https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1087-9077
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Abstract
Bringing together methods and perspectives from critical archive studies, African history, social history and critical prison studies, this article considers the opportunities, challenges and ethical considerations that arise when doing social history research on colonial African prisons using official archives. We argue that while such records can provide valuable information, engagement with these documents needs to be grounded in recognition of their ‘person-ness’. This involves acknowledging the power dynamics and coercion that shaped the creation and content of official archives, prioritising the experiences of incarcerated people, and using the records in a way that recognises the limits of consent in terms of their origins and use. By turning to a person-centred historical praxis, researchers can not only play a key role in furthering our knowledge of colonial carceral systems but can also help to challenge these systems and their afterlives.
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank Riley Linebaugh, Emily Bridger, Catherine Ramey and the reviewers for their helpful feedback; Meg Foster and the journal editors for their guidance and support; David M. Anderson, Abigail Opoku, Catherine Ramey and Jamie Zettle for their research and insights on this topic; the archivists and librarians who helped us to access the archives used in this research; and the participants at the Imperial Genealogies of Crime Workshop for sharing their work and ideas. We would also like to thank the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation for providing funding to support this research.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Jinja District Archive Catalogue, https://derekrpeterson.com/archive-work/.
2 Jarrett M. Drake, ‘“Graveyards of Exclusion”: Archives, Prisons, and the Bounds of Belonging’, Medium, March 24, 2019, https://medium.com/community-archives/graveyards-of-exclusion-archives-prisons-and-the-bounds-of-belonging-c40c85ff1663; Eric Ketelaar, ‘Archival Temples, Archival Prisons: Modes of Power and Protection’, Archival Science 2 (2002): 221.
3 Vic Overdorf, ‘Archives of “Sexual Deviance”: Recovering the Queer Prisoner’, Journal of Feminist Scholarship 19 (2021): 11.
4 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish (New York: Vintage Books, 1995).
5 The Digital Panopticon, https://www.digitalpanopticon.org/.
6 The Proceedings of the Old Bailey, London’s Central Criminal Court, 1674 to 1913, https://www.oldbaileyonline.org//.
7 Proceedings of the Old Bailey; Barry Godfrey, ‘Liquid Crime History – Digital Entrepreneurs and the Industrial Production of “Ruined Lives”‘, in Liquid Criminology: Doing Imaginative Criminological Research, ed. Michael Hviid Jacobsen, and Sandra Walklate (London: Routledge, 2017), 140–55.
8 Katherine Roscoe, ‘Radical Changes: Decolonizing, not just Diversifying, Digital Crime Archives’, Journal of Victorian Culture 27, no. 1 (2022): 167–73.
9 Florence Bernault, A History of Prison and Confinement in Africa (Portsmouth: Heinemann, 2003); Erin Braatz, Katherine Bruce-Lockhart, and Stacey Hynd, ‘Introduction: African Penal Histories in Global Perspectives’, Punishment & Society 24, no. 5 (2022): 759–70.
10 Dior Konaté, Prison Architecture and Punishment in Colonial Senegal (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2018).
11 Jocelyn Alexander, ‘The Productivity of Political Imprisonment: Stories from Rhodesia’, The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 47, no. 2 (2019): 300–24; Fran Buntman, Robben Island and Prisoner Resistance to Apartheid (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Munyaradzi B. Munochiveyi, Prisoners of Rhodesia: Inmates and Detainees in the Struggle for Zimbabwean Liberation, 1960–1980 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).
12 Heidi A. McKee and James E. Porter, ‘The Ethics of Archival Research’, College Composition and Communication 64, no. 1 (2012): 59.
13 Mary Dillard, ‘Oral History and Life History as Sources’, Oxford Research Encyclopedias: African History, 20 November 2018, https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190277734.013.219; J.J. Ghaddar and Michelle Caswell, ‘“To Go Beyond”: Towards a Decolonial Archival Praxis’, Archival Science 19 (2019): 71–85; Michelle Caswell, ‘Teaching to Dismantle White Supremacy in Archives’, The Library Quarterly 87, no. 3 (2017): 222–35; Jarrett Martin Drake, ‘Diversity’s Discontents: In Search of an Archive of the Oppressed’, Archives and Manuscripts 47, no. 2 (2019): 270–79; Sebastian Jackson, ‘Decolonizing Archives in the Digital Age’, Inward Outward: Critical Engagement with Sounds and Films of Coloniality (2020): 14–17.
14 Overdorf, ‘Archives of “Sexual Deviance”’, 13.
15 Frank Dikötter and Ian Brown, Cultures of Confinement: A History of the Prison in Africa, Asia, and Latin America (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2007); Sarah Balakrishnan, ‘Of Debt and Bondage: From Slavery to Prisons in the Gold Coast (Ghana), c.1807–1957’, The Journal of African History 61, no. 1 (2020): 3–21; Bernault, A History of Prison.
