The architecture of colonial imprisonment: The afterlