Imprisonment and confinement have often accompanied racial and colonial oppression. Across Africa slavery, colonialism and apartheid relied on incarceration, imprisonment and restriction. But what happened to sites of colonial and apartheid incarceration?

• What do their Afterlives look like?
• How are the histories of incarceration at these places remembered?
• Does this history of incarceration matter today?

Imprisonment and confinement have gone hand in hand with colonisation and racial exploitation. Slaves were shackled and confined. Even prior to the advent of full colonial political control debtors and others who disturbed the smooth running of trade were imprisoned by European traders. Once colonialism took hold incarceration was seen as a priority for colonial rulers, and prisons were often the first buildings they erected. Later, imprisonment was a key tool of dealing with resistance to both colonial and apartheid rule.

By exploring these patterns not in one country context by comparatively, across Ghana, Kenya and South Africa, this exhibition highlights how imprisonment and restriction are tactics used repeatedly as a key form of oppression and control. They are practices which resonate across the continent.

The afterlives of sites of incarceration are often contested as they resonate with struggles over identity and getting to grips with difficult histories and what they mean in the present. These sites of incarceration, the structures and spaces built to intimidate, isolate, restrict, punish, and exploit, persist even when kinds of rule change. Some, such as the Old Fort Complex, are reimagined and reborn as Constitution Hill as sites of memory and conscience. But other such as Johannesburg Central Police Station undergo a change of name but undergo no change of purpose. Whilst incarceration is heavily entangled with colonial forms of rule. Imprisonment and carceral practices did not stop after these struggles against colonialism and apartheid were over. How should we think about contemporary practices of imprisonment in relation to these histories?