Paper short abstract:

This paper examines the genealogy of the term "punitive expedition" before considering the scale of this particular form of colonial violence in German colonial contexts in Africa. From this macro-history, an analysis of the use of strikethrough as a tool for colonial censorship follows.

Paper long abstract:

The debate on restitution of African cultural heritage has brought greater attention to the violent colonial pasts, especially to the dispatch of so-called "punitive" expeditions in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Expanding knowledge on the genealogy of this particularly brutal form of military campaign, this article explores the historical semantics of the German term ‘Strafexpedition’ and its contextual use in archives of militarist colonial propaganda at the time, namely military reports to the Colonial Department of the Foreign Office and its official publication, the Deutsches Kolonialblatt. Through a content analysis of the occurrence of the term, this study aims to bridge the fields of semantics and postcolonial historiography and lay the groundwork for a macro-history of events of spoliation and plunder in German colonial contexts. Besides, these colonial archives are fraught with the use of strikethrough, a tool for censorship that demonstrates that clerks and administrators were well-aware that unfiltered military reports could generate public outrage in the metropole. By examining different examples of such blatant erasure, I argue that this apparatus of propaganda participated in fuelling colonial amnesia and apahasia until today. The paper ends by discussing this textual cancelling technique for the future of critical historiographies of colonial violence.

Paper short abstract:

This paper mobilises recently unearthed colonial archives to study how an episode of revolt in 1931 Belgian Congo led to power reconfigurations in the field. The effective suspension of the rule of law transformed the nature and scope of repression, as well as African responses to colonial demands.

Paper long abstract:

This paper mobilises recently unearthed colonial judicial and administrative archives to study how an episode of revolt in interwar Belgian Congo led to profound power reconfigurations in the field. The effective suspension of the rule of law, in order to quell a rapidly spreading rebellion, had two intertwined consequences. On the one hand, it led to the deployment of new colonial strategies of repression, which shed light on the gap between legal principles and effective practices of order. On the other, it induced an intense reconfiguration of the flows of power, hierarchies and values, both for colonial actors and the local population. This research uses different practices of "punishment" - perpetrated by Congolese "rebels" and by Belgian public servants - in order to better understand what "revolt" effectively meant for the actors involved in a colonial power relation, and how it exposed, challenged and reconfigured existent structures of violence.

On a conceptual plane, this research builds on the concept of anomie - e.g. a situation of instability resulting in a suspension of values, norms and morals - and how it could constitute a moment of opportunity and open-ended futures for the parties involved, beyond the mere deployment of brute violence. We intend to use this case study to help make sense of "revolts" as crucial nodes in (post)colonial historical dynamics, in Central Africa and beyond.

Paper short abstract:

This paper examines the use of capital punishment in colonial Natal. It highlights the violent nature of the punishment, and questions who was subjected to this violence, and why. It then proceeds to explore the ways in which the gallows served a political, as well as judicial, function.

Paper long abstract:

The governance of colonial Natal posed a number of challenges for colonial authorities. The lifetime of the territory was punctuated with frequent armed conflicts, demographic tensions, and indigenous resistance. Within this context, the maintenance of order was perceived as a central objective of the colonial government. Capital punishment was one of the central tools utilised within the colony to achieve this aim.

Capital legislation was constructed to tackle the largest perceived threats to the colonial state. This paper will examine how the cases most likely to end in an execution were those which met political, as well as judicial, requirements. Capital punishment was intended to serve as the ‘ultimate deterrent’ to anti-colonial sentiment, but its use had to be carefully balanced; leniency could make the colonial state look weak, and allow anti-colonial voices or actions to proliferate, whilst excessive judicial violence could lead to local resistance against colonial authority.

Commencing with an analysis of the construction of capital legislation within the colony, this paper illuminates the inner workings of a complex legal regime (the sort of which emerged across the African continent). The paper then proceeds to analyse the use of capital punishment in both peacetime and during moments of upheaval, highlighting that it served a political function within both contexts. Through the course of this analysis, the paper will offer insights into the nature of colonial power, and its violent manifestations. Finally, it will apply its findings to the current discussions around decolonisation.

Paper short abstract:

Until 1927, no legislation stated how the penal execution of Africans should be carried out in FWA. Yet, in practice, colonial administrators used the firing squad. This paper examines how this method became customary and then law, at the crossroad of material, political and cultural considerations.

Paper long abstract:

For the French, the firing squad fulfilled a specific set of requirements that made it the desired method for legal, public and exemplary executions.

Firstly, execution by shooting was thought to sharply differ from precolonial methods that, in the minds of Europeans, qualified as torture (drowning, poison). The reluctance to inflict pain was crucial to the concept of civilised killing. The clinical pretence of the guillotine, like the firepower of the rifle, made it a technically superior, modern and civilised way of killing.

Secondly, the actors involved in the ritual of the execution – the person sentenced to death, the African riflemen (tirailleurs), and colonial administrators – recreated a visual and material interpretation of the colonial social order as intended by the colonizers. The relation of power between citizens and subject, colonizers and colonized, which overlapped a racial division, was obvious to all. Executioners or executed, Africans were made to obey the orders (riflemen) and the laws (executed) of the colonizers.

