Executions and State Power during the Colonial Period

Abstract

European colonialism brought new conceptions of criminal justice to the African continent, one in which the colonial state was at the center, serving as investigator, trier, and executioner. Capital punishment served as a tool of social control and deterrence, especially in the starkest display of the power of the colonial state, the public execution, which survived in the colonies long after its abolition in Europe. The death penalty could also be used as an instrument of political oppression against African nationalists, especially in French Algeria, British Kenya, and the white settler-dominated states of South Africa and Rhodesia. Portuguese Africa, where the death penalty did not exist, was the exception.