 Well, welcome all to the first in a series of workshops to launch our new project here at SOAS, the Carceral Policy Policing and Race Project. I'm delighted to have been appointed a professor at practice at SOAS to head up this project alongside policy fellow Olli DeRose. I think it's probably right to say that in the wake of a resurgent Black Lives Matter movement, we've witnessed a sense of urgency over the relationship between race, policing, prisons, and detention. However, it's probably also true to say that this is not translated into a sustained conversation about the truly global reality of Black and Indigenous suffering, interment, and injustice. The relationship between race, policing, and prisons has largely been explored through the context of the global North, perhaps with the United States dominating much of the conversations. And this project is drawing in marginalised populations in the global South. Almost 980,000 people are currently incarcerated across the continent of Africa, a home of 53 countries of profound diversity. Africa is nevertheless a site of several cross-continental characteristics, namely the unsafe, overcrowded conditions that we see inside their prisons. Similarly in South America, 950,000 people are currently in prison. This is close to my heart because my family stemmed from the wonderful country of Guyana on the Northeast corner of South America. And it's alongside 350,000 prisoners in Central America and 120,000 across the Caribbean. In Asia, the number exceeds a staggering 3 million. And these carceral experiences are routinely ignored by a discussion of mass incarceration, largely rooted, as I said, through a United States-centric framing of disproportionality, criminal justice, and mass incarceration. This workshop then introduces the central aim of the broader project, which is to recalibrate the discussion, to amplify the carceral experience of marginalised communities around the world and dig deeper into the various meanings of being incarcerated itself. And at the heart of this is a central question, how have forms of incarceration, detention, and repression across Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbean shaped by colonialism and slavery? What does that look like? To answer this question, I'm delighted to be joined by four wonderful speakers. Dr. Stella Mingazi is a Ugandan human rights activist, medical anthropologist and poet. She's also a political activist with campaigns for women and girls in rights, as well as the rights of LGBTQ plus communities. She's most known for her outspoken criticism of the Ugandan president, Musa Veniz, which led to her imprisonment at a maximum security facility. And I'm joined also by Dr. Dylan Kerrigan, who's a Caribbeanist, I've known for many years, whose interdisciplinary research explores coloniality and punishment in the Caribbean across various injustice systems under capitalism, including prisons, court systems, transnational organized crime, and securitization. He's currently a lecturer in criminology at the University of Leicester in the UK, and was previously a lecturer in sociology and political anthropology at the University of the West Indies in Trinidad. Now he currently works with a multidisciplinary research team, researching the definition, extent and experience of the treatment of mental, neurological and substance abuse disorders in Guyana's prisons in South America. Also joined by Dr. Wangi Kamari, who's an anthropologist at the Institute of Humanities in Africa at the University of Cape Town, her work draws on many local histories and theoretical approaches, including oral narratives, urban political ecology, the black radical tradition, the anthropology of empire, the anthropology of violence, the anthropology of subjectivity, in order to think through urban spatial management in Nairobi from the vantage point of its most marginalised residence. And we're also joined by Annie Finst, I hope it's pronounced that properly Annie, even though you told me, is an independent scholar and artist in a Visiting Research Fellow in Sociology at Goldsmiths University here in London. Annie brings an interdisciplinary visual, archival and discursive practice on apprehension of materiality and spatiality of settler colonial violence and the carceral and colonising geographies of Kenya and historic Palestine. Thank you so much for giving up your time. I'll ask each speaker to present for around 15 to 20 minutes before opening up to questions from other speakers in the audience. After the last speaker has presented, we'll open up to the floor again to try and draw some connections between the three presentations. Oli will be monitoring the chat if you have any questions. So please feel free to post any queries in the chat box throughout the workshop. I hope you're all on silent so that we can run this smoothly. You'll forgive me that I will have to leave 10 or 15 minutes before the end and Oli Jeroz will bring this to a close. So can I invite Dr Stella Langazi to speak first? Right, thank you very much. I'd like to share the screen. Delighted to be invited to this. Am I sharing the screen as yet or not yet? Yes, yes, we can see it. Okay, good. Yes, so to the workshop on the colonialities of incarceration across the Global South, which is organized under the casserole policy, policing unrest series of the School of Oriental and African Studies, so as I offer some reflexive musings as a decolonial radical queer feminist scholar and activist who is also an ex-convict, I'm an ex-con, a former remanded prisoner and potential future inmate of Lucero women prison. This cartoon and all other graphic illustrations that I use in this presentation are taken from popular culture materials that were produced, circulated, consumed and produced by local and international artists, photojournalists based on my widely publicized experiences of prison and incarceration in Uganda. I have been detained 22 times in police cells, police posts, police units, border and control police units, special investigation units and most of the times I've been arrested because I was protesting against diverse forms of oppressive power in Uganda. I enter this space as a Ugandan woman who has been imprisoned two times in Uganda maximum security prison called Lucero women prison, both times on charges of cyber harassment and offensive communication against dictator president here where he was seven years his family. I was remanded for 33 days the first time and the second time I spent 305 days in prison which included time as a remandee, as a convict and as an appellant against my conviction and sentence. And I think I'm fortunate that all my detention facilities the ones I named before in the police posts and the one in prison have been officially gazetted and like several other individuals in Uganda who've been detained in unidentifiable safe houses and torture chambers where one cannot trace where they were and so one cannot go back for redress. And so I'm gonna talk about the colonial legacy there's a new versions of detention which were perhaps created in post-dependence Uganda. So although I was imprisoned both times in prison for writing critically about the excesses, failings and violations of Mosevyn's dictatorship the first time I just wrote a post on Facebook and the second time I wrote a poem a long beautifully crafted poem commemorating the president's birthday. I published a book collection of 154 poems while in prison. A month before my acquittal from prison I won the Oxfam Novip in collaboration with Penn International Freedom to Write Award. Writing and publishing while a prisoner in a prison facility that does not allow women to write is subversion of the colonial prison sentence. If prison was slapped on me in order to determine as an individual or indeed to deter the wider collective of dissident writers from writing irreverently and disrespectfully about executive state power within this repressive regime. My insistence on writing poems and colluding with good friends who conspired with me to smuggle the poems out of prison stood the logic of punitive state on its head. And so drawing from a colonial legacy of women prisoners being amenable to correction, open to rehabilitation and submissive to a penitentiary authority who reformed colonized savages the Uganda prison services were not prepared for a dissident writing woman opposed to prison reformation. I entered prison as a dissident writer. I lived in prison as a dissident writer. When I was in solitary confinement I wrote with shit on the walls as a dissident writer. This imprisoned subaltern was speaking back, speaking against, speaking at oppressive colonial state power. By the time prison wardresses realized I was always writing about the everyday life in prison it was too late to stop me from writing in order to smuggle my writings out of the maximum security prison facility I was. By the time I was prohibited from reading newspapers or accessing the underused library my smuggled writings were already circulating on social media. By the time my writings were routinely searched confiscated and destroyed by fire as I watched. I had set up a counter process of writing in duplicate sometimes triplicate and smuggling my pieces out of the prison. When I turned 45 years old in prison comrades on the outside ensured that key influences in Uganda published 45 of my poems to celebrate my 45 years on their different social media platforms. In the poems I continued criticizing the dictatorship and I also exposed the failings of the prison in which I was a prisoner. So how was I able to write poems in and about prison? Trained up to a doctoral level as an ethnographer for whom participant observation and qualitative research methods of in-depth interviews and focus group discussions were my daily staple my prison time facilitated ethnographic field work. I didn't get clearance or ethical permissions but I was doing field work inadvertently. Since writing extensive field notes was impractical because prisoners were not allowed to take written materials out of prison. I committed to remembering important facts through writing poems that were stolen out. Often I wrote about conversations I held with prisoners as in the cartoon that was that I share. I wrote about the conversations that I held with prisoners. I shared about experiences of confinement and I also reflected on more abstract ideas of freedom, equality, power and justice. As a storyteller and consumer of gossip I often gave and received information from several prisoners, prison wardresses and affiliated workers or visitors to the prison such as priests we had to go to for summons and confession, health workers, outreach workers, philanthropists, Sligo aid officers, it is safe. And I want to refer to, I share a quote from one of the reviews of my poetry book who said that the state actually paid for my 18 months writing retreat and they gave me thousands of captive respondents via which to study Uganda. Indeed prison time for me and like several other colonized prisoners or others in the post-independent Uganda prison was an ethnographic field site for me. Right, so although I could speak about the political economy of food and eating in prison, punishment, violence and torture in prison, hygiene and sanitation, mental health issues, hard labor extracted for free, for the country but also across borders, pregnant prisoners and mothering in prison, death and disposal of prisoners, gender, sex orientation and sexual orientation and sexuality, friendship and loss of friendship, processing justice while in prison, religion and conversion in prison, education and skills training programs in prison, congestion, surveillance and monitoring of prisons, lies, fleas and ticks in prison, all interesting themes. But