Thirdly, colonial officials deemed it the most respectful method of killing according to their understanding of African cultures. For instance, decapitation was understood to be too insulting to Muslims. Moreover, administrators were careful to organize the burial according to the religion of the executed, a sharp contrast with the mutilation and exposition of body parts used during the conquest.

As we lay out colonial understandings of “civilized” killing, we will contrast those with local reactions to executions, using minutes of executions and newspaper articles.

Paper short abstract:

This paper aims to demonstrate that punitive adjustments are a historical modus operandi, a way of doing, living and making operational the future and the daily governance of the prison.

Paper long abstract:

Since the creation of the Makala Central Prison in 1958, carceral punishment has not always been systematically implemented when a crime is committed in Kinshasa. In the cases where this punishment has finally been triggered, it has historically been subject to daily adjustments. It has been lightened, deepened, or interrupted, depending on the social status of the detainees, their interactions with the prison administration, and their ability to negotiate their conditions of detention. These punitive adjustments, which continue in the contemporary DRC, are not a challenge to the prison disciplinary order through the daily negotiations of punishment. They are a permanent interaction, a dialogue that sometimes opens and sometimes closes, around what is appropriate, what is bearable in terms of punishment of those who are identified, rightly or wrongly, as criminals in Kinshasa. The question is the following. What socio-political, humanitarian and economic issues have historically underpinned punitive adjustments in Kinshasa? Based on this question, the current proposal aims to demonstrate that punitive adjustments are a historical modus operandi, a way of doing, living and making operational the future and the daily governance of the prison. They are part of practical norms (De Herdt and Olivier de Sardan, 2015), in which the actors involved in the day-to-day functioning of incarceration operate on the edge of humanism and repression (Super, 2011), taking advantage of the degrees of permeability (Schneider, 2018; Jefferson and Martin, 2019; Bouagga, 2019), and informal activities (Ayimpam and Bisa, 2021) offered by Makala central prison.

Paper short abstract:

This paper is about the strategies of Ethiopian women political prisoners to cope with the separation from their children and to maintain the emotional bounds damaged by imprisonment. It analyses the lasting impacts of political repression on societies, precisely because it attacks the intimate.

Paper long abstract:

Scholar working on women political prisoners narratives in Africa and other continents demonstrated how political repression is a process where the intimate and the political are inextricable; where individuals, families, and the larger society are together affected.

After three decades of silence, Ethiopian women activists recently published autobiographical accounts of their experience of the revolution of 1974 that overthrown Haile Selassie, and the Red Terror that followed. Between 1974 and 1978, the Derg, a military committee that embraced Marxism-Leninism, seized power and eliminated the civilian Marxists who were demanding a civilian government. Tens of thousands disappeared in mass killings, suffered extreme tortures, and were imprisoned.

Based on women activists' published testimonies, in Amharic and English, completed by interviews, I will analyse their experience as mothers and political prisoners. What collective strategies have they put in place to cope with the separation from their children, in addition to the brutality and living conditions of the prison? How did they struggled to maintain and rebuild the emotional bounds damaged by years of imprisonment? This experience is embedded in tensions between embodied social expectations for women (being mothers) and their transgression of gender norms (being a revolutionary activists).

In their writings, Ethiopian women activists give a striking testimony of the lasting impacts of repression on societies, precisely because the repression attacks the intimate, and because the intimate is immersed in social relations.

Paper short abstract:

This paper develops criminological studies of ‘penal humanitarianism’ (Bosworth, 2017; Lohne, 2019) by tracing its imperial roots and legacies. It critiques the relationship between humanitarian sentiment, penality and colonial violence through analysing penal reform in 1930-70s Ghana and Kenya.

Paper long abstract:

This exploratory paper analyses the imperial and colonial roots and legacies of penal humanitarianism, sketching its historical genealogy in the late colonial and decolonization era. It develops the contemporary concept of ‘penal humanitarianism’ (Bosworth, 2017; Lohne, 2019) from the emergent criminology of humanitarianism literature (Kendall and Nouwen, 2020), refining this through the use history of crime, African penal histories and humanitarian history approaches. Penal humanitarianism analyses the intersections between humanitarian reason and penal governance, focusing particularly on how humanitarian rationales increase beyond the nation-state. This paper looks at colonial developments in penal humanitarianism in Africa, critiquing the relationship between ‘civilizing’ governance, ‘welfarist’ penal reform, ‘rehabilitation’ programming, and humanitarian sentiment in the treatment of offenders. It takes the treatment of death row inmates, juvenile delinquency and prison labour in Ghana and Kenya between 1920-70s as key case studies. It explores how penal humanitarianism operated in (trans-)imperial and African colonial contexts, and highlights the influence of humanitarian actors/organizations in colonial penality. It thereby analyses the limitations of penal humanitarianism in colonial contexts, and tensions between local and international understandings of effective penal reform. The paper argues that penal humanitarianism should be understood in practice as well as policy, and that human rights and humanitarianism should be disaggregated in its critique of criminal justice. The paper is based on capital case files and juvenile offender records from Nairobi and Accra, CO/FCO treatment of offenders and penal welfare files, ICRC prison visits records, and IPPC/UN Congress on Crime Prevention and Criminal Justice records.