The enactment of the Penal Code in 1930 led to the replacement of the Indian Penal Code with the English law in the Central Government courts. The Criminal Procedure replaced that of 1919. Offences such as treason, murder, manslaughter and rape were transferred to the Criminal Procedure Code and could not be handled by subordinates. Special districts were declared in which a magistrate tried Africans for criminal offences (Morris & Read 1966: 42).
The Lugbara perceived colonial administration and form of law and order as having caused increased exploitation of native labour, social instability and disorder. Colonialism introduced new laws and crime categories which were political and economic in nature; they related to respect of authority, taxation, labour, property and production. The effect of colonial law was the criminalization of the African for new offences, leading to increased crime rates.
The British made laws in their oversea colonies through which crime was invented, criminals made and prisons created in the service of the colonial administration. The colonial administration used strategies to criminalize the subject by providing a hegemonic definition which perceives crime as ‘an action or omission that constitutes an offense that may be prosecuted by the state and is punishable by law’ (Michalowski 2016: 184). The state uses law as a tool to define crime as illegal acts against the state and the political elite. State law was a tool to mobilize penal labour.
Crime, Punishment and Prisons as Colonial Resources
Tales about Arua town characterized it as a place where natives were imprisoned, flogged, and subjected to hard labour and penal diet as forms of punishment (Interview Jackson Avutia 2014). The colonial administration in West Nile introduced prison confinement as a new form of punishment. Among the Lugbara people, punishment (panga in Lugbara) is an act inflicted on a person for an offense or misconduct. It depended on the nature and gravity of the offense. As punishment, a child who disrespected an elder was rebuked or caned instantly (Interview Jackson Abiria 2014). The common offenses included murder (the intentional killing of a person), man-slaughter (the accidental killing of a person), patricide (the act of killing one’s father), fratricide (the act of killing one’s sibling), matricide, (the act of killing one’s mother), infanticide (killing of an infant), uxoricide (the act of killing one’s wife) and mariticide (the act of killing one’s husband). While the colonialists defined these as offenses against the state, indigenous practice treated them as transgressions against the ancestral spirits, gods, the dead and the living. The offenses attracted punishments ranging from rebuke, caning, compensation, curse to excommunication. Indigenous punishment bore social and moral considerations and value. Detention in the Lugbara context was considered disruptive to social functioning and cohesion as it was retributive.
Bernault (2003) noted that ‘Colonial conquest used the prison as an early instrument for the subjugation of Africans’ (2003:3). Before colonial powers were in full control of territories, they erected prisons in all European garrisons and administrative outposts. In addition to prisons, the European colonizers introduced a range of techniques of confinement and discipline, including asylums, hospital wards, workers’ camps, and corrective facilities for children. However, European colonizers continued to use primordial forms of punishment, such as corporal sentences, flogging, and public exhibition. In Africa, the prison supplemented public violence. Colonial administration emphasized the economic ends of the prison, and its role in the organization of forced labour (Bernault 2003:3). African prisons were models of social control imported from the West and covered a wide range of state and social strategies destined to restrain forms of deviance defined by criminal law, and to promote the reproduction of social order needed to exploit African labour. Social control is considered an instrument of the state, which represents the ruling classes, to impose and legitimate social coercion (Bernault 2003: 3-4).