framings that approach prisons and imprisonment on the continent on its own terms and that pay special attention to how technologies of punishment and incarceration were developed in Africa by European powers throughout their colonial projects there, and how those technologies continue to be implemented by newly independent African nations that have, in many other ways, rejected continuing colonial influence as they have fought for and gained independence (see Bruce-Lockhart 2022).
South Africa:
South Africa is to some degree exceptional in the history of African prisons, partly because there is so much more scholarship on its prisons, and because of its history of racial apartheid under white South African rule until 1994. During apartheid, the white South African government imprisoned large numbers of political activists and Black South Africans, using it simultaneously to control political thought and social unrest, whether caused by reaction to restrictive racial policy or the exigencies of poverty. As of 2015, its incarceration rate was 258/100,000, indicating the persistence there of incarceration as a solution to social problems, even while political systems change. For more on the changes and similarities between apartheid and post-apartheid prisons, see Gillespie 2007.
Officially, the early penal system under Dutch occupation of the Cape had little to do with maintenance of racial segregation. Public punishments and torture were used against all offenders, although the reality of the heavily racialized colonial world of the Cape, in which white Dutch colonizers ruled over a largely Black indigenous population, suggests they were unlikely to be used equally. But after the abolition of slavery between 1807-1834, new systems of racial control emerged - control of where Black people could travel, limitations on political participation, and a host of other restrictions. Quickly, an openly racist penal policy was implemented, and a system of forced work for prisoners met the needs of white landowners for labor as well as social and physical control. Punishment for the violation of “pass laws”, that required Black Africans to carry documents authorizing their movement and presence in restricted areas, began to fill jails and work farms. Portable “convict stations,” which held prisoners and moved them closer to public works, were constructed and implemented. This system of labor became so essential to agricultural work in South Africa that, by the 1930s, white farmers bought shares of farm-jails, and the amount of convict labor they then received from those farm-jails was in direct relation to how large their shares were. The scope of this system should not be understated: one large landowning farmer testified that "between 1972 and 1977, no fewer than 4,000 prisoners worked on his farm," according to Human Rights Watch. We can consider this relation between government, industry, and human bondage in connection to plantation slavery historically in the Americas and Africa, the contemporary privatization of prisons in the U.S. and elsewhere and the use of prison labor (Herivel and Wright 2005, Eisen 2018), and to U.S. post-slavery practices of racialized convict leasing in the U.S. South (Childs 2015). In all these places, capitalists (large landowners, public works contractors, etc.), could and can purchase the labor of a racialized underclass with little available means of resistance.
* (southern Africa being an exception, where they were built in the earlier part of the 1800s. This pattern holds today: In 2010 data, Southern Africa incarcerates 188 out of 100,000 people, while Western Africa only 52. And while Western Africa's numbers fell to 44.8/100,000 by 2015, Southern Africa's increased to 248).
(Theis Panoptical Prison plans, 1916, Senegal) National Archives of Senegal.
(Kigali Prison in Rwanda)
Texts
Confinement, Punishment and Prisons in Africa by ISBN: 9781003009627Publication Date: 2021-05-10This interdisciplinary volume presents a nuanced critique of the prison experience in diverse detention facilities across Africa. The book stresses the contingent, porous nature of African prisons, across both time and space. It draws on original long-term ethnographic research undertaken in both Francophone and Anglophone settings, which are grouped in four parts. The first part examines how the prison has imprinted itself on wider political and social imaginaries and, in turn, how structures of imprisonment carry the imprint of political action of various times. The second part stresses how particular forms of ordering emerge in African prisons. It is held that while these often involve coercion and neglect, they are better understood as the product of on-going negotiations and the search for meaning and value on the part of a multitude of actors. The third part is concerned with how prison life percolates beyond its physical perimeters into its urban and rural surroundings, and vice versa. It deals with the popular and contested nature of what prisons are about and what they do, especially in regard to bringing about moral subjects. The fourth and final part of the book examines how efforts of reforming and resisting the prison take shape at the intersection of globally circulating models of good governance and levels of self-organisation by prisoners. The book will be an essential reference for students, academics and policy-makers in Law, Criminology, Sociology and Politics.
