The architecture of colonial imprisonment: The afterlives of colonial incarceration in Africa

Summary

The history of incarceration in Africa stretches from the slave trade to the current day.  Prisons were often some of the first buildings built by colonial powers in Africa.  Numerous colonial  incarceration practices across time and space resulted in the erection of varied architectures of incarceration slave forts to detention camps.  This talk explores how some of these sites are currently used and remembered in Ghana, Kenya and South Africa.  It explores how the architecture of these sites, their positioning within a broader landscape, and their contemporary usage, shapes the ways in which they are understood by the communities that surround them, and engage with or avoid them.

Bio

Dr.  Laura Routley is a Reader in African Politics at Newcastle university.  She is also the Principle Investigator on the Leverhulme funded research project – Afterlives of colonial incarceration: African, Prisons, Politics and Architecture, which explores the memory politics of former sites of colonial imprisonment across Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, and South Africa.