Introduction: African penal histories in global perspective

Abstract

It has been over twenty years since the publication of Florence Bernault’s edited volume Enfermement, prison et châtiments en Afrique: du 19e siècle à nos jours (1999), a first of its kind collection that helped establish the field of African penal history. Since then, this field has greatly expanded (see Alexander and Kynoch, 2011; Roberts 2013; Waller, 2017) with innovative research on topics such as capital and corporal punishment (Anderson, 2005; Hynd, 2008; Gendry, 2018; Pierce, 2001; Ocobock, 2012), colonial and postcolonial prisons (Thioub, 1999; Branch 2005; Diallo 2005; Braatz 2015; Hynd 2015b; Brunet-La Ruche 2016; Konaté 2018; Machava 2019; Bruce-Lockhart 2022), prison protests (Filippi, 2012), forced and penal labour (Sene, 2004; Hynd, 2015a; Tiquet 2018), indigenous forms of punishment (Braatz 2015; Balakrishnan, 2020), political imprisonment (Alexander 2012; Branche 2014; Munochiveyi 2014; Deslaurier 2019), detention without trial (Lobban, 2021), detention, re-education or concentration camps (Elkins, 2005; McCracken, 2011; Cruz and Curto 2017, Machava, 2019), and the relationship between penal reform and prison violence (Sarkin, 2008; Gillespie, 2011). Such studies have highlighted the significant of race and ethnicity to African penal regimes, but also their gendered (Zimudzi, 2004; Bruce-Lockhart, 2014), generational (Fourchard 2011; Hynd 2018) and economic/capitalist dynamics. This scholarship has not only provided a clearer picture of penal ideas and institutions on the African continent but has also offered insights into wider questions on the relationship