16 David Killingray, ‘The Maintenance of Law and Order in British Colonial Africa’, African Affairs 85, no. 340 (1986): 413.
17 Ibid.
18 Gregory Mann, ‘What Was the Indigénat? The ‘Empire of Law’ in French West Africa’, Journal of African History 50 (2000): 333–35.
19 Bonny Ibhawoh, ‘Stronger than the Maxim Gun: Law, Human Rights and British Colonial Hegemony in Nigeria’, Africa 1 (2002): 63.
20 V.C. Onwuteka, ‘The Aba Riot of 1929 and Its Relation to the System of “Indirect Rule”’, Nigerian Journal of Economic and Social Studies 7, no. 3 (1965): 273–82; Judith Van Allen, ‘“Sitting on a Man”: Colonialism and the Lost Political Institutions of Igbo Women’, Canadian Journal of African Studies 6, no. 2 (1972): 165–81; Ndubueze L. Mbah, ‘Judith Van Allen, ‘Sitting on a Man’, and the Foundation of Igbo Women’s Studies’, Journal of West African History 3, no. 2 (2017): 156–65.
21 Van Allen, ‘Sitting on a Man’; Ihuoma Elizabeth Obienusi, ‘Aba Women Protest and the Aftermath 1929 till 1960’, International Journal of Humanities (2019): 131–49.
22 D. Kennedy, ‘Constructing the Colonial Myth of Mau Mau’, International Journal of African Historical Studies, 25, 2 (1992): 241–60.
23 David M. Anderson, Histories of the Hanged: Britain’s Dirty War in Kenya and the End of Empire (London: Phoenix, 2005), 281.
24 Anderson, Histories of the Hanged, 7; Katherine Bruce-Lockhart and Bethany Rebisz, ‘Discourses of Development and Practices of Punishment: Britain’s Gendered Counter-Insurgency Strategy in Colonial Kenya’, in Oxford Handbook of Late Colonial Insurgencies and Counter-Insurgencies, ed. Martin Thomas and Gareth Curless (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023), 482–500.
25 ‘Kiambu District Annual Report’, 1953, Kenya National Archives Nairobi (KNA), KNA DC/KBU/1/44; Letter from T. Gavaghan to Provincial Commissioner, Central Province, ‘Rehabilitation – Female Detainees’, UK National Archives (UKNA), FCO/141/6324/58; Gavaghan to Provincial Commissioner, Central Province, 5 June 1958, UKNA, FCO/141/6324/58.
26 Katherine Bruce-Lockhart, ‘“Unsound” Minds and Broken Bodies: The Detention of “Hardcore” Mau Mau Women at Kamiti and Gitamayu Detention Camps in Kenya’, Journal of Eastern African Studies 8, no. 4 (2014): 596–601.
27 Florence Bernault, ‘The Shadow of Rule: Colonial Power and Modern Punishment in Africa’, in Cultures of Confinement: A History of the Prison in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, ed. Frank Dikötter and Ian Brown (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2007), 63.
28 Ibid., 63.
29 Ibid., 65–66.
30 Katherine Bruce-Lockhart, Carceral Afterlives: Prisons, Detention, and Punishment in Postcolonial Uganda (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2022), 24–27; Report of the Prisons Committee, 1936, Rubaga Cathedral Archives, Kampala (RCA), D: 37.6.
31 Bruce-Lockhart, Carceral Afterlives, 27.
32 Nelson Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 1994); Jack Mapanje, Gathering Seaweed: African Prison Writing (Oxford: Heinemann Educational, 2002).
33 Richard Waller, ‘Legal History and Historiography in Colonial Sub-Saharan Africa’, Oxford Research Encyclopedias: African History, https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190277734.013.548.
34 National Archives of Nigeria Online Finding Aid, https://nationalarchivesofnigeria.org.ng/.
35 Catalogues of the Uganda National Archives, https://derekrpeterson.com/archive-work/.
36 Edgar C. Taylor, ‘Risk and Labour in the Archives: Archival Futures from Uganda’, Africa: The Journal of the International African Institute 91, no. 4 (2021): 532–52.
37 Uganda Protectorate Prisons Department, Annual Report for the Year ended 31st December, 1955 (Kampala: Uganda Government Printer, 1956), 32, British Online Archives (BOA), 73143C-03.
38 British Online Archives, https://microform.digital/boa/.
39 Jinja District Archive Catalogue.
40 K.G. to District Commissioner, 21 April 1961, Jinja District Archives (JDA), Uganda National Archives, Kampala, Box 1, File 19.
41 Report of the Prisons Committee, (RCA), D: 37.6.
42 Report of the Prisons Committee, Uganda, 1936, Foreign and Commonwealth Office Pamphlet Collection, East Africa, University of Manchester Special Collections, 10942.293.