in the limited time that I'm left with I will discuss how prison can be or how I used an appropriated prison to decolonize and undo colonial legacies entrenched within the law. I will discuss this decolonization through the lenses of three of my health challenges when I was at Lucila Women Prison, namely, my release the first time on bail due to an episode of Sidiya malaria and I have a picture indeed where wardresses are carrying me, I have a cannula on my arm, denial of access to private post abortion care after suffering a miscarriage due to torture by prison wardresses and an episode in which state prosecutors attempted to subject me to involuntary mental examination. On May 10th, 2017, I was released on bail from Lucila Women Prison because I was suffering from acute malaria. Too dizzy and frail to walk on my own, I was supported by two prison wardresses to the suspect's dock in court. The colonial legacy of release on bail which made its way into several post-independence constitutions is a catalyst for the humongous backlog of unresolved pending court cases in a lot of global South but specifically African countries. Bail deflates away from effectively using prison as a grounds for resistance and it gives currency to the uses of police arrest detention and charging as deterrence to sustained dissidents. And in my subsequent prison time in prisonment, I remember choosing the legal strategy of refusing to apply for bail so that we would force the state to prosecute and try me if indeed by expressing myself freely I was committing a crime against the person of the president. And so by refusing myself the constitutional right to bail a right indeed that was carved within colonial times, I was challenging the very coloniality that gives prisoners freedom and thereby gives the state reason not to further pursue them in court. I will move to the second example. Prior to receiving my bail application the magistrate received an application from the state prosecutors to subject me to involuntary mental examination. In the mind of the state, the logic of the state a woman cannot write critically so graphically about executive power unless she has fallen mentally ill. This application relied on the mental treatment act which was amended in 1940. Uganda received her independence in 1962. And so the application relied on the mental treatment act which provide immediate mental exam and treatment for colonial people who denied and dared to criticize colonial administrators. I learned that it was not mere rhetoric when two government psychiatrists came to prison to try and start assessing my mental status. I fought them off verbally and was able to put away the forced mental exam only by applying for constitutional interpretation of this law and thereby I halted what was otherwise a colonial relic that still stood on statute books. Having been released in 2018 I was among the few Ugandans who interacted with the parliamentary review committee that revealed the mental treatment act at the time and the law was amended. Taking away some of the clauses such as the one that led to my application to the state prosecutors application for my mental examination on grounds of my critique of the government. The last example I want to discuss, I'm not doing very well for time but the last example I want to discuss relates to my battle for access to my medical treatment, medical records when I was a prisoner, I was tortured by prison wardresses. I was pregnant and I lost my two month old pregnancy needing access to private post abortive care. This was denied to me, although I applied through the courts of law, I applied to Uganda Human Rights Commission and I also tabled an appeal before the Uganda prison services. The argument was that indeed the law denied prisoners, ex-prisoners access to their medical records. And so in terms of discussing the coloniality and that is visible within these three examples that I suffered from my medical access to medical care in prison, it is clear that issues around safe custody, notions of self-cursion, human rights of prisoners is violated often. And I wanted to talk about corporal punishment which was taken off the books of law in Uganda that continues many prisoners, especially pregnant and other women of reproductive age suffer irreparable damage from corporal punishment. Torture within prison by prisoners and prison staff continues and there's inadequate medical provisioning. And so for me, I just want to say that from this example, the three examples I have shared, it is clear to me that political prisoners can mobilize prison practice as a site of resistance to colonial relics. In my own incident, the short biography I've shared, I challenged the Metro Treatment Act of 1930. I challenged the denial of access to medical prison, medical health facilities. And I also want to highlight that we are discussing how medical military healthcare workers, I deployed to a face remove evidence of torture victims in prison. As I conclude, I just want to say that many times the stories and the power of elite women who are imprisoned are often denied and currency and neglected. When the stories are told about prison, it's often stories told by men, stories told by elite and stories told by the Western gaze looking upon Africa. But I think that it's important to utilize and be able to mobilize elite Africans, including women, but also people of non-binary genders to tell the stories that happen in prison, the stories that have otherwise been silenced in order to do the colonial work in the prison setting. This was kind of my concluding slide because of time, well, I just wanted to say that in terms of the contribution that I want to make towards the discussion, I want to say that not everything is legible, not all forms of incarceration are legible. There are places such as safe houses and torture chambers that are known because the bodies of ex-prisoners come out marked with torture but where these have taken place in Uganda cannot be retraced and so we cannot get redressed because we don't know where the torture is happening, we don't know who is responsible. Colonizers do not expect women prisoners to write and speak back and subvert power and it looks to me, it seems that the prisons are not made for emancipated speaking women. I think for me that the gender differentiation in who produces knowledge for and about prisons in Uganda must be addressed. A lot of the work that has come out of the prison system is either by the oppressors in prison writing or by colonized Ugandans who've gone through Western education systems writing for the prisoners, rarely do prisoners who are not empowered with formal education, writing their stories and telling them, I want to talk about the gender binaries but that I will skip. I think one of the problems with the colonial legacy in places like Uganda is that the commonwealth left us with a binary system of gender, binary system of prisons. We have male prisons and female prisons and so transgender and intersex people but also queer people are often misgendered in terms of how the penalties are given to them and this has not been redressed and this introduces a politics of gendered sexualities within prison that has not even been touched in some of the literature that I've seen. As I conclude, I just want to say that this is a wonderful platform that has been created and I hope that more and more we can have the input of prisoners and ex-prisoners who are of African origin, who are African, who are from the Global South contributing and that the sort of empowerment that's going to come from this platform will also be extended to people in prison, people who have been to prison, such that we're not just producing knowledge from the outside for people on the inside but that insiders to these cultures can also participate. I thank you very much. Stella, Yanzi, thank you so much for that fantastic, wonderful, wonderful opening start. If it was just a wonderful way to begin, we're so grateful for your sacrifice, your witness, your testimony, your advocacy, your strength and your power. So I'm really, really very grateful and very humbled that you're with us and you've kicked us off to such a fantastic start. Let me just open this up for questions. I probably should have said to indicate that you might have a question in the chat box or well, I think to do it quickly now, if you can just raise your hand or press the raise button. I'm gonna ask Ollie to help me with this because it involves, but there must be questions. Very surprised if there aren't. Is one from Chris, David? Chris. Can I just go? Yes, just go. Okay, actually, thank you very much for the very interesting talk about your work and your experiences. One thing that I was wondering about when listening to your story is what did in the end make you keep going? And what was your motivation? Especially when you were incarcerated for, I think, 22 times? No, maybe I just got that wrong. How often again? Hold that, Chris. Actually, what I'm gonna do is I've got a feeling there might be a few more questions and then I'm gonna come back to you. So I'm gonna give you some breath, Stella. Okay, we'll go back to you. A Vivian. I can see Vivian's hand up. Yeah, thank you. Thank you so much. It's always very wonderful to hear Dr. Stella Nyanzi speak. I wanted to perhaps ask what you can say about the feminist contribution to expanding the casserole state. We know that a lot of, particularly in responding to gender-based violence, we see a lot of feminist interventions that focus on expanding policing, expanding imprisonment and calling for criminalization. What do you think about that? Especially because I'm from Kenya, I see that a lot and also parts of, different parts of Africa as well. So could you comment on the role of feminist in expanding this state here? Casserole, yeah. Any other questions for Stella Lutz? Is it Lutz? Yes, thank you. Thank you so much. And thank you, Stella, for this wonderful presentation. Now I'm coming from sort of a human rights law perspective. You know, when we look at the positive obligations of states, you know, to prevent torture, for example, one of the main focus of the anti-torture movement has been to address impunity and to call for accountability of the perpetrators. Now this would normally also involve incarceration. So there have been some critics of this term towards the coercive and casserole in human rights law. So to put it perhaps in a slightly provocative way, is there good and bad incarceration in that sense? Does it then depend on political motivation or should we irrespective of what anyone has done go beyond incarceration to deal with whatever kind of wrongdoing? And obviously I don't imply in your case that there was any wrongdoing because it was clearly politically motivated, but I think it goes beyond that. Any other questions for Stella? Anyone else with the hand up that I've missed? Ah, thanks so much for this. Can I also ask if Dr. Stella envisions any practical and legal ways to move from colonial leftover gender binaries in the prison system? Any practical legal ways to move beyond the colonial leftover gender binaries in the prison system? And can I just ask one question, which is to what extent do you think we can come up with systems if that's not too loaded a word that are African, Ugandan, not colonial or are the two now too intertwined? I mean, was your experience, do you see it as a colonial experience or is it an African? Is it both? It's a loaded question, but I just wonder what your reaction is to that. Thank you very much, Stella, as you come back. Shall I respond? I saw the dims of hand up. I mean, thank you all very much for wonderful questions. I will not pretend I can answer all of them brilliantly, but I'll try. What kept me