Content area
Full Text
In the three decades since Michel Foucault rejuvenated the study of prisons,1 historians of Europe, North America, and Australasia2 have enthusiastically accepted the intellectual challenges posed by his Discipline and Punish.3 In contrast, historians of Africa have been slower to demonstrate interest in the continent's prisons.4 However, as a derivative of recent studies of Africa's urban settlements, crime, and deviancy, scholarly curiosity towards prisons is increasing.5 This has been most prominently demonstrated by the recent publication of Florence Bernault's edited collection, Enfermement, Prison et Chatiments en Afrique du 19e Siècle à nos Jours, and a subsequent English edition.6 Foucault's shadow lingers over this first attempt to chronicle the history of the prison in a broad range of settings in the sub-Saharan region. This is not to suggest that Bernault or her fellow contributors have uncritically replicated much of Foucault's understanding of the nature of imprisonment. However, Bernault's specific characterization of imprisonment in colonial Kenya will be challenged here.
Foucault described the prison as the location for
distributing individuals, fixing them in space, classifying them, extracting from them the maximum in time and forces, training their bodies, coding their continuous behaviour, maintaining them in perfect visibility, forming around them an apparatus of observation, registration, and recording, constituting on them a body of knowledge that is accumulated and centralized.
Prisons were "to render individuals docile and useful."7 In modification, Bernault argues that prisons in colonial Africa became experiments in hybridity. African prisons grafted together the disciplinarian function and character of prisons in North America and Europe, as described by Foucault, with "specific, highly original models of penal incarceration," produced by the unique demands of the variety of locations into which prisons were introduced.8 In the wider context, Bernault describes the colonial prisons of Africa as the location for physical punishment.9 However, Bernault borrows Foucault's terminology to identify colonial Kenya, along with South Africa, as possessing a bureaucratic and institutional culture of control that was "one of the few in Africa to resemble a 'carceral archipelago.'"10 For Foucault, the prison was just one component of that archipelago. Together with workhouses, schools, orphanages and so on, the carceral archipelago represented
A continuous gradation of the established, specialized and competent authorities (in the order of knowledge and in the order...