The Bushe Commission of 1933, which objected to whipping, had noted that eleven months might elapse from the accused’s arrest until the determination of his case (Morris & Read 1972: 93). This delay was due in part to the human resource challenge in the judiciary and was not intended as a punishment. Yet by incarcerating bodies it served to recruit prison labour. Under colonial rule, prisons and punishment were bound up with economic value and were situated within the ‘political economy’ of the body.
Colonial Law as Apparatus for Domination and Resource Exploitation
As a resource, prison labour was part of a much larger apparatus that produced and continued to shape it. Agamben (2009:2), citing Foucault, defines ‘Apparatus’ as ‘discourses, institutions, architectural form, regulatory decisions, law, administrative measures, scientific statements, philosophical, moral and philanthropic propositions’ which have a dominant strategic function to respond to urgency. It is located in a power relation and a strategic means to manipulate relations of forces. It is as well a rational intervention to relations of forces to develop them in a particular direction, to stabilize them and utilize them. An apparatus in this work is understood as a game of power and a set of strategies to manipulate power relations and exploit the prison labour resource. Agamben (2009) expands Foucault’s apparatus to include anything that has ‘….capacity to capture, orient, determine, intercept, model, control, or secure the gestures, behaviours, opinions, or discourses of living beings. Not only, therefore, prisons, madhouses, the panopticon, schools, confessions, factories, disciplines, juridical measures…..but also, the pen, writing, literature, philosophy, agriculture….and—why not—language itself…’ (Agamben 2009: 14). The history of prisons and prison labour in colonial Uganda is embedded in the broader system of political economy, including colonial views on the ‘uncivilized native’. The apparatus was constructed through the system of Indirect Rule.
In West Nile, Nubian officers were recruited as district and county ‘chiefs’ to impose British administration and taxation, and they came to dominate the long-distance trading and much of urban life… the military role of the Nubi was partially transferred to [the Lugbara] as the Nubi became disproportionately involved in the colonial army and other coercive institutions such as the police and prison services. (Leopold 2006: 181)
The colonial army and police became enforcers for the effective mobilizing of both community and prison labour. In 1925, with the native local authorities achieving their initial taxing powers (Therkildsen 2006: 4), the chiefs, village heads and the parish chiefs had the role of assessing taxpayers, enforcing tax collection and arresting and imprisoning tax defaulters. Each native administrative unit was given a target amount of tax to collect. Detention of tax defaulters in the county or subcounty cells was to force the subjects to pay taxes. Thus, the imposition of taxes led to imprisonment and contributed to the increase of prison labour.
The introduction of Indirect Rule by Lord Lugard witnessed the establishing of a European form of law and order on the already existing African indigenous systems and institutions such as the native courts. Lugard appreciated that indigenous communities had mechanisms of making rules and adjudicating disputes within the family and society, overseen by selected members in whom indigenous authority was vested. The colonized people did not have the equivalent of the colonial or modern prison system. Indirect rule witnessed the invention of ‘customary law’, a hybrid of indigenous and modern law, and the introduction of the native courts. Therefore, indirect rule and the colonial law were established on the already existing indigenous systems and institutions.