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Drawing upon social history, political history, and critical prison studies, this book analyzes how prisons and other instruments of colonial punishment endured after independence and challenges their continued existence. In Carceral Afterlives, Katherine Bruce-Lockhart traces the politics, practices, and lived experiences of incarceration in postcolonial Uganda, focusing on the period between independence in 1962 and the beginning of Yoweri Museveni’s presidency in 1986. During these decades, Ugandans experienced multiple changes of government, widespread state violence, and war, all of which affected the government’s approach to punishment. Bruce-Lockhart analyzes the relationship between the prison system and other sites of confinement—including informal detention spaces known as “safe houses” and wartime camps—and considers other forms of punishment, such as public executions and “disappearance” by state paramilitary organizations. Through archival and personal collections, interviews with Ugandans who lived through these decades, and a range of media sources and memoirs, Bruce-Lockhart examines how carceral systems were imagined and experienced by Ugandans held within, working for, or impacted by them. She shows how Uganda’s postcolonial leaders, especially Milton Obote and Idi Amin, attempted to harness the symbolic, material, and coercive power of prisons in the pursuit of a range of political agendas. She also examines the day-to-day realities of penal spaces and public perceptions of punishment by tracing the experiences of Ugandans who were incarcerated, their family members and friends, prison officers, and other government employees. Furthermore, she shows how the carceral arena was an important site of dissent, examining how those inside and outside of prisons and other spaces of captivity challenged the state’s violent punitive tactics. Using Uganda as a case study, Carceral Afterlives emphasizes how prisons and the wider use of confinement—both as a punishment and as a vehicle for other modes of punishment—remain central to state power in the Global South and North. While scholars have closely analyzed the prison’s expansion through colonial rule and the rise of mass incarceration in the United States, they have largely taken for granted its postcolonial persistence. In contrast, Bruce-Lockhart demonstrates how the prison’s transition from a colonial to a postcolonial institution explains its ubiquity and reveals ways to critique and challenge its ongoing existence. The book thus explores broader questions about the unfinished work of decolonization, the relationship between incarceration and struggles for freedom, and the prison’s enduring yet increasingly contested place in our global institutional landscape.

Winner of the 2023 Association for Ethnic Studies Outstanding Book Award

A study of anti-Blackness and white supremacy across four continents demonstrates that colorblindness is neither new nor a subtype of racist ideology, but a constitutive technology of racism
 
In Colorblind Tools, Marzia Milazzo offers a transnational account of anti-Blackness and white supremacy that pushes against the dominant emphasis on historical change pervading current racial theory. This emphasis on change, she contends, misses critical lessons from the past.
 
Bringing together a capacious archive of texts on race produced in Brazil, Cuba, Mexico, Panama, the United States, and South Africa from multiple disciplines and genres, Milazzo uncovers transnational continuities in structural racism and white supremacist discourse from the inception of colonial modernity to the present. In the process, she traces the global workings of what she calls colorblind tools: technologies and strategies that at once camouflage and reproduce white domination. Whether examining Rijno van der Riet’s defense of slavery in the Cape Colony, discourses of racial mixture in Latin American eugenics and their reverberations in contemporary scholarship, the pitfalls of white “antiracism,” or Chicana indigenist aesthetics, Milazzo illustrates how white people collectively disavow racism to maintain power across national boundaries, and how anti-Black and colonial logics can be reproduced even in some decolonial literatures. Milazzo’s groundbreaking study proves that colorblindness is not new, nor is it a subtype of racist ideology or a hallmark of our era. It is a constitutive technology of racism—a tool the master cannot do without.

Complicities explores the complicated—even contradictory—position of the intellectual who takes a stand against political policies and ideologies. Mark Sanders argues that intellectuals cannot avoid some degree of complicity in what they oppose and that responsibility can only be achieved with their acknowledgment of this complicity. He examines the role of South African intellectuals by looking at the work of a number of key figures—both supporters and opponents of apartheid.

Sanders gives detailed analyses of widely divergent thinkers: Afrikaner nationalist poet N. P. van Wyk Louw, Drum writer Bloke Modisane, Xhosa novelist A. C. Jordan, Afrikaner dissident Breyten Breytenbach, and Black Consciousness leader Steve Biko. Drawing on theorists including Derrida, Sartre, and Fanon, and paying particular attention to the linguistic intricacy of the literary and political texts considered, Sanders shows how complicity emerges as a predicament for intellectuals across the ideological and social spectrum. Through discussions of the colonial intellectuals Olive Schreiner and Sol T. Plaatje and of post-apartheid feminist critiques of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Complicities reveals how sexual difference joins with race to further complicate issues of collusion.

