Guest Editors’ Introduction To Crime and Punishment Forum

Since 1985, the Center for African Studies at the University of Florida (UF) has hosted an annual conference named for Gwendolen M. Carter, the second president of the African Studies Association (1958–59) and later emerita at the University of Florida. Carter conferences have had diverse themes—for example, migration and displacement, conservation and sustainability, architecture and design. In 2016, we organized a Carter conference on crime and punishment in Africa which we called “Topics of Discipline.” We had initially wanted to examine the transnational traffics in drugs, ivory, and people, in part because we thought those topics would provide the most provocative discussion, and in part because we wanted to honor the memory of Stephen Ellis, a frequent visitor to UF whose work on crime inspired us and who passed away as we began to plan the conference.

The 2016 conference was interdisciplinary; historians, anthropologists, and political scientists presented conference papers that addressed the issues of global markets and global migrations and the punishments endured by political prisoners in colonial and post-colonial Africa. There were eighteen conference papers, many of which challenged conventional notions of crime and punishment. Five of the six articles in this forum are from that conference. The authors all challenge the category of crime in ways for which we were unprepared when we organized this conference. These articles in particular showed us how unstable certain categories became in twentieth- and twenty-first-century Africa; what separated crime from custom, for example, or magic from accumulation was not always clear to litigants and to the people who never set foot in a court of law. Status, many of these articles argued, was a matter of context and time and place. It could not always be defended in the home or in the courtroom. Each of these articles makes a significant contribution to a regional historiography, to be sure, but for our purpose what is most important about them is how they intervene in the study of crime in Africa.

These articles divide into two groups, crimes with courts and crimes without courts. Daly, Keefer, and Shutt all address the complexities of courtroom testimony. Katrina Keefer’s “Poro on Trial” [https://doi.org/10.1017/asr.2018.6] provides a rich analysis of a single court case in the Sierra Leone Protectorate. Her close, contextualized reading of the testimony reveals the ways that a murder trial involving Poro and Leopard Men was not just about who killed, but also about who could live—and how comfortably they could do so—and exert influence in the early years of colonial rule. Allison Shutt’s “Litigating Honor, Defamation, and Shame in Southern Rhodesia” [https://doi.org/10.1017/asr.2018.27] provides a detailed analysis of two court cases, one in 1938 and the other in 1946. Both were trials for defamation, both set precedents, but taken in sequence, Shutt demonstrates with great clarity how literate Africans learned to use courtroom proceedings to their own advantage. Questions of status and family history could easily be translated into vocabularies understood by lawyers and magistrates. By 1946, Africans had used legal proceedings to construct a category by which to defend their status and prestige, the idea of professional honor, of the respect and sub-servience due a clerk or a clergyman. By contrast, Samuel Fury Childs Daly’s “‘Hell was let loose on the country’” [https://doi.org/10.1017/asr.2018.41] takes for his analyses many court cases in Biafra. If legal proceedings in Sierra Leone in 1913 took place in the shadow of slavery, Biafra’s courts were under the shadow of Grey’s Inn and legal precedent already established in the Anglophone world, by lawyers trained in Britain and India. As defendants and prosecutors struggled to address the impact of the flow of guns into a country with an untrained and poor but entrepreneurial army, prosecutors and judges opined and ruled on the place of self-defense in national defense and debated whether rulings made in peacetime were applicable in times of war. For all the Africanist scholarship on courtroom...