going? I said I was arrested 22 times. The COVID lockdown period in Uganda called for a lot of protests. So I was arrested protesting for food. There were hungry people we need to eat. I was caught protesting when I crossed the border. The borders were locked, but the president was traveling in and out of the country. So I traveled out of the country without a visa. And I was caught. And for me, the issue was to get caught and highlight the issue of how can you lock down when you're getting out? If you lock down, lock us all down. I was arrested. So I was arrested many times. What kept me going was the detention. I've written a poem where I say I wear a prison as a medallion of owner. I don't enter prison as a criminal. I enter prison as a political prisoner. And people have said to me, yes, you are charged with being a public nuisance. You're charged with offending the president or the dictator. And I said, that is welcome. That is a welcome charge to be guilty of offending a repressive authoritarian is welcome. And so what kept me going was that it was important to do the sort of work I was doing and that my trial was often a trial of the entire dictatorship. And so to answer the question around, well, I'll come to it. The question about coloniality and what we can do with prison. But the feminist contribution question from Viviane, I am one of the people who have argued both ways for incarceration, but also for abolition of the prison system, particularly when it comes to gender-based violence. I have argued in relation to women who murder children or murder their spouses because of mental illness problems that I saw mental health reform that could only have taken place through the counseling that was provided by psychiatrists in prison. For some women in rural areas where psychiatric offices are not offered where the mental health services in a country are so dire and sparse, the only places they could have obtained that sort of intervention was in prison and they saw reform happening. And so in the absence of alternative mental health care in Uganda, to merely say that gender-based violence will be dealt away with alternatives outside the system is not acceptable. I think for me that they are women who have been violated and can only get justice when the perpetrators of violence are brought to book. And for them, it is the only way that amends can be made. I think that there are issues around parents for whom restraining orders can only come through the legal processes where children and custodial care can only be taken through a legal process and the judiciary system, which inevitably has prison as one of the potential penalties that are given. And so it is not always clear to me that incarceration must be done away entirely, especially when no alternatives are given for and against gender-based violence. I haven't answered that question well, but that's my initial thought. We've been debating and I think for me, I see both ends happening. The other point as the person who's been in prison, defending prison when women are suffering from urinary tract infections and there's no medicine just doesn't make sense. When antiretroviral therapies run out and there's no more and people who are stuck on those drugs or dialysis, people who need access to dialysis, people who need access to critical life support, defending in the absence of alternatives, especially also for people doing life sentence and those who are condemned and Uganda doesn't work. I need to hear the alternatives. And in the context of Uganda, there are none put on the table. Lutz question, human rights, low positive obligation of the state. So can I come in Stella? Because I think you've got the question to a large extent already when you talk about gender-based violence and whether someone who's guilty of gender-based violence, which is also a form of torture, whether or not they should be in prison or not. I mean, that was sort of the gist of my question or whether we should move beyond incarceration altogether. So I think for me that in contexts like Uganda, where perpetrators of torture are using state machinery and are above the law, right? That the only way to be able to catch them and redress them sometimes is to make them face the law and what might perhaps deter them is to lock them up because it's the only language that a violent punitive state understands, especially for perpetrators of torture who are using the state and the state machinery to continue this harm. And I think that is one of the things they fear or only the only thing they fear, the possibility of being detained. And so for me, I think before we entirely write it all off, I think in situations of especially immense totalitarian, militant military regimes where even civilians are forced to be tried in military courts and are imprisoned in military prisons that sometimes putting the very perpetrators of this in their own prisons is a way to curb this or deter anymore. Someone asked for a practical legal way to move from gender, I mean, from gender binaries in the prison system. I think for me that one of them could be to have alternative gender cells as well. I was with an intersex prisoner who was called my daughter and called my son. And when he died, we didn't know what he was. He died of COVID-19 in prison. And part of the problem was that when the lesbian couples were being punished in prison, this person was always at the center of the witch hunts of lesbian couples. And often he said to me, because I called him son, he asked me to call him son. He said to me, I was putting the wrong cell. Why was I locked up with women? I am not a woman, okay? Why would they put all this temptation before me? And I think that in the case of this intersex person, they often said they wouldn't fit in an all male cell and his fear was the men would rape me immediately. But on the other hand, I say, but you're fisting on all these girls all the time. And he said, but I'm not a girl and they're here this temptation before me. And I think part of what he said, may his soul rest in peace is when you go out, you must ask for cells, if not prisons for such gender people, at least cells within facilities where such gender people can be kept, can be put. So that's one way of doing it. The other way is, I think for me part of the problem around the non-binary, incarceration of non-binary people are stories of torture, sexual torture where the politics of gender in prisons is redone, and merely by putting them in this misgendered prison wards, especially in the zero women prison, only the mentally ill or people who have contagious illnesses can afford access to a free cell, an individual cell. The rest of us were sleeping on the floors in open ward systems. And in that system, for me, I kept wondering how the prison was blind to all the sexual activity that was happening. I was often penalized for carrying deodorant roll-on sticks. They were confiscated because there was a fear I was masturbating with these deodorant sticks, but way above me, there were people actually having an intercourse. And so the narrow thinking, I think one of the practical ways is to begin teaching prison officers about gender and how it works and how it doesn't work, and to abuse them of the idea, the colonial idea that there are men and women, girls and boys, and it's all just biological. I think, first of all, the lessons would be useful because in commonwealth countries such as Uganda, the British colonial legacy of man and woman full stop carries currency, and there's no recognition of transgender or alternative genders. Yes. Stella, I'm gonna, I'm gonna... Thank you very much. That's a powerful place to... We're gonna come back to all of you at the end, but I want to try and run to time. We've got a little bit over. Thank you so much for that fantastic opening contribution and answers there. Can I bring in now Dylan Kerrigan? Thanks, David. Thank you, Stella. That was really, really informative and bringing lots of ideas together. I'm gonna share my screen too, to just give you some stuff to look at while I'm talking. This presentation is... Oops, sorry. It's something that where I draw on historical, anthropological and criminological research in colonial and post-colonial archives of Guyana. And I wanna try to provide a little bit of the historical context of Guyana, a little bit about the kind of current situation and then some sort of conceptual information and ideas that are kind of circulating amongst us at the moment as we think about the project. The project actually concentrates on mental neurological and substance abuse disorders in Guyana's jails, both amongst inmates and the people who work with them. And we try to connect this to the British colonial period of 1814 to 1966. These are some of the research questions from that project. I'm gonna not really be talking about these questions, but I want to give you the broader context of the project. Today I kinda wanna talk a little bit more about the biopolitics of carcerality as a way to imagine the connections between colonialism and its afterlife. And I think Stella already did a really good job of this already. In the Caribbean, oh, sorry, I also wanted to present the team members of my research project. We're led by Professor Claire Anderson at the University of Leicester and Professor Melissa Eiffel at the University of Guyana. And the team is a mixture of colleagues from the University of Guyana and University of Leicester. One of the things we found quite useful in the Caribbean is the concept of biopolitics because it helps us to understand the power dynamics between both colonizers and the colonizers and how hierarchies extended and grew specifically through the regulation and control of incarcerated bodies. This would include also what that relationship extends to and looks like today. And in this Caribbean sense, it's always important to connect something like Foucault to Fanon's work. And in particular, how does the colonial regime dehumanize the colonized subject by targeting the body and its dignity while also denying it the opportunity to be human and the role that carcerality itself both inside and outside of the prison plays in this process. And as some commentators have suggested, colonial biopolitics does not only beat the colonized body into the dead or dying, it renders through slow, protected violence of denial to the center of the human into the non-human. And this is where Fanon is speaking, not of instantly transformative violence and not specifically of violence events, but of sustained violence. And I think that's one way we can think about coloniality as a kind of sustained violence. And we can see it in the relationship between colonial governmentality and post-colonial carcerality. Specifically, I think how the biopolitics of carcerality today can connect the past and present together. While also showing how these early forms of colonial carcerality shape the prisons that follow them that we have today. So colonial prisons in British Guyana, let me just provide a little bit of background on this. So what's the relationship between prisons and colonial governmentality, this desire to control laboring populations in British Guyana? Well, before the abolition of slavery in 1833, punitive sanctions were really largely in the gift of slave owners in this, what was a sugar colony. Afterwards, the British oversaw the construction of complex carceral infrastructure to manage emancipated people and ultimately their descendants alongside the colonies indigenous population and later migrants. This included regulations on things like vagrancy, on the control of alcohol and intoxicants, the building of hospitals in Luminos, could it take a silence? And of course, the construction of prisons and a penal settlement, each