A History of Prison and Confinement in Africa by ISBN: 9780325071251Publication Date: 2003-06-17Over the last 30 years, a substantial literature on the history of American and European prisons has developed. This collection is among the first in English to construct a history of prisons in Africa. Topics include precolonial punishments, living conditions in prisons and mining camps, ethnic mapping, contemporary refugee camps, and the political use of prison from the era of the slave trade to the Rwandan genocide of 1994.
Carceral Afterlives by ISBN: 9780821447741Publication Date: 2022-07-05Drawing upon social history, political history, and critical prison studies, this book analyzes how prisons and other instruments of colonial punishment endured after independence and challenges their continued existence. In Carceral Afterlives, Katherine Bruce-Lockhart traces the politics, practices, and lived experiences of incarceration in postcolonial Uganda, focusing on the period between independence in 1962 and the beginning of Yoweri Museveni's presidency in 1986. During these decades, Ugandans experienced multiple changes of government, widespread state violence, and war, all of which affected the government's approach to punishment. Bruce-Lockhart analyzes the relationship between the prison system and other sites of confinement--including informal detention spaces known as "safe houses" and wartime camps--and considers other forms of punishment, such as public executions and "disappearance" by state paramilitary organizations. Through archival and personal collections, interviews with Ugandans who lived through these decades, and a range of media sources and memoirs, Bruce-Lockhart examines how carceral systems were imagined and experienced by Ugandans held within, working for, or impacted by them. She shows how Uganda's postcolonial leaders, especially Milton Obote and Idi Amin, attempted to harness the symbolic, material, and coercive power of prisons in the pursuit of a range of political agendas. She also examines the day-to-day realities of penal spaces and public perceptions of punishment by tracing the experiences of Ugandans who were incarcerated, their family members and friends, prison officers, and other government employees. Furthermore, she shows how the carceral arena was an important site of dissent, examining how those inside and outside of prisons and other spaces of captivity challenged the state's violent punitive tactics. Using Uganda as a case study, Carceral Afterlives emphasizes how prisons and the wider use of confinement--both as a punishment and as a vehicle for other modes of punishment--remain central to state power in the Global South and North. While scholars have closely analyzed the prison's expansion through colonial rule and the rise of mass incarceration in the United States, they have largely taken for granted its postcolonial persistence. In contrast, Bruce-Lockhart demonstrates how the prison's transition from a colonial to a postcolonial institution explains its ubiquity and reveals ways to critique and challenge its ongoing existence. The book thus explores broader questions about the unfinished work of decolonization, the relationship between incarceration and struggles for freedom, and the prison's enduring yet increasingly contested place in our global institutional landscape.- Le système pénitentiaire de l'Afrique du Sud byISBN: 20412053
Enfermement, Prison et châtiments en Afrique. Du xixe siècle à nos jours. by ISBN: 9782865379460Publication Date: 1999À la fin du XIXe siècle, sauf à l'intérieur de quelques garnisons et forts de traite européens de la côte, les prisons étaient inconnues en Afrique. Aujourd'hui, les États africains utilisent massivement le système pénitentiaire légué par les colonisateurs. Comme le rappellent chaque jour les prisons surpeuplées du Rwanda, la nuit carcérale étend désormais son ombre sur l'ensemble des sociétés au sud du Sahara. Dès les premières années de la conquête coloniale, la prison joua un rôle central dans le contrôle de la population. Des bâtiments temporaires aidèrent à contraindre et à soumettre les Africains au travail forcé et à l'impôt obligatoire, remplacés bientôt par un maillage serré de prisons permanentes, partie intégrante du décor colonial et de ses techniques répressives. Aujourd'hui, ce réseau architectural n'a été ni détruit ni remplacé, et fournit la majeure partie des bâtisses utilisées par le régime pénal des États contemporains. Mais la prison fait partie d'un ensemble plus vaste. Les gouvernements coloniaux dotèrent leurs territoires d'institutions destinées à connaître, comprendre et surtout quadriller les espaces et les hommes qui persistaient à leur échapper. Ces outils intellectuels et matériels - cartes ethniques, routes, villages regroupés, asiles, camps de travail - enfermèrent peu à peu l'Afrique dans une nouvelle forme d'espace politique, dont les paysages actuels sont les héritiers directs. Ce basculement séculaire d'une Afrique ouverte à une Afrique fermée contient de précieuses leçons sur l'efficacité des modèles de gouvernement occidentaux à envahir d'autres aires culturelles, sur la capacité des hommes ordinaires à refuser ou à manipuler les systèmes imposés de l'extérieur, ainsi que sur le destin de l'autorité en Afrique, et de ses États. Cet ouvrage présente pour la première fois l'histoire sociale, culturelle et politique des arsenaux répressifs apparus en Afrique, depuis la capture des esclaves au XIXe siècle jusqu'aux prisons du génocide rwandais, en passant par les asiles d'aliénés coloniaux, les camps de réfugiés, et les réponses des prisonniers à leurs bourreaux.