Complicities sheds new light on the history and literature of twentieth-century South Africa as it weighs into debates about the role of the intellectual in public life.

Conjugal Rights is a history of the role of marriage and other arrangements between men and women in Libreville, Gabon, during the French colonial era, from the mid–nineteenth century through 1960. Conventional historiography has depicted women as few in number and of limited influence in African colonial towns, but this book demonstrates that a sexual economy of emotional, social, legal, and physical relationships between men and women indelibly shaped urban life. Bridewealth became a motor of African economic activity, as men and women promised, earned, borrowed, transferred, and absconded with money to facilitate interpersonal relationships. Colonial rule increased the fluidity of customary marriage law, as chiefs and colonial civil servants presided over multiple courts, and city residents strategically chose the legal arena in which to arbitrate a conjugal-sexual conflict. Sexual and domestic relationships with European men allowed some African women to achieve a greater degree of economic and social mobility. An eventual decline of marriage rates resulted in new sexual mores, as women and men sought to rebalance the roles of pleasure, respectability, and legality in having sex outside of kin-sanctioned marriage. Rachel Jean-Baptiste expands the discourse on sexuality in Africa and challenges conventional understandings of urban history beyond the study of the built environment. Marriage and sexual relations determined how people defined themselves as urbanites and shaped the shifting physical landscape of Libreville. Conjugal Rights takes a fresh look at questions of the historical construction of race and ethnicity. Despite the efforts of the French colonial government and society to enforce boundaries between black and white, interracial sexual and domestic relationships persisted. Black and métisse women gained economic and social capital from these relationships, allowing some measure of freedom in the colonial capital city.

This concise scholarly biography is the first English-language book to tell the story of Paul Bonga-Bonga’s extraordinary sporting life in Congo and Belgium. The book is divided into three parts: Childhood and Youth, Adulthood, and Maturity. Part 1 focuses on Bonga-Bonga’s early years under Belgian colonial rule, his formative experiences in mission schools, and his emergence as a precocious soccer talent. Part 2 focuses on a booming Kinshasa in the 1950s, when he started first for Union and then for the popular Daring Club as a left-footed midfielder who mesmerized crowds in Africa’s largest stadium. After being scouted as a member of a Congolese all-star team that toured Belgium in 1957, he signed with Standard Liège in the Belgian first division. Part 3 analyzes Bonga-Bonga’s six seasons at Standard, where he contributed to the club’s first three league championships and played in the European Cup semifinals against Real Madrid. The last chapter chronicles his coaching accomplishments, notably his work as the first Black African licensed head coach in Belgium and as technical director of Zaire’s national team.

Against a backdrop of colonialism, independence, and globalization, this biography demonstrates how Bonga-Bonga’s achievements and struggles helped pave the way for today’s Afro-Belgian footballers. It does so by drawing on a rich set of written and oral evidence in multiple languages—including interviews with Bonga-Bonga himself—as well as photographs and vintage video footage. His lifelong movement between Congo and Belgium highlights the nonlinear nature of African migration and further deepens understanding of Congo’s underappreciated role in the cultural and economic globalization of soccer. Well suited for teachers, students, and general readers interested in sports, culture, and identity, this book deepens knowledge of African social change in a global context and connects to key themes in African studies and sports history, such as individual agency, migration, race and racism, masculinity, citizenship, and belonging. Bonga-Bonga’s sporting life is proof, if proof were still needed, that histories of modern Africa are incomplete without football.

Ghana has long struggled against persistent corruption that has sapped state treasuries, distorted economic and social relationships, and undermined public confidence in government. In recent decades, concerns about corruption have become common in international policy circles, media, and academia. Ghanaians, however, began grappling with the issue long before outsiders expressed interest. From their indigenous precolonial societies through the decades of British rule to the various postindependence regimes, Ghanaians have aspired both to clean house at the top and to ensure that day-to-day affairs are managed honestly and with justice for ordinary citizens. Drawing on decades of research and interviews with Ghanaian officials and activists, Ernest Harsch focuses closely on corruption’s political implications: that is, how political actors use concerns about graft and related misdeeds to advance their own agendas. Harsch also considers social dimensions: class, ethnicity, gender, and other distinctions. While elite perspectives are well represented in official records, this book pays particular attention to voices from below, expressed through popular demonstrations, strikes, and other rebellious actions. In addition, activists have produced or collected hundreds of original protest declarations, petitions, reports, and letters. Those documents reveal that ordinary Ghanaians have opposed corruption not so much because it distorts markets—a central complaint of external and elite actors—but because it makes their daily living conditions so much harder and deepens inequities by disproportionately benefiting those with wealth and harming those without.