Abstract:Africans historians have recently paid more attention to postcolonial archives, trying to locate these elusive collections as well as thinking more critically about how to use them. Uganda, in particular, has been an important site for reconsidering the role of postcolonial archives in historical research. Using the archives of Uganda Prisons Service as a case study, this article explores how official records can illuminate the social histories of public servants and the postcolonial state. Along with surveying the state of Uganda’s official archives – particularly those of the Uganda Prisons Service – it explores how these documents provide insight into the everyday experiences and concerns of prison officers after independence. Beyond its bureaucratic functions, paperwork served as a site in which officers could negotiate their responsibilities and relationships. Through the archives of the Uganda Prisons Service, we learn about the social worlds of prison officers within and beyond the prison walls, thus better understanding their experience of public service beyond narratives of corruption and brutality. Ultimately, this article demonstrates the ways in which official archives can be used to study the postcolonial state from a social history perspective.
This article examines prisoner releases in postcolonial Uganda, focusing on the period between independence in 1962 and the inauguration of Yoweri Museveni in 1986. During these decades, Uganda's government enacted over 30 large scale releases of prisoners and detainees, affecting approximately 20,000 individuals. These acts of clemency were highly politicized and frequently occurred during times of political transition or tension. While framed by Uganda's leaders and the official media as gestures of goodwill and symbols of progress, these releases ultimately reinforced executive power and the centrality of incarceration in state repression.
It has been over twenty years since the publication of Florence Bernault's edited volume Enfermement, prison et châtiments en Afrique: du 19e siècle à nos jours (1999), a first of its kind collection that helped establish the field of African penal history. 1 Since then, this field has greatly expanded (
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