of which were becoming better connected and interconnected with the plantation economy. Prisons were first introduced while the Dutch were there to the colonies of Demero, Esquibo, and Burabis and following the loss of the colonies to the British, British colonial authorities took over the prisons that were already in New Amsterdam and Georgetown. And the role of these prisons in this early era was really to confine enslaved men and women and in separate accommodations, also civil prisoners for things like debts and stuff like that. The legal rights of slave owners to punish and the high fees associated with confinement which were payable by the plantation owners ensured the need for the prisons at this time actually remained quite limited. And instead the colonial state delegated authority over the enslaved to the plantation owners, the slave holders and placing little constraint on their use of violence. Over time, anti-slavery movements, humanitarian sentiments in the 19th century sort of pushed back and said it's a bit controversial and there were shifts in the law somewhat. And this meant that the colonial government suddenly became more responsible for such services. And this is really when the period of coloniality or colonial carcerality sorts of emerges. From this point forward, labor discipline was enforced by the state. This included legislation restricted the movement of both formerly enslaved, the regulation of consumption of alcohol in prison workers who broke their contracts. It also included the development of Her Majesty's Penal Settlement in Masaruni and also some other coastal district prisons and Masaruni's down these people and is quite removed from the rest of Guyana in its location. Of course, at this time, incarceration was designed to invoke terror and iron restraints and many of the things that we've documented about the ill treatment of prisoners took place at this time. At this time, also there were the need for further investigations due to the concerns about this ill treatment and the passing of different bills, which sort of gave more control to the governors in the context of making reforms. However, as you see, the reforms never really happened, even though the new prison rule suggested improving living conditions, improving the management of the buildings. However, in the face of these reforms, we still got lots of reports of office and misconduct, the miscasing of civil and criminal prisoners, poor living conditions, overcrowding and the mixing of civil and criminal prisoners, poor living conditions, as I've sort of said. And on onwards, so we have this kind of system that by the mid-19th century, the colony and the colonial government is using the prisons to control the colonies increasingly diverse population. And also sort of to reverse the decline of British Guyana's plantations, and we can put this in the context of the coloniality of power and so forth. In the context of prison labor, it was supposedly designed to accustomed prisoners to regular work, but really it was for their immediate productive capacity. And in the later decades of the 19th century, expectations of physical punishment were largely replaced with a regime of psychological hardship. And this included things like solitary confinement, restricted diets, the ability to extend imprisonment for insubordination, for breaking the rules. And of course, prisons became sites of resistance during these times. By the late 1930s, anti-colonialism, growing in these nationalism, the emergence of the welfare state had pushed the British to try to reform again a kind of new interventionist model of colonialism, in an attempt to sort of justify their rule. This included things like industrial training and education. Wait. Silver. Okay. So I gave you this background because I wanted to connect it to colonial prosperity in post-independence Guyana. And of course, there's lots more I could say about this historical period and we have a lot of evidence. But in the short time I had, I just kind of wanted to pick out some key little points. In this next sort of section, I just want to talk about colonial carcerality in post-independence Guyana and link this to some of the information we've gathered from the Guyanese prison service. It's annual reports, stuff around prison infrastructures, prison regimes, semi-structured interviews that we've done that we've collected. These are pictures of current prisons. In the top left is Lucignan prison. In the top right is Lucignan holding bay which is the remand yard. In the bottom left is the Georgetown fire in 2017. And in the bottom right is the aftermath of the Georgetown fire. To keep things simple, I'm going to connect to three key themes in our historical work, enslavement, the management of labor and the failure of reform efforts. So the inmates themselves in the prisons that we talked to make comparisons to slavery while also, of course, noting differences too. Nonetheless, in contemporary Guyanese society, those incarcerated in prisons today are also most often the same population groups from previous time. So it's black, Asian, indigenous and minority ethnic individuals from the same kind of economic and educational backgrounds and socially challenged locations such as Georgetown, West East-Romfeld or Boys Town, South-Romfeld, Long Avenue and other non-depressed communities but ones that still slightly economically challenged. And I think this connects to Fanon's sustained violence and it connects the sort of inside of British Guyanese colonial prisons to the outside social world of contemporary Guyanese today. And I think it's connected to a broader process of material impoverishment, the creation of what scholars called poverty archipelagos. And in Guyanese context, the harsh criminalization of poverty and cannabis. And then it creates a kind of dehumanization loop that goes on between the prisoners and the communities from which prisons are most often taken. As Stella noted, it's similar in Guyanese today, many Guyanese prisoners are still physically beaten even though these rules have changed, some by staff, some by other inmates, they're forced to live in conditions that are described as inhumane, life-threatening, not fit for human habitation, the cells are overcrowded, unsanitary, bestial food is often served. Again, bodies are surveilled and controlled and bordered in sorts of dominates. Also there's a continuance of colonial courtful punishment being placed in dark cells, repeated solitary confinement, reduction of diet, continuities that are pretty clear between the past and the present. Also the management of labor continues like those enslaved on plantations, prisoners in the post-1966 era are still manual labor. In the 1970s, this was really around agricultural activities and prisoners in Georgetown, for example, made bread not only for the use in prison but also for all government hospitals. And there's information on the different kinds of work that they would do in the 1976 report. We see that 65% of the 924 prisoners were actually employed full-time. If you look at the kind of numbers in 2016, it's a similar number, it's around 70, it's kind of increased, it's around 71% and now employed in some kind of labor that's out of a population of 10, 1047. These jobs have changed though, they're not so many agricultural labor in jobs now. What you see more is doing the staff work of the prison like cleaners, orderlies, construction. So there's been a decline in manual labor, not a decline in manual labor rather but in the kinds of employment alongside new types of employment. And more generally there's been a failure of reforms. As the proceeding information suggests, the most glaring holdover is the infrastructure of prisons in Guyana through the prison sites were built in the 19th century. The 19th century problem of overcrowding has remained. It's not just a lack of space but the condition of the buildings. Georgetown and New Amsterdam prisons were constructed of wood and had been identified as fire hazards long before that. In our business to Lucignan prison and Timoree prisons we saw lots of overcrowding too with young men having to sleep in the canteen because there's not enough beds for them in dormitories and so forth. We also saw a very big problems in the Roman yard. So I say all this because I wanted to sort of do the obvious. Say, you know, speak about coloniality and its extensions into the present but I also think coloniality allows us to do something else. And in conclusion, I wanted to talk about something to do with the prisons of history and how maybe we write history and how we think about prisons. What I've been trying to get across here is that the prisons past and present kind of illustrate human beings preoccupation with dehumanization. And as my brief presentation kind of is suggesting there are numerous continuities here and connections between the past and the present but colonialism also created new ways to think about reality and otherness. So these intersections between empire and governmentality have created prisons of sources of toxicity. So in this sense, prisons incarcerate and dehumanize the most marginalized members of society where colonialism wants to find the other. Now we might even say it's colonial prisons in the present that do some of this work. In the failure to improve infrastructure, regimes and education prisons, for example, society in a production of its own humanity today in essence is rejecting the humanity of prisons. Whether, you know, this is not necessarily self-conscious but it does make sense to be explicit about how the biopolitics of colonial carcerality have extended and lived on. And I think this connects to a broader point made by scholars like Sylvia Winter and McKith Trick. And I think one takeaway from these processes of post-colonial carcerality and biopolitics is it's no longer the elites and the colonial elites and the plantation owners forcing or pushing these forms of violence and dehumanization. It's now the broader multi-ethnic societies at large that we live in where mostly, where most people have not been incarcerated but who maintain in some ways these colonial institutions and logics. And in many ways in a prediction of what Winter is talking about, work live and constantly produce a binary of othering between the insides and the outsides of prison walls. Prisoners in this sense are the other. And in the rejection of prison as humanity, there's a sort of normalization of a form of violence and dehumanization rooted in the colonial past. And it goes without saying such a binary is problematic and the majority for validating their own humanity in this way, despite racial inequality and not fully aware that colonial carcerality reconfigured through biopolitics has produced such a situation. And I think this is a big question, right? But the point I wanted to get to is why is it that colonial prisons still play such a role in Guyana? When we know that their roots lie in the management of enslaved and bonded workers and knowing the destruction that that can cause. And it's not that I wanna move away from coloniality but I think in some sense, coloniality trapped us in a prison of where we document these continualities when really what we maybe need to move towards is proposing new forms of humanity rather than just proving the continuities. The contemporary prisons will be still a place of oppression and social control. The hierarchy of the prisoners, methods of surveillance replicate the hierarchies of empire premised on these old regimes and prejudices. And of course, in this sense, colonial carcerality is ongoing and evident. So I guess I might change in the sense the biopolitics of colonial carcerality which were designed to dehumanize the colonized subject and deny them the