Le monde des surveillants de prison by ISBN: 9782130456520Publication Date: 1994Une observation du travail des surveillants de prison et plus de trois cents entretiens effectués dans sept établissements pénitentiaires français, montrent que les conditions de travail des personnels de surveillance constituent une situation sociale limite. Totalement organisée et contrôlée de l'extérieur par un système légal très strict et détaillé, la prison a un rôle d'exécution. L'existence d'un double langage de la société sur les délinquants, qu'elle prétend exclure et réinsérer, la difficulté à affronter la réalité de la peine et à " penser " la sécurité structurent de fait l'organisation et l'ensemble des relations sociales de la prison. Dans ce contexte la mission des surveillants est caractérisée par des injonctions contradictoires et une ambiguïté fondamentale. L'objectif de cette recherche est de susciter un intérêt pour la connaissance d'un monde dont les représentations restent dominées par des mythes.
Répression et enfermement en Guinée : le pénitencier de Fotoba et la prison centrale de Conakry de 1900 à 1958 by ISBN: 9782747586580Publication Date: 2005En matière de répression pénitentaire, la Guinée est connue pour le tristement célèbre camp Boiro. Mais autant la prison du camp Boiro aura marqué la Guinée indépendante. autant le pénitencier de Fotoba et la prison centrale de Conakry réveillent le souvenir de la répression coloniale. Evoquer ces deux établissements a d'autant plus d'intérêt que la Guinée fut la seule des huit colonies de l'AOF à abriter un pénitencier " indigène " de dimension régionale. L'ambition répressive était grande, mais les moyens restèrent très limités, les autorités se contentant de locaux de fortune, simples prisons " morales ", et d'un système centralisé à outrance ne tenant pas compte des besoins spécifiques de chaque région. Ce système pénitentiaire reposait sur les travaux forcés et l'emploi. sans distinction, de la main-d'œuvre pénale. Le système pénitentiaire, institution essentielle du régime colonial, est révélateur de la philosophie et des pratiques de la domination. L'ambition de ce livre n'est pas uniquement de restituer l'histoire de la répression pénitentiaire telle qu'elle avait été voulue et conçue par l'administration coloniale mais aussi de saisir sa réalité concrète, telle qu'elle apparaît dans les archives.
Letters from Robben Island by ISBN: 1868084507Publication Date: 1999-01-01Late one night in July, 1963, a South African police unit surrounded the African National Congress headquarters in Rivonia and arrested a group of Movement leaders gathered inside. Eventually eight of them, including Nelson Mandela, who was already serving a sentence, Walter Sisulu, Dennis Goldberg, Govan Mbeki, Raymond Mhlaba, Elias Motsoledi, Andrew Mangeni, and Ahmed Kathrada, were convicted of sabotage and, on June 12, 1964, sentenced to life in prison. Soon, these men became widely known as the "Rivonia Trialists." Despite their imprisonment, the Trialists played active roles in the struggle against South Africa's racist regime. Instead of being forgotten, as apartheid officials had hoped, they became enduring symbols in a struggle against injustice and racism.
Kathrada and his colleagues were classified as high security prisoners, segregated from others and closely watched. Every activity was regulated and monitored. Among the many indignities visited upon them, the prisoners were prohibited from keeping copies of incoming and outgoing correspondence. Kathrada, or "Kathy" as he is known, successfully hid both.
Letters From Robben Island contains a selection of 86 of the more than 900 pieces of correspondence Ahmed Kathrada wrote during his 26 years on Robben Island and at Pollsmoor Prison. Some were smuggled out by friends; others were written in code to hide meaning and content from prison censors. These are among his most poignant, touching, and eloquent communications. They are testimonies to Kathrada, his colleagues, and to their commitment to obtaining human dignity and freedom for all South Africans.