43 Achille Mbembe, ‘The Power of the Archive and Its Limits’, in Refiguring the Archive, ed. Carolyn Hamilton et al., (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2002), 19–26; Luise White, ‘Hodgepodge Historiography: Documents, Itineraries, and the Absence of Archives’, History in Africa 42 (2015): 309–18; Premesh Lalu, ‘The Virtual Stampede for Africa: Digitisation, Postcoloniality and Archives of the Liberation Struggles in South Africa’, Innovation 34 (2007): 28–44.
44 Taylor, ‘Risk and Labour in the Archives’, 545.
45 Toyin Falola, ‘Ritual Archives’, in The Palgrave Handbook of African Social Ethics, ed. Nimi Wariboko and Toyin Falola (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), 473–97; Toyin Falola and Saheed Aderinto, Nigeria, Nationalism, and Writing History (Rochester: University Rochester Press, 2010); Toyin Falola, Colonialism and Violence in Nigeria (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009).
46 Saheed Aderinto, When Sex Threatened the State: Illicit Sexuality, Nationalism, and Politics in Colonial Nigeria, 1900–1958 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2014); Saheed Aderinto, ‘Introduction: Colonialism and the Invention of Modern Nigerian Childhood’, in Children and Childhood in Colonial Nigerian Histories, ed. Saheed Aderinto (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015): 1–18.
47 Riley Linebaugh and James Lowry, ‘The Archival Colour Line: Race, Records and Post-colonial Custody’, Archives and Records 42, no. 3 (2021): 284–303.
48 Riley Linebaugh and Katherine Bruce-Lockhart, ‘Coloniality and Power in Uganda’s Archives’, in Decolonising State & Society in Uganda: The Politics of Knowledge and Public Life, ed. Katherine Bruce-Lockhart, Jonathon L. Earle, Nakanyike B. Musisi, and Edgar C. Taylor (Suffolk: James Currey), 200.
49 Ibid., 201; Shohei Sato, ‘“Operation Legacy”: Britain’s Destruction and Concealment of Colonial Records Worldwide’, The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 45, no. 4 (2017): 697–719.
50 David M. Anderson, ‘Mau Mau in the High Court and the “Lost” British Empire Archives: Colonial Conspiracy or Bureaucratic Bungle?’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 39, no. 5 (2011): 699–716.
51 ‘Temporary withdrawal of record series FCO 141’, The National Archives, 11 July 2022, https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/about/news/temporary-withdrawal-of-record-series-fco-141/.
52 ‘Access reinstated for FCO 141 Record Series’, The National Archives, 21 September 2022, https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/about/news/access-reinstated-for-fco-141-record-series/.
53 Patrick Gathara, ‘The Path to Colonial Reckoning Is Through Archives, Not Museums’, Aljazeera, 14 March 2019, https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2019/3/14/the-path-to-colonial-reckoning-is-through-archives-not-museums.
54 Ellen Ndeshi Namhila, ‘Content and Use of Colonial Archives: An Under-researched Issue’, Archival Science 16, no. 2 (2014): 113.
55 Sue McKemmish, Shannon Faulkhead, Livia Iacovino, and Kirsten Thorpe, ‘Australian Indigenous Knowledge and the Archives: Embracing Multiple Ways of Knowing and Keeping’, Archives & Manuscripts 38, no. 1 (2010): 37.
56 The National Archives, ‘Digitising FCO 141 records’, https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/about/news/digitising-fco-141-records/.
57 Ibid.
58 Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995), 48.
59 Kirsten Weld, Paper Cadavers: The Archives of Dictatorship in Guatemala (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014), Kindle edition, location 604; Verne Harris, ‘The Archival Sliver: Power, Memory, and Archives in South Africa’, Archival Science 2 (2002): 65.
60 Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 29.
61 E.W.M. Magor to H.G. Williams, 5 November 1956, UKNA, PRO FCO 141/6324/24.
62 Katherine Bruce-Lockhart, ‘The “Truth” About Kenya: Connection and Contestation in the 1956 Kamiti Controversy’, Journal of World History 26, no. 4 (2015): 815–38.
63 While much of the historical scholarship on Fletcher has focused on her role as a ‘whistleblower’ in the Kamiti controversy, it has emerged that she was also involved with the eugenics movement – see Chamion Caballero and Peter J. Aspinall, Mixed Race Britain in the Twentieth Century (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 69.
64 Office of the Commissioner Kenya Prisons to the Secretary of State for Community Development, May 29, 1956, KNA, AB/1/112/82.
65 Paul Gready, ‘Autobiography and the “Power of Writing”: Political Prison Writing in the Apartheid Era’, Journal of Southern African Studies 19, no. 3 (1993): 489.