opportunity to be human still underpin the Guyanese prison regimes today. Yeah, yeah. I think that's why I would like to leave it, if that's okay. Well, that was pretty strong stuff there from Dylan Kerrigan. I suspect there are certainly questions. I do know that Scott Newton and was it Ladine had their hands up previously for Stellar. I hope you might, unless you can adapt your question to Dylan, you might want to come back at the very end for all speakers. Have we got questions for, oh, it's a new hand, Scott. Is that a new hand? Yes, yes. Thank you. And this is Scott Newton, the head of the law school here at SOAS. So very grateful, Scott, for you kicking me to make this happen and for being here with us, Scott Newton. Dylan, that was an amazingly compelling presentation. I wanted to raise one thing which is the relation between carcerality on the one hand, coloniality or post-coloniality and specifically post-slavery because that seems, that's a complicated relationship to theorize. And obviously Guyana is the, it's a premier case because it combines both post-coloniality and post-coloniality and post-slavery. But briefly, I mean, the plantation is the original mass carceral space, right? It's not a selective carceral space, like a prison is a mass carceral place where an entire population is incarcerated. So that the plantations of the age of Atlantic slavery are the sort of the gulag archipelago of the day, right? There's this vast array of carceral spaces which all incarcerate great numbers of people. So what difference does that make, right? So how do you separate out the specifically post-colonial aspects of contemporary carcerality and the post-slavery aspects of contemporary carcerality? I mean, obviously, I mean, the obvious case is mass incarceration in the U.S. must in some profound sense be related to the mass incarceration of slavery. But that's, that strikes me sort of overly facile. I'm just, I just wanted to get your... Great question. Let's just hold off that other other, that's a big question, dude. Yeah, but other questions. I can see Maya. Yes, can you hear me? Yes, we can. Hi. Yeah, so to add on to Scott's question, I just want to throw in like also the concept of neocolonialism and like how does that play into like post-colonialism and post-slavery? Because these emerging but yes sustained forms of carcerality and how it's not necessarily up, you know, the end of colonialism, but also just new forms of it that, you know, fit within a political, global political economic system today that we're maintaining through, you know, neoliberalism, for instance. And so, yeah, just want to get your thoughts on that. Thanks. And Caroline. Hi, Dylan. I found the data quite interesting. Do you have any specific information relating to women in prison in Guyana? Thank you so much, Caroline. Anybody else itching to? Great. Well, that's nice and neat. You've got coloniality. You've got the justification of slavery and you've got neo-coloniality linked to neoliberalism. There we go, Dylan. No, no, fantastic. I'll just take my lead from Stella saying I would try to offer some responses, but I'm sure I will answer these in not necessarily in full, complete ways. But thank you for the comments and the interest in the stories we're telling. So to start with, I might jump towards Maya and then come back to Scott just because in some ways I'm somebody who also worked with neo-colonialism as a sort of starting premise that this division between things like colonialism, post-colonialism, and neo-colonialism are sort of the man-made social kind of definitions that we've divided up. And from a sort of Caribbean context, we always have little problems talking about post-coloniality because we don't really necessarily feel that this moved. We feel that almost like it shifts you into a space of discussion that's not necessarily about structural change, but just like making little small tweaks to the system so it sort of continues as Maya is pointing out. And I think a big part of that problem is also a sort of colonial amnesia. We don't necessarily connect the past to the present. We might start in the present. We might start with neoliberalism. And there's lots of a lot of scholars who suggest that one of the things we do need to do and my coloniality is really important is to illustrate these longer connections. And I think a lot of people have struggled to make these connections in ways that are tangible. But I see that changing quite a lot in recent times with new bodies of work coming out that actually make more direct connections in terms of things like I was mentioning like infrastructure or regimes or the management, things that you can actually hold onto and show connections. But one of the reasons, and this is to jump to Scott, one of the reasons I was talking about the biopolitics today is because I feel like that's a way to sort of maybe avoid these questions about eras and difference in time zones because we know from our observations and from the stories that people tell from being prisoners, from the families themselves, that there's this direct sort of connection between the systems of social control that have existed over time and a sort of development of a separate space, a space where these prisoners are sort of not seen as part of the society, right? And I think that's quite problematic. So one of the things I've been trying to do with biopolitics allows you to connect to other things that don't necessarily rely on these definitions of eras. So you can, one of the reasons I start with mobilizing poverty archipelagos is because there's a lot of literature that illustrates in coloniality terms the numbers of people who end up in prisons often come from the same geographical kind of locations and communities, right? So it's not that, say that there's an economic downturn in a country, right? That necessarily everybody's gonna feel it and end up in jail with the equal problems of debt or whatever, the majority will come from certain locations. So we have a reoccurring kind of punishment, this sort of sustained violence. So I guess I'm not gonna answer you very well but my answer to these questions is in my own work is to find concepts that work. So in the Caribbean, I tried to do what Stella says, pull from, in her context, Uganda or Africa. Within Caribbean, I tried to pull from these Caribbean authors. So people like Fanon, people like Sylvia Winter who are speaking to that sort of Caribbean essence and experience. And so I probably moved away in many ways from thinking about distinctions between sort of post-coloniality and post-slavery because in some ways I feel like they lead me to a kind of end game where I don't really get to sort of like connect all as one narrative. And I think that's something I've struggled with in the three or four years that we've been doing this project to really, you know, what we wanted to do was say, look, the mental health problems in the prisons are directly related to colonialism, right? And you can't really fit it like that. You kind of got to provide a more sophisticated body of evidence to make these connections and it circulates through things like social class, families, education, and those are the connectors that extend over long periods of time rather than things like discourse or necessarily, I've found necessarily eras. So I don't know if I really provide you with that answer there but I've found that neocolonialism is a more effective, sorry, my kid had a birthday and that's a balloon popping in the background. Neocolonialism is, for me, a more fruitful way to have a discussion today. But I often find it's not something that's picked up by a lot of scholars. Neocolonialism sort of out there is an old hat sort of concept but I think it has a lot of merit, especially if you're speaking from a sort of Caribbean bottom-up perspective, you know, a lot of the processes that people experience are still very much embedded in these kind of colonial hierarchies and logics between not just within social class but between different geographical locations like the Global North and the Global South. And then, sorry, to jump onto Caroline's question, in Guyana, the female population, the women in prison, is really only in one prison. It's in New Amsterdam, which again is a very old prison, a very wooden prison. They call it the paper prison because you can push things through the wall to other prisoners and because it's in cool wooden that you can push things through. And you have smaller numbers. I think when I was there last, about two years ago, the population was under 100 women in that. Many of them were arrested for things to do with trafficking and drugs trafficking because of where Guyana's location is. You often hear very sad stories of people being kind of forced into the transaction too, often maybe because of financial needs or certain promises that were made to them. And the support within the prison for women, from what I could see was very limited, very much like the men. You do not have a lot of welfare officers in a prison. You might have one welfare officer for a whole population of around 200 people and that welfare officer is in charge of all their needs from medical needs to also their court dates and stuff like that. And that creates a lot of tension both for women and for female inmates, male and female inmates because there's this lack of information and lack of concern, a lack of support in terms of the medical things they might need. So it's a fairly depressing situation really on the ground. But there are people, there are organizations, the local organizations run by Guyani's people who are seeking to change things. One of the biggest problems I was trying to suggest here is a connection between the past and the present is that a general apathy for anybody in prison, everybody thinks people in prison to some extent have it okay and it's not too bad. Whereas when you actually explain to people what's going on they're kind of shocked and that's a similar kind of premise to the colonial times. People thought that what's going on in the prisons was okay and that's it. So overall there is a kind of almost like a lack of local knowledge about what happens in the local prisons. And I think that's really a problem that needs to change somehow through public education or raising awareness because perhaps it's more that when the public are more educated about these issues, they can lean on the politicians a little bit more for change because I'm not sure it really changes coming from the politicians. So yeah, so I kind of went off a few tangents there but thanks for your questions. Thank you very much to them. That was a fantastic central contribution to the project that we've launched here at SAAS. So we're very, very grateful indeed. Can I now ask our next speakers, Dr. Wangu Kamari and Dr. Anne Finks to present next. I think presenting together. Thank you very much. Thank you everyone and thank you to Stella and Dylan. I really learned a lot and thank you for all of these engaging questions and the ability to talk and try and make connections across the global south and a global south that includes Africa. I think when I first got this invitation, I was wondering whether the global south included Africa because we're so often off stage but it seems like there's really lots of intention and lots of intentionality behind this and I think that's really powerful. So my name is Wanguai Kamari and I'm a researcher but I think the work that I've tried to be doing for the last 15 years in a poor community called Madarin Nairobi probably is what has brought me here together with my friend and colleague Annie. We'll be talking about carcerality in Kenya and if I could just share my screen. Let's see if that's possible. I'll just start