- L’AFRIQUE EN PRISONS
Depuis l’ouvrage de Florence Bernault consacré à l’histoire des prisons africaines, les sciences sociales francophones sont restées singulièrement silencieuses sur les enjeux carcéraux en Afrique. Le présent volume entend combler ce manque à partir de recherches ethnographiques – entretiens, enquêtes de terrain, consultation d’archives – conduites par une équipe pluridisciplinaire dans dix pays du continent, en Afrique francophone et anglophone : Tunisie, Sénégal, Burkina Faso, Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, Nigeria, Éthiopie, Burundi, Cameroun et Afrique du Sud.
Cet ouvrage permet de rompre avec les images archétypales et lacunaires souvent véhiculées sur les prisons du continent, et propose une lecture nuancée de l’expérience carcérale articulée aux représentations de la justice. Il étudie le phénomène carcéral en Afrique dans une perspective historique autant qu’il s’intéresse aux enjeux contemporains de la réforme carcérale. Enfin, il invite à saisir l’empreinte de la prison au-delà de ses murs.
Il intéressera les chercheurs, les étudiants ainsi que la pluralité des acteurs impliqués dans le travail carcéral et dans les débats sur les réformes pénitentiaires et le sens de la prison.
Surfacing Up by ISBN: 1501725793Publication Date: 2018-08-06Focusing on the history of the Ingutsheni Lunatic Asylum (renamed a mental hospital after 1933), situated near Bulawayo in the former Southern Rhodesia, Surfacing Up explores the social, cultural, and political history of the colony that became Zimbabwe after gaining its independence in 1980. The phrase "surfacing up" was drawn from a conversation Lynette A. Jackson had with a psychiatric nurse who used the concept to explain what brought African potential patients into the psychiatric system. Jackson uses Ingutsheni as a reference point for the struggle to "domesticate" Africa and its citizens after conquest. Drawing on the work of Frantz Fanon, Jackson maintains that the asylum in Southern Rhodesia played a significant role in maintaining the colonial social order. She supports Fanon's claim that colonial psychiatric hospitals were repositories for those of "indocile nature" or for those who failed to fit "the social background of the colonial type." Through reconstruction and reinterpretation of patient narratives, Jackson shows how patients were diagnosed, detained, and deemed recovered. She draws on psychiatric case files to analyze the changing economic, social, and environmental conditions of the colonized, the varying needs of the white settlers, and the shifting boundaries between these two communities. She seeks to extend and enrich our understanding of how a significant institution changed the way citizens and subjects experienced the colonial social order.
Imperial Bedlam by ISBN: 9780520216167Publication Date: 1999-09-24The colonial government of southern Nigeria began to use asylums to confine the allegedly insane in 1906. These asylums were administered by the British but confined Africans. Yet, as even many in the government recognized, insanity is a condition that shows cultural variation. Who decided the inmates were insane and how? This sophisticated historical study pursues these questions as it examines fascinating source material--writings by African patients in these institutions and the reports of officials, doctors, and others--to discuss the meaning of madness in Nigeria, the development of colonial psychiatry, and the connections between them. Jonathan Sadowsky's well-argued, concise study provides important new insights into the designation of madness across cultural and political frontiers. Imperial Bedlam follows the development of insane asylums from their origins in the nineteenth century to innovative treatment programs developed by Nigerian physicians during the transition to independence. Special attention is given to the writings of those considered "lunatics," a perspective relatively neglected in previous studies of psychiatric institutions in Africa and most other parts of the world. Imperial Bedlam shows how contradictions inherent in colonialism were articulated in both asylum policy and psychiatric theory. It argues that the processes of confinement, the labeling of insanity, and the symptoms of those so labeled reflected not only cultural difference but also political divides embedded in the colonial situation. Imperial Bedlam thus emphasizes not only the cultural background to madness but also its political and experiential dimensions.
La violence carcérale en question by ISBN: 9782130739371Publication Date: 2008Pour la première fois en France, des sociologues ont réussi à enquêter sur la violence carcérale. Ce livre analyse l'ensemble des relations entre personnes incarcérées, entre personnels et détenus, ainsi que les effets de la structure sécuritaire de l'institution sur ces relations. Il montre que la violence légale du cadre carcéral est générateur des violences en prison, malgré les moyens institutionnels et les efforts déployés par les professionnels et aussi par les détenus, pour la limiter. Ces violences se manifestent le plus souvent sous une forme explosive. Cet ouvrage est issu d'une longue recherche de terrain menée au sein de cinq prisons d'hommes, à partir d'observations, d'entretiens et de questionnaires, il accorde une large place à la parole des détenus et à celle des professionnels
Yaoundé carcérale : géographie d'une ville et de sa prison by ISBN: 9791036201004Publication Date: 2019Ce livre dévoile le quotidien de la prison centrale de Yaoundé, de ses détenus comme de leurs gardiens. Ce faisant, il souhaite dépasser les stéréotypes sur les prisons africaines, souvent réduites à des espaces surpeuplés et délabrés, signes " d'États en crise" et encore mal connus. Il se veut le support d'une mise en perspective des actions et des discours nationaux et internationaux sur les prisons, à l'intersection entre la réforme de la justice et celle de la sécurité.0Plus largement, cet essai éclaire la vie urbaine des populations dominées et les pratiques de régulation dont elles font l'objet de la part des autorités au Cameroun. Démontrant l'existence d'un continuum liant prison et quartiers populaires, il informe sur la manière dont le pouvoir en place gère la pauvreté comme les oppositions politiques en ville. Ce livre se situe ainsi à la croisée des approches urbaine, sociale et politique en géographie, à partir d'un objet encore rare dans la discipline.0Il s'appuie sur des entretiens répétés auprès des détenus, des sortants de prison, de leurs familles, comme de l'administration pénitentiaire et des ONG, et sur des observations conduites dans la prison et dans les quartiers de Yaoundé. Il s'adresse aux étudiants en sciences sociales et à toute personne engagée sur les questions carcérales et sur les droits de l'homme
Enjeux criminologiques contemporains Au-delà de l’insécurité et de l’exclusion by ISBN: 2760331539Publication Date: 2020Enjeux criminologiques contemporains confronte certaines des questions pressantes relatives aux pratiques penales et carcerales, à la criminologie "clinique", et au contrôle du crime et ses consequences. Cet ouvrage presente des theories et des methodes à la ne pointe de la recherche, dans le but explicite de contribuer au developpement de politiques qui promeuvent la securite et l'inclusion sociale. Les approches et theories critiques explorees dans cet ouvrage servent de contrepoint aux approches d'ordre administratif ou managerial et aux politiques et pratiques etatiques punitives, fondees sur l'exclusion. Decline en deux volumes -- l'un en français et l'autre en anglais --, ce live rassemble autant des experts eminents que des chercheurs emergents qui, ensemble, o rent une importante contribution à l'avancement de la recherche et des politiques publiques.
Campos de concentração em Cabo Verde : as ilhas como espaços de deportação e de prisão no Estado Novo by ISBN: 9789898074935Publication Date: 2009Na tradição histórica da prática do desterro de presos políticos para os destinos insulares, encontramos o fundamento e a definição da ideia de ilha como espaço adequado para o banimento dos condenados. Mais do que dar continuidade ao desterro, o modelo repressivo do Estado Novo estrutura de forma metódica a prática da deportação política dos seus opositores, sob a lógica repressiva do desterro e prisão no local do mesmo. O presente trabalho traz-nos um mapeamento dos diferentes destinos de deportação e prisão política, centrado fundamentalmente nas ilhas onde ficaram celebrizadas a encenação e a materialização desta prática, desde as referências sobre a prisão para deportados políticos na ilha de São Nicolau, até à imposição repressiva do Campo de Trabalho de Chão Bom, na ilha de Santiago, na sequência da contestação anticolonial. Fortemente ancorado na descodificação dos diferentes momentos e discursos que legitimavam esta prática política, este estudo analisa a problemática do desterro e da prisão no local de desterro como um dos dispositivos da grande panóplia repressiva do Estado Novo.
Colonial and Post-Colonial Incarceration by ISBN: 1281298182Publication Date: 2010-02-03The first study to deal extensively and comparatively with capture, imprisonment and punishment in colonial and postcolonial cultures. Offering textual as well as historical analysis, each chapter focuses on a specific national or regional arena. Each also provides foundational insight into the social, economic and cultural conditions prevalent in colonial societies. Chapters, written by a wide range of international specialists, include coverage of the early modern to the contemporary period as well as coverage of cultural arenas from Europe to Asia, Australia, northern and southern Africa and North America.
