Agatha Alidri
Department of History, Gulu University
Abstract
Prisons established in the colonial period in Uganda provided labour to the colonial administration. Whereas other forms of forced labour were phased out, prisoners continue to be used as a human resource on prison farms, in workshops and public work projects right up to the present day. The study of the colonial prison system shows how the formation of a legal and political apparatus was necessary to produce and maintain this prison labour. The apparatus included new laws that created new crimes. Courts and government administrative systems enforced these laws, sending more and more people to prison. An important part of the apparatus was a racist colonial ideology about the need to ‘uplift’ the colonized Africans and mould them into disciplined citizens who would work hard in a capitalist system. In this article, I draw on a larger study of the colonial experience of the Lugbara people of Arua District.
Keywords: Arua, Lugbara, prison labour, apparatus, resource
Introduction
This article examines prison and prison labour as a material and non-material ‘resource’ within a colonial apparatus. Whereas Bruce-Lockhart (2022:1940), citing Minister of Internal Affairs Basil Bataringaya, observed that modern criminal justice is considered reclamation and social rehabilitation of the offender, this work deems colonial carceral justice as a source of labour for the protectorate. Colonial carceral justice was guided by Lombroso’s theory of atavism and biological determinism, which was prejudicial to blacks and other social groups that he considered inferior (Lombroso 2006:1). The central argument in this study is that colonial prisons in Uganda had a main role to play as a labour resource and institution to discipline the mind and body of the inferior subjects who were considered unruly in behaviour. Building on the case of imprisonment in the Lugbara area of West Nile Region, it shows how the larger apparatus of colonial administration and law produced prisoners whose labour could be exploited for the benefit of the colonial state. Yet convict labour was not only an economic resource for the colonial power. It was political, social and cultural, and both material and non-material. At independence in 1962 and in the post-colonial governments, carceral justice functioned as a political tool to punish the body as means to social rehabilitation of offenders and labour for nation building. Whereas I will not be able to do full justice to the thesis of prisons as resources due to scarcity of statistical colonial data, we shall understand it within the broader framework of apparatus. Richardson and Gisa (2014) suggest that material natural resources are made through processes and within assemblages, which I refer to as apparatuses, where values are at play. This article will show that the same holds for the creation of human resources in the form of prisoners and their labour.