from, I hope you can, I'm a dinosaur. I don't know lots about technology but I hope you can see my screen. Yes, thank you. So together with my friend and colleague Annie Finks we'll be talking about carcerality and the legacies of settler colonialism in Nairobi. And this builds on a paper that we just co-wrote together but above all our commitment to highlighting the enduring colonial violence in Nairobi and Kenya and for Annie also in Palestine. So I'll just, so this is the paper that we just wrote and that informs this conversation we are having but even as we focus on the legacies and also highlight quite a bit in this paper the colonial provenance of carcerality in Kenya even now colonial modes of punishment, of incarceration of enclosure, of interrogation, of curfew, confiscation, separation, displacement and detention without trial are still deeply embedded in the spatial and ideological arrangements of post-colonial Kenya. If we were in a room out as how many of you have been to Kenya and maybe some of you would put up your hands. Okay, I can see the lens into Kenya but I think some of the themes we are addressing here are probably really quite evident and we know that and as we've been talking about now even if we think the ostensibly post-colonial period has ruptured this carcerality I would say in many ways in poor communities this has been expanded and exacerbated. So my, I'll take a few minutes to speak about the post-colonial articulations of this carcerality and Annie will talk about the colonial provenance and articulations of this. And again, not to say that they are distinct time periods because often, often people in Kenya talk about the coincidence of the presence of these dual tenses of post-colonialism and post-colonialism. And so I'm not here to talk about them in distinct periods but just show how they came to be normalized or the kinds of processes that led to the normalization of carcerality. And also just to flag that to be sure carcerality is not often, a term used often in Kenya. I'm not sure if it's used often in Guyana and even in literature that's lots of important critical literature that reflects on colonial punishment and legacies in Kenya. It's not foregrounded but at the same time both Annie and I in making connections and thinking about how carcerality is part of an assemblage or prompts an assemblage of punishment of injury and harm. We found it quite useful for us and really building on how many people who are the subjects who suffer the most suppression from carcerality, how they narrativize their conditions really highlights even if they don't use carcerality in local vernacular in Shang, how they narrativize their present conditions really, I think substantiate the use of carcerality. So to do this, I've given you all of my preamble and to do this, I'm going to focus on the settlement of Madari where I have, I'm not from Madari I'm actually really a very boring middle-class researcher in Nairobi, but I came to Madari maybe 15 years ago and I really, it's kind of an accident but not really an accident and since then I've been involved in a number of community activities for about the last 15 years and so my reflections and carcerality and I was actually there today and some of what I learned today I'll talk about later but I think the sharp contrast between my living conditions and I think the colonial oppression that still persists in Madari really I think have informed my thinking in many ways and so Madari is often the site where for today it's a site where my thoughts on carcerality move through but it's also where many of my thoughts on Nairobi are shaped and before I talk about Madari, sorry, another small preamble I think here we've talked a lot about prisons and our talk is not so much about prisons it's really about everyday carcerality and the different ways in which it is it's materialized but at the same time it bears reflecting on prisons a little bit we know the prison industrial complex is large and we are talking about this everyday carcerality but at the same time we know and boring from Gadara that really the British and I'm just going to read a quote from Gadara he says there is no evidence of the existence of pre-colonial prisons in Kenya however it is notable that prisons were among the first buildings that the British built whenever they went into a future colony and really I think if my history serves me right the police were one of the first state forces in Kenya even before it was a colony when it was a protractor it was the British East African Protectorate and these small fortifications whether it was of wood or whether it was of in Kenya you call it Kayaba but kind of Tony Bush those were still prisons and really one of the first buildings that the British built and within 16 years of their arrival in Kenya in 1895 the British had built 30 prisons with an average daily incarcerated population of 1500 people we currently have a population of about 54,000 prisoners in Kenya but of those roughly 50% are there awaiting trials so no one knows whether they're they haven't gone through the new process to discern whether they're they're guilty or not many of them are in remand because they can't afford bail because bail sometimes is so arbitrary and so I just wanted to while we're talking about everyday casserality I just wanted to flag that as well but also flag that to also in holding that up or holding that in space also flag how everyday casserality feeds into into these prison formations or yeah into prisons and obviously the logics that informed the building of prisons for the native population because that's what who they were built for are the same ones so these logics that build prisons in Kenya the same ones that inform the creation of racialized zones that produce spaces like Madari so Madari emerged as a discarded landscape no white person wanted to live in this area they said it was full of mosquitoes to floodplain so this area Madari is emerges from this colonial narration as an unwanted space that was not the geography that Europeans were to live on and so Africans were put here South Asian populations were put as kind of a buffer and Europeans lived in higher areas not that many mosquitoes and that were not floodplain so the same logics of separation of detention or containment that operate and operationalized prisons are what produce spaces like Madari and these are racialized logics of course and in thinking about how carcerality operates here I think I'm going to focus in particular on detention or curfews and surveillance and containment and to bring this to the present I'm going to focus on an event a really problematic event that happened at the beginning of 2020 when the COVID regulations were put in place so Yasin Moyo a 13 year old boy was shot and I'm going to read an extract he was shot as part of disenforcing of COVID regulations in Madari which doesn't make sense at all but it's part of a continuous process of surveilling of killing of extorting of separating and of seeking to contain problematic populations who were only problematic become problematic in this colonial period so I'll just read a brief news report from then early in the COVID-19 prompted long down in March 2020 the police killed a 13 year old boy in Madari Yasin Moyo who was on his balcony 20 minutes after the 7 p.m. curfew began over the next few months more would be killed as part of the enforcement of coronavirus measures in this poor area and across the country highlighting the extreme nature of containment measures so while in other more prosperous sections of Nairobi the price for non-adherence the rules could be a bribe or less here as in other poor settlements the overzealous and violent policing of the lockdown curfew initially from 7 p.m. to 5 p.m. led many to declare that they have killed us more than corona so the reason obviously Yasin Moyo is brought here to be memorialized here's a picture that we had recently commemorating his really his awful death but the curfew is brought also because it emerges from provisions of the public order ordinance that dates from the British colonial administration of Kenya in fact not even the time has changed when the British had the curfew it was during the Maomao period or when they were fighting the Maomao or the Kenya Freedom Fighters the curfew was the same 7 p.m. to 5 p.m. and so this reinstanciation of the curfew we can see emerges from has this colonial this new report although while the government we say that the enforcement of these regulations or the enforcement of how this enforcement of COVID regulations is neutral we can see it's not neutral and it's implemented more forcefully in geographies like Madari here not where I live at all and this then echoes the policing of the native city even if Africans were not really allowed to live in the city there was the native city it highlights the kind of casserole objects that still that still inform governance of the city and for me the police are in many cases in the police are the number one face of the state there's no water and no public services and I sorry I need to make some space for any so just in brief I just wanted to talk about other measures and this is a picture of a raid a recent raid that was conducted again in mother in a picture I took you can see police trucks and police van and other ways that geographies like my area are you can see how casserole objects are still in place this heavy surveillance this this poor community that's only three square kilometers in size and has 206,000 people is governed is surrounded by folk police stations and a military air base between April 2019 to June 2021 we documented 99 people killed by the police and those that's a body count of bodies that was seen I also need to remember that there are many bodies that are just disappeared they're still continuous raids and formal curfew like we had during COVID but the informal curfew and viewers and is still really young men don't want to leave the house after seven there's still lots of extortion there's still lots of searches so these are these are ways that the casserole objects aren't playing and that's why I say that in some ways in many ways and in reference to what Dylan is saying unfortunately Kenyans have normalized this and for it's become just a normalized way to govern poor people but there are many groups and this is important to highlight I think part of why we're meeting we're trying to do something about it for example the social justice centers working group about 49 community-based organizations or social justice organizations distinct from NGOs and they make that distinction very explicit that come together to document human rights violations but also to organize to end them and just by way of introducing Annie in our work we talk about how supporting BEMBE he says the punitive was a founding ethos of colonial sovereignty where in the lack of justice of the means and the lack of legitimacy of the ends conspired to allow an arbitrariness and in an intrinsic and conditionality that may be said to have been the distinctive feature of colonial sovereignty certainly and as we've tried to put forward the post-colonial Kenyan state has really created this and conditionality and the regime of impunity that was the color color I can say that English word colorally of the of yeah the colonial regime and so now I will let that's just a small introduction to Annie I will let you go ahead and I know you do you want me to leave the pictures on yes I'll tell you when to change them so okay and thank you both for all of you for enduring my my dinosaur technology techniques one second Annie let me just get back okay I'll just do very brief this is an image actually taken from the internet but it's during the Mao Mao and I think it's