Imperial Incarceration: Detention without Trial in the Making of British Colonial Africa by Michael Lobban

Abstract

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a British imperial agent with ambitions of conquest, must be in need of a law. Jane Austen’s version has potential wives calculating their attachments with remarkable ingenuity, but they have nothing over the legal acrobatics conducted in the colonies. Lobban’s Imperial Incarceration provides an exhaustive account of the different methods of sanitizing the detainment and deportation of African leaders who threatened British conquest during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.Court records overflow with public statements regarding the clear inferiority of the subjects to be pacified, so it is difficult to comprehend why there was such a strong impulse to shine up imperial conquest in the armor of legality. Freudian analysis would suggest a need for collective delusion and/or denial about the sheer amount of suffering and violence involved in spreading British dominion around the world. Or it could be understood as a massive public relations campaign of “lawwashing,” akin to the “greenwashing” of today.In this comprehensive volume, which will serve scholars of colonial legalities for years to come, Lobban has meticulously pieced together archival evidence from the Foreign Office, the Privy Council, and the Colonial Office (among other sources) that displays British attempts to couch the neutralization of indigenous leaders within the terms of “the rule of law.” He recounts the evolving efforts to present the British Empire as beholden to the rule of law even as the records show that so-called courts met without judges, lawyers, or jurisdictional authority.Lobban uses Dicey’s complex notions of the rule of law to establish the presumed—or advertised—principles guiding the actions of the judiciary, the Colonial Office, the Foreign Office, and colonial administrators on the ground. Dicey assigned a crucial role to the public as a safety net, which was to insist upon a common sense of justice when institutions faltered. To balance Dicey’s vision, Lobban also uses the Comaroff’s notion of “lawfare,” that is, law as a tool of conquest and violence in itself.1The book contains rich accounts of the nearly farcical lengths taken to uphold the image of proper procedure and legal authority. An example is seen in the description of a British agent who was sent to Sierra Leone to review the confinement of seven different local leaders to ensure that their sentencing was proper. However, the recommendations for release or continued confinement were based upon his best estimate of how damaging or beneficial each leader might be to British ambitions in the area as opposed to the rectitude of the proceedings.I kept wanting to know what those subjected to these legalities thought of them. Lobban’s account shows the mutual incomprehensibility that these proceedings must have caused. In one example, the court records did not contain any account of the self-defense offered in a case on the Niger Delta, offering only this assessment: “I found it quite impossible to take minutes as is usual at a Court of Inquiry, the vernacular of the natives being so peculiar” (211). I would have loved to hear the natives’ account of the different versions of the Foreign Jurisdiction Act; what peculiar vernacular it was! Alas, these judgments are lost from the archival evidence.I also wanted to hear more about Lobban’s aims in making this remarkable archival excavation. In his conclusion he asks, “Why did an imperial power committed to bringing the rule of law to its wider empire resort to detention without trial so frequently?” (419) He parses through the different situations and unclear jurisdictional authority to find the answers. Another question might be, “Why did they feel the need to pass ad hominem laws to legalize the detention of African leaders?”Lobban gives pride of place to the archives themselves, often letting the records and actors therein speak for themselves. The book is organized both geographically and historically, so it is clear how the different edges of the Empire were wrestled into submission at different junctures in distinct ways. Lobban does not try to assert a grand theory from all of these details, but registers the subtle changes of legality that came with shifts in administrators, the time period, and the local political and social contexts.Surprisingly, even after the thick accounting of “lawfare” in the conquest of Africa throughout the book, Dicey’s version of the rule of law appears triumphant. Cases that grabbed headlines back in London usually received a different treatment than those that did not. The public does indeed matter as the last resort in upholding the rule of law—but only the British public.