Gunboat Criminology in the History of People of African Descent

Onyeozili, Emmanuel C.

doi:10.4324/9781003004424-22

The Routledge Handbook on Africana Criminologies 2020

DOI: 10.4324/9781003004424-22

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Gunboat Criminology in the History of People of African Descent

Emmanuel C. Onyeozili¹

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From Genocidal Imperialist Despotism to Genocidal Neocolonial Dictatorship

Agozino¹

2023

Decolonizing the Criminal Question

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Colonizers tend to adopt the ideology of the Empire of Law to normalize the despotic means of domination that characterize imperialism. They tend to believe that the colonized were living under Asiatic despotism before the colonizers arrived with the civilizing mission or the white man’s burden of bringing Enlightenment to dark natives. Records of genocidal crimes organized by the colonizers tend to be rationalized as essential for the purpose of teaching the natives some moral lessons through pacification and sadistic domination. This legalistic interpretation of colonial plunder was framed by Henry Maine in his book about the rule of law under British colonization in India where the common law was relied upon to directly govern areas with significant European presence while the vast expanse of the subcontinent was allowed to be ruled under what was defined as customary laws. To the astonishment of the colonizers, it was the women who led the uprising against the autocratic powers of the colonizers and their appointed chiefs in what was known as the Women’s War in Nigeria (Agozino, 1997; Falola and Paddock, 2011). In response, the colonizers commissioned anthropologists to conduct ‘intelligence reports’ for the purpose of determining if the women were drunk or under the influence of the men to make them oppose despotic colonial rule. This chapter reflects on one such report by C. K. Meek (1937) in Law and Authority in a Nigerian Tribe with implications for the retention of despotic authoritarianism in neocolonial African states today.

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From Genocidal Imperialist Despotism to Genocidal Neocolonial Dictatorship

Agozino¹

2023

Decolonizing the Criminal Question

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African Criminologies

Warren

Ryan

2022

The Oxford Handbook of the Sociology of Africa

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This chapter argues that the decolonization of criminology and criminal justice throughout Africa has enormous potential to reshape the static trajectory of the discipline. This is because the central role of criminology in sustaining inherently harmful justice institutions and practices is reflected clearly in lived African experiences that are obscured in knowledge-building practices throughout the Global North. The emphasis in this chapter is on two interconnected problems specific to the colonial and postcolonial conditions in Africa. The first is the gradual shift in the use of the criminal law to suppress political violence and translating these processes into the civilian sphere. The second is the highly selective use of international criminal law to address mass atrocities. For decolonization to be authentic to a wide body of critical African theories, a true epistemic break from knowledges embedded in legal, political, and humanitarian institutions formed in the Global North is required.

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Gunboat Criminology in the History of People of African Descent

Cited by 2 publications

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From Genocidal Imperialist Despotism to Genocidal Neocolonial Dictatorship

From Genocidal Imperialist Despotism to Genocidal Neocolonial Dictatorship

African Criminologies

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