66 Kamiti Downs Prisoners to the Honourable His Excellency, 6 November 1956, KNA, AH/9/37/139/2.
67 Pennsylvania State University Library, Annual Report: Uganda, 1959 (London: Her Majesty’s Stationary Office, 1960), 9; Uganda Protectorate Prisons Department, Annual Report of the Uganda Police for the Year Ended 31st December, 1959, 2; The Report of the Commission of Inquiry into the Disturbances in the Kabaka’s Government Prison at Mengo on 17th October, 1955 (Entebbe: Government Printer, 1956), Royal Commonwealth Society Archives (RCS), Cambridge, L.45.Z38.
68 A.J. Poppy, S.A.C.P, Commissioner of Police Crime to Attorney General, 26 October 1955, Re: Riot and Death of Prisoner in the Buganda Government Gaol at Mengo on 17 October, 1955, RCA, D:37.6.
69 Saidiya Hartman, ‘Venus in Two Acts’, Small Axe 26 12, no. 2 (2008): 2.
70 The Report of the Commission of Inquiry, RCS, L.45.Z38.
71 Carol Summers, ‘Casualties and Connections: Observations from the Archives of Late Colonial Uganda’, American Historical Association Annual Meeting, 2014, https://aha.confex.com/aha/2014/webprogram/Paper14568.html.
72 Hartman, ‘Venus in Two Acts’.
73 Ibid., 13.
74 Summers, ‘Casualties and Connections’.
75 MoMA, ‘Critical Fabulations’, https://www.moma.org/calendar/galleries/5378.
76 Overdorf, ‘Archives of “Sexual Deviance”’, 14.
77 Ibid., 14–15.
78 McKee and Porter, ‘The Ethics of Archival Research’, 59.
79 Ibid., 60.
80 Oral History Association, ‘OHA Principles and Best Practices’, October 2018, https://oralhistory.org/principles-and-best-practices-revised-2018/.
81 Bruce-Lockhart, Carceral Afterlives, 247.
82 Sarah Stacy, ‘Study in Documents: The Legalization of the Photography of Canadian Prisoners’, Archivaria 65 (2008): 122.
83 Kamiti Downs Prisoners to the Honourable His Excellency, 6 November 1956, KNA, AH/9/37/139/2.
84 Eve Glazier, ‘Toward an Abolitionist Archival Practice’, Barnard Center for Research on Women, 11 July 2023, https://bcrw.barnard.edu/toward-an-abolitionist-archival-practice/.
85 Letter from A. to District Commissioner, Busoga Central Offices, 17 July 1961, JDA, Box 19, File 17.
86 Marshall S. Clough, Mau Mau Memoirs: History, Memory, Politics (Boulder: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1997).
87 Mapanje, Gathering Seaweed.
88 American Prison Writing Archive, Hamilton College, https://www.hamilton.edu/academics/open-curriculum/digital-hamilton/projects/american-prison-writing-archive; The Gaucher/Munn Penal Press Collection, https://penalpress.com/.
89 The Museum of British Colonialism, https://museumofbritishcolonialism.org/.
90 Rose Miyonga, ‘Imagining Kenyan Futures Through Kenyan Pasts’, The Elephant, 3 December 2021, https://www.theelephant.info/ideas/2021/12/03/imagining-kenyan-futures-through-kenyan-pasts/.
91 Rebel Archives in the Golden Gulag, https://rebelarchives.humspace.ucla.edu/about.
92 Jarret M. Drake, ‘Archives, Prisons, and the Ethnography of Exchange’, in Paths to Prison: On the Architectures of Carcerality, ed. Isabelle Kirkham-Lewitt (New York: Columbia Books on Architecture and the City, 2020), 262.
93 Mariame Kaba, We Do This ‘Til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transforming Justice (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2021), 135.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Katherine Bruce-Lockhart
Katherine Bruce-Lockhart is an assistant professor in the Department of History at the University of Waterloo and a faculty member at the Balsillie School of International Affairs. Her research explores how the prison became a global institution, linking this history to wider discussions about and movements for decolonisation and prison abolition. She is the author of Carceral Afterlives: Prisons, Detention, and Punishment in Postcolonial Uganda and a co-editor of Decolonising State & Society in Uganda: The Politics of Knowledge and Public Life.
Tolulope Akande
Tolulope Akande, a recent master’s graduate from the Department of History at the University of Waterloo, specialises in the study of juvenile delinquency, prisons and punishment in colonial Nigeria. Her research delves into the complexities of these issues within the historical context of colonial rule, shedding light on the experiences of youth and the penal system during that era. Tolu’s work contributes to a deeper understanding of the social and legal dynamics of colonial Nigeria, offering valuable insights into the challenges faced by marginalised groups and the broader implications for colonial governance and societal norms.