probably from Operation Anvil that cleared Nairobi which includes Matare of its men of it of its Kenyan men and I'll talk a little bit more about that in a minute but following on from what Wangui's talked about in underpinning the logic of settler colonialism the car through all that I understand is the punitive term this is about punishment defines and determines criminality and in that in defining and determining criminality it authorizes spatial temporal and material modes of punishment including framing resistance to occupation to this possession to capitalist extractive land use as criminality as subversion as lawlessness as disorder and as disloyalty and although we're now talking about Kenya I also make specific reference to the ongoing nature of that punitive mode across Palestine and particularly with reference to the siege of Gaza but not only it's a whole of historic Palestine resistance is punished as we know so so the colonial arbitrariness as Wangui's myth mentioned discussed as legality entrenched privileges and rights while simultaneously delegitimizing repressing and extinguishing the aspirations of Africans and in the sort of class hierarchies in Nairobi we can see this operating so the aspirations of Matari residents are defined as not legal essentially in the 1950s the British administration through a military cordon through Operation Anvil surrounding East Nairobi arresting all those considered to be and I think this language is interesting in your records lawless, ruthless and shiftless persons that were sent for interrogation and incarceration and the operation also aimed to ensure that other tribes and I'm using that word from the archives would not be contaminated by the Malmau ethos colonial modes of punishment through what Stuart Hall framed as the discursive regime of race endure and come together with a further two imperatives I'll just make a comment on this image this is during the emergency these women are being sent, this is Nairobi it's actually Prumwani and Prumwani was a community hall during the emergency it was turned into a police station which was called the Poceres as a police station effectively policing Matari that's kind of like a material link if you like so the colonial modes of punishment through what through the discursive regime of race endure and they come together with a further two imperatives have set the colonialism and the other is of the states both of which have an obsession with control. The state's self-preserving force suggests Sylvia de Feverre manifests in structures of containment and that caused injury and harm in lots of ways which could be expected, could be argued as in fact the intention. So I'm just going to finish because I know we have a lot of time with five interconnecting structures and this is again an archive image from the period of the emergency of Marmel or shall I say the Kenya Kenya land and freedom are uprising. We developed five interconnecting structures that assemble and reassemble carceral modes of containment, control and punishment and I'm only going to mention very briefly what the first one is the eliminatory logic inherent to the structure of settler colonialism. The second is the institution structures and systems that combine to make up violence. The third is the structure of racism that together with the structure of colonial corporeality defines and determines the body corporeality and social political location of the colonized we would now say and of the marginalized and the fifth is the structure of capitalism that engenders the continuities and discontinuities of the economies of an extraction production and labor and our argument is that those five structures are intertwined so racism, the extractive industries, institutions of violence, settler colonialism inform and shape each other. I'm going to stop there because I know our time is short. Okay. Thank you both very much indeed. Can I ask for questions? In terms of the time available, yeah I think we can have questions to Annie and one guy first and then we can open it up to everybody. Any questions? Well I've got a question. I've got a question about the I hadn't seen this idea of everyday carcerality that was new to me and I thought phenomenally interesting because it makes me think of lots of in a global north sense lots of what we would call downtown in the American consciousness or inner city in the European consciousness areas of town. So I wanted you to deepen that and to perhaps say when you think historically that started within the Kenyan content. It also makes you think of shantytowns and ghettos so it's quite a big idea. So I wondered if you might deepen that idea because it's really really good. I can see that Bella has her hands up. Yeah I was just going to say thank you for your lecture. It was very interesting. I grew up in Kenya as well but obviously middle upper class as well and so one thing that I knew like I'm very aware of especially around settler colonialism is also just private properties and how those are very like almost you know like you know fenced off and I was just wondering if you could if you have any links to what you're talking about everyday carcerality and you know the racial carceral regimes and a link to the fact of these like fenced off private properties that you know are all over let's say Nairobi. Thank you Bella. Caroline I should say that Caroline's been assisting with this project at CERC. I'm very grateful Caroline. Caroline. Thank you. I've found that Amy's discussion about structure really interesting. I'm studying the experiences of black women in prison in the UK and having lived in the Caribbean so I spent most of my early years in Jamaica and I also worked as a lawyer. I worked in the courts in Jamaica and I saw the representatives of you know men being in chains their feet chained and the links back to slavery. However I've noticed that when I was in the Caribbean race didn't figure very highly on my thoughts of structure it was about poverty it was about colonialism. Now that I'm in the UK and I've lived here for the last 20 years race is very very high on my agenda of structure. Would anyone have any thoughts or reflections on that in terms of if there's anyone of the panel who made any comparisons between north and south just for simplification purposes or from you know what happens in the front of a better word in the developing world and you know any reflections on race and comparisons. Thank you. Well well Annie will come back to that but we'll also open that up so we hold that thought that Caroline has had and why the group. Any other questions observations specifically Wangu and Annie? Okay then we'll come back. Okay Annie why don't you go ahead because I started so feel free. The question of the every day I mean I think this is why for me cultural geography is such an interesting framework to work with it because yes it is about prisons and imprisonment but actually it's about it's about the cultural space and the cultural space shapes privilege it shapes vulnerability it shapes access to resources and it is racially determined and I think that you know like if I was to talk about Palestine there's not a Palestinian family who hasn't had someone in prison for some period of time over the last 100 years. If we talk about Kenya and we talk about Matare there is no family who hasn't had a confrontation with police or has had a son that's been shot in the in the alleys by police so the every it's past reality is a geography it's a geography that determines access and life and capacity to live and it's linked into the prison system but it isn't only about the prison it isn't only about the cell it's actually about the links and in terms of coloniality that link between surveillance arrest interrogation detention was a core component of colonial administration and people you know Kenyans went from well they didn't leave the detention camps till the 60s but you know they would like the women would go from Pumwani back to the reserves they would be I'll keep this brief okay so that that that's that's that's the nature of cultural geography as an everyday space and it's it's the hierarchies and it's the in and out nature of policing that also determines where you're located how you're located how precarious your life is and whether your life is recognized as livable I'm going to borrow from you the ballot for a minute is your life worth does your life have worth are you recognized are you seen if you're not you're you're in precarity you're vulnerable you're in a carousel state and just to thank so much Annie and just to add to that you know everyday casserality is takes place in so many ways and I use it because for me it before people get to the prison there's so many ways in which their life people have sought to contain their lives surveil their lives and just as a as a brief example today I was in a room with 30 people men women kids boranah muslim ethnic Somali all kinds who who live in madari and they were there because we are trying to write a report another one but a participatory one on on the work that this group called the mothers of victims and survivors network so a network of people who's family members have been killed by the police or who've been beaten are trying to deal with this everyday casserality which is a continuum from materially from you being denied an identity document and if you don't have an identity document then it's you being stopped all the time surveilled all the time materially also in terms of policing but also immaterially in the fear that's instilled in them that you should not you're not allowed you don't have value you your life is at risk if you question the police your life is at risk if you question these things so there's both material and immaterial ways through which casserality is is reproduced in in particular spaces like annie was saying and in terms of race it's really there's really a very direct link between madari which was always the in areas like the ungovernable space or the ungovernable africans these are not the africans that that would be recruited to fight in the second world war or recruited as part of the native arm of the civil service this was always the ungovernable africans and in how that space has been neglected in terms of basic services but also how the narrative is produced about it uh endure we can see a direct link to colonialism but also the racialization and even now racialization is is part of that that's the african space it's not a space where you would find south asian descendants it's not a place where you would find white kens at all and so that racialization still takes place and even while it's denied by all of this like uh declaration that we're in a postcolonial state madari residents are fourth generation people who've lived there who were this who moved there because they were dislocated from their farms who are displaced from their farms or who didn't have a place to go after they were detained by the colonial government so in many ways there are very many links to racism and i feel sometimes we we don't highlight that enough in postcolonial studies of of africa in terms of property i would say and i hope i understood your question uh well bella but there's definitely a um to reproduce privilege or to reproduce walls you need to you inevitably unfortunately reproduce fear of people coming for our stuff and so and i think there's a lot of um there's so many most of where i live is is walls most people have walls there's always this fear of the and dylan was talking about this other this other person who's going to come and take this and equally as in gayana it's us now in this context in supposedly six years after independence who are reproducing the very same narratives or recreating these others that need to live in specific geographies or need to be contained in in prison so i hope that in some ways that has responded to your question thank you so much um you'll forgive me but i have to move on to another meeting such as the nature of my day job this has been absolutely fantastic really so wonderful such a rich rich conversation i'm terribly excited now that sas have asked me to do this i'm bringing all these amazing people together so we could change the world for at least our small space of it but i'm going to hand over um to olly the rose um just to curate um questions perhaps to the to the entirety of the panel that we've had um uh and to draw this um to an end i know ladine had a question from earlier i hope that you might come back i don't know scott newton is with us but scott might want to come in just before we close um as well very very grateful indeed thank you so much um and to all of you for your contributions and i'm sort of in touch with you separately and together thank you so much thank you olly yeah thanks david um i'd just like to echo his thanks before i open up to the floor that was uh awesome thanks so much for your contributions um a really really broad range um of themes and topics there and already i think we've seen how there are lots of debates within these topics um that we can uncover um i don't know if annie you had your you have your hand up yeah i did want to take some on space i actually wanted to ask um stellar we've been talking about the everyday of culturality what would your experience of how would you understand that given your experience right so um i i appreciate the question i also appreciate the the the jogging of my mind to to consider um everyday culturality outside the confines of the bars of prison and detention i i think the the fast immediate response for me was ah lockdown when the whole world was locked down and we were all forced to be in a huge jail and everything you talked about surveillance um curfew raids etc was well not raids or raids on the supermarkets maybe but but the disparities between those who have and those who don't access to vaccines and those who can get gas cylinders and those who die without gas was happening more than every day the the prisons of madari the prisons enforced by poverty i think for me raise immediate issues around criminalization of poverty so in you in prison when i was in prison i was shocked at how many poor women were dragged in every day simply because they were poor trying to make a living and so when they get out of the shanty towns and go to the streets of the clean the the gentrified cities and spaces in Uganda we have anti vagrancy laws so so vagabonds and public nuisances and people who are in the wrong places putting dirt where cleanness has been constructed are cleared up routinely and um if one as as as one we clearly said if one cannot afford either the bribe um for for the for the for the city authorities who are taking them away one has to face immediate take taken of plea at the city court immediate that day of of cleaning the city and many times these poor people don't know the language of court they're so poor the status doesn't even entail uh opening one's mouth and immediately they're shipped off so so so so it's kind of double casserality this word casserality i like how Wangui said we don't use casserality often in Uganda either we use prison and detention and punishment but the idea of assemblages what you say an assemblage of harm and punishment and i was writing down an injury beautiful you know big english words um i understood the the the the the giving of a name to what we live with every day and and and i see what you're saying but i think for me this duality between the everyday madari and then people are shipped off and taken into detention facilities where to be poor one does 60 days and so we returnly had vendors of food carrying food on their heads or whatever wears boys begging with begging bowls and tins um and young women as well coming into prisons and so it it's it's ongoing i think Kenya very much um is a replica of Uganda in that case it's a brilliant brilliant ways of thinking around casserality yes thanks i just wanted to to build on the conversation my my colleagues are having because in the Caribbean everything that you spoke about is what we see in Trinidad what we see in Guyana what we see in Jamaica these are similar processes and and and and when you're speaking i was i felt very much you were speaking to the experiences that i've seen and spoken to many people and this everyday casserality um is something that that we we mobilise a lot using this um what i think was it was one of our colleagues in the audience said about gated communities in this sort of division of life and and i felt that the the the way you spoke about COVID too in Trinidad and elsewhere it's like in Jamaica we sometimes have lockdown because of crime right because the whole society goes into curfew because of of of they want to lock down on the criminality element so that this constant kind of feeling of you never know when that might happen um and and just conceptually so we sometimes now in criminology talk about carceral masculinities as a way to think about how casserality impacts gender in a sort of male context outside how it comes back into the prison in this relationship between the inside and the outside of the prison that there isn't really yeah there's these walls but there's this constant movement from the inside and the outside of the prison and when you're thinking about casserality i've just thought this is me personally but conceptually to to mobilise other other metaphors that are quite helpful to me like this idea of what masculinity on the outside of a prison then becomes on the inside of a prison and then how that feeds back into what masculinity it's the same thing i think sometimes with casserality is becoming this geographical thing that annie was talking about where certain pockets um like winter talks about these poverty archipelagos that really like play a major role in the actual bodies that kind of feed into this circularity um and obviously i'm plugging in lots of conceptual things here but there's a lot of conceptual ways that people try to talk about these things and i think it's quite interesting to listen to you speak about uganda you speak about kenya i speak about gyan we're speaking about the same things but using slightly different terminology so is there more merit that we all have to kind of move towards speaking a more i don't know the same language in a sense because we're talking about the same things but we're building from the bottom up in each of our kind of geographical locations and does that does that create problems of intelligibility between these ideas or is that not a dilemma i don't know it was a question that sort of was nagging at me slightly that do we need more of these moments where we connect to say look these are the same things happening here not that we don't know that already but it was so visceral today i mean if i can just uh so thank you all and i really am grateful for the learning today and if i can just briefly respond to that partially why i i like casserality is because um there's some things that uh partially why i like casserality is because it allows us to to think that this is not you know everyone is always like africans are always killing themselves endangering themselves all of these things these are just african pathologies but they're not they are part of a of a continuous imperial process and i i really appreciate casserality or or sometimes common vernacular because it allows us to see these these similar logics and similar structurings whereas if we just think of like singularities we'll say oh this is these are just how africans live and i i really uh obviously we should problematize that but i'm very grateful for a vernacular that's expansive enough to allow us to see these different connections perfect thanks so much um just on that last point to wrap up um we have a conference in september on the 78th of september um and the deadline to the call for papers is meant to be on monday because we're trying to do a tight turn around however i'd really encourage um any participants in the in the in the chat to really um reach out and submit and obviously that's a tight deadline so if you want to just email me i'm going to post the link online there and that's my email we can definitely sort out um an extension to the deadline because i um i know this is like a fast-moving project um because hopefully what this conference will do um effectively is draw on these concepts of casserality because this workshop the tide school was actually a point of debate uh amongst ourselves um you know incarceration in the global south first of all incarceration uh is that too narrow a concept um and also global south what does that mean and what are the you know political um meanings of that term and so that's why this is just like a starting point and i'm so grateful for uh the speakers that for doing this because it's introducing these concepts but with a willingness to try scrutinize and to open up the terms that we're relying on um as did instead of trying to draw comparisons between uh different countries um so that's where the next workshop actually which they're trying to organize is on bordering and detention and deportation because this is also a form of casserality that often gets ignored by the prison-centric discussion um and yeah the conference hopefully will bring all these ideas together um a really broad range of activists, research and academics um so we can all discuss these here i'm going to stay on the um on this chat just if anybody has any questions about the conference um but for now i just want to thank um all of our speakers uh Dr. Stella Nyanze, Dr. Wangyukamari, Dr. Annie Finks and Dr. Dina Kerrigan it's really really um a lot of pleasure uh for you to be here so it's thank you so much um really really grateful um and yeah keep in touch so you can see how this project um keeps going i'm going to stay on the line um so if anyone has any questions but yeah thanks again really grateful thank you can only can i just pop in yeah um everyone uh i can't thank you enough this has been a uh absolutely transformative couple of hours here i i i want you all to know that when Ollie David and i sat down together i think it was almost a year ago uh to plan this project we were all seized with with enthusiasm at the prospect uh and now a year on i mean i have to tell you i i feel a mixture of pride and humility um pride at at at having assembled such an extraordinary tour de force um of speakers and topics today and humility in their presence you know the prisons are and carceral spaces are terribly confined and close but i i have an extraordinary sense of expansion today both experiential and and conceptual expansion and that's all down to you so i really think we're on the verge of of mapping out an entirely new developing research agenda um and we've had uh just an amazing riveting transformative as i said set of presentations and also i i think um a wonderful display of the appropriate mode of analysis here i mean i think that that that uh we've had a combination of analysis of testimony of poetry um which i think is is is is a high bar for the rest of this project i mean i i wish that every time we gather um we will be able to operate in in just this kind of multi-dimensional mode so i want to thank our brilliant panelists uh i want to thank ali i want to valley i want to thank uh david in his absence and i want to thank anyone who who took the time and trouble to attend today and to contribute and and participate so i i look very much look forward to the next one and i will see you all then thank you