A History of Prison and Confinement in Africa

Abstract

A History of Prison and Confinement in Africa. Edited by Florence Bernault, translated by Janet Roitman. Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann, 2003. Pp. x, 287. $67.95 cloth, $28.95 paper. The collection under review, English translation of Florence Bernault's Enfermement, prison et chatiments en Afrique du 19e siecle a nos jours, is important addition to a literature applying Foucaultian problematics to African history. The collection describes more than a particular set of penal practices; it represents ambitious attempt to chart a colonial-era shift in strategies of governance. In her introduction, Bernault suggests that the penitentiary was part of a wider-ranging attempt to make colonial spaces susceptible to imperial rule. And yet, she argues, imported practices of incarceration often resonated with precolonial practices of imprisonment, confinement, or exclusion from society, even while colonial penal practice became cut off from the intellectual systems undergirding European imprisonment and prison reform. The systems of imprisonment that emerged during the colonial and postcolonial periods thus represent a heterogeneous amalgam of African practices and colonial impositions. The framework is important and productive way to address a comparative issue as complex as prison and confinement. Bernault suggests that technologies of confinement ultimately helped constitute colonial societies. Circumscribing individual freedom was not merely a matter of sticking particular people in prison but was part of a more comprehensive project of regulating modes of life, categories of person, and types of space. Colonialism inaugurated new organizational problems with the advent of capitalist wage labor, the abolition of slavery, and the increase in peasant agriculture and sedentarization. Imprisonment and confinement were one pole of a more generalized regime of juridical projects that at times criminalized precolonial patterns of work and sociality. By formulating the collection's problematic in this way, Bernault brings into focus a critical problem in colonial and postcolonial history. Naturally, none of the chapters addresses the problem in its entirety, and even as case studies they vary widely in quality. Nonetheless, the best essays are extremely good, and the worst are simply pedestrian; all are very readable. The collection will therefore be useful for undergraduate teaching, as well as being required reading for scholars with any interest in law and governance. The essays begin with Jan Vansina's study of prisons in Angola. Vansina argues that imprisonment had no basis in precolonial practice in the Kongo kingdom or the other areas incorporated into the Portuguese colony. Rather, prisons emerged with the imposition of Portuguese law and with the exigencies of Portuguese military fortification, the transportation of prisoners to Angola, and the slave trade. There is a certain element of romanticism to his account-he attributes the absence of imprisonment and other bodily constraints upon free people in precolonial society to an African vision of human, individual, and social dignity (p. 64) -but nonetheless provides a compelling overview of a complex historical development. By contrast, Thierno Bah's study, which claims to address confinement in nineteenth-century West Africa, is a breathless catalog of carceral practices in various West African societies, ranging from sixteenth-century Songhay to precolonial Cameroon, The piece is somewhat disjointed, more a collection of anecdotes -and these culled from a very few, mostly secondary sources -than a systematic study. …

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