COLONIZE AND PUNISH

Prisons were among the first buildings the British built wherever they colonized. Arriving in Kenya in 1895, within 16 years they had built 30 prisons, with on any given day over 1,500 inmates. Over the next two decades, the numbers of both prisons and people inside them would more than double. By the dawn of the Second World War, Kenya was incarcerating a far greater proportion of its population than British colonies elsewhere in East and Central Africa.

Colonial prisons were, and to a large extent remain, places of brutality, social exclusion and abandonment. Kenyan prisons today carry the DNA of their forebears. They brutalize people into submission and, along with the police and military, aim to scare the rest of society into compliance with the state.

The incorporation of prisons and detention camps into the ‘Pipeline’ (the system developed by the colonial state to deal with anti-colonial insurgents) inevitably led to the