Confinement, Punishment and Prisons in Africa

Marie Morelle is Professor at Lyon 2 University, France.Frédéric Le Marcis is a professor of social anthropology at Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon, France. Julia Hornberger is an associate professor of anthropology at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa.

• Introduction: thinking with prisons in AfricaThe carceral imprint Words, walls, and hierarchies: on some colonial legacies in the Burundian prison Improving daily life? Senegalese prisoners’ use of letters as an attempt to reform colonial prison (1930s) Confinement and development in Ethiopia: the uses of prison in public policies Mass expulsion as internal exclusion: police raids and the imprisonment of West African immigrants in Ghana, 1969–1972Economies of value ‘As if they can squeeze you to death’: recollections of post-arrest journeys towards and into prison in South Africa The carceral impasse seen from the perspective of street youth in Burkina Faso The value of prison in South Africa: performing the prison experience beyond the prisonTension within the dispensation of justice ‘I don’t steal, I don’t lie, I cut!’ The paradoxes of the imprisonment of women for female genital mutilation in Burkina Faso In search of justice in an uncertain world (South Africa) A justice that dare not speak its name? Amicable settlements in the commune of Abobo (Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire)Transforming the prison The languages of prison reform: how to speak about punishment in a period of political transition (Tunisia, 2011–2019) Claiming rights in Yaoundé Central Prison The uses of pre-trial detention: a case study at the Maison Centrale in Conakry Prison and the politics of the ‘redemption script’: a view from Johannesburg, South Africa ‘Mother, you can’t leave us here’: thinking about incarcerated homosexuality. Interview with Ms Alice Nkom, Esq., lawyer at the Cameroon Bar