Slave “Corrections” in Luanda, Angola from 1836 to 1869

Abstract

This paper uses thousands of cases of imprisonment published under the police section of a weekly gazette entitled Boletim Oficial do Governo da Província de Angola to explore the connections between slavery and the “birth of the prison” in Luanda, the capital of the Portuguese colony of Angola between 1836 and 1869. It demonstrates that as the colonial administration gradually abolished the institution of slavery in the mid-nineteenth century, masters and mistresses sent thousands of captives to jail for “correction,” which could include imprisonment, beatings, and forced labour. By focusing on “correction” cases, this paper problematizes the dichotomy between pre-modern and modern types of punishment and demonstrates that the prison in Luanda reinforced the violence of the slaveholding class.

Violence and intimacy in colonial and postcolonial Africa

“…His contribution advances recent scholarship on incarceration and convict labour in post-emancipation contexts. While existing scholarship has begun to highlight the ways in which local penal systems were embedded in trans-imperial circulations of ideas and practices of punishment and forced labour contexts (Lichtenstein 1996;Paton 2004;Penn 2008;Anderson 2011;Jean 2016;Lopes 2022), Holdridge's focus on violent intimacies sheds light on the '"messiness" of human actions' that exposed the imperfections of colonial rule.…”

Murder in a quarry: violent encounters and distant intimacy on a Cape convict station

“…This was a continuation rather than an abrupt rupture from carceral practices and laws that served racial capitalism. Liberal and humanitarian reforms existed alongside and were entangled with labour coercion and the persistence of bodily punishment as a method to maintain and extend the racial order (Lopes 2022;Jean 2022;Olsavsky 2021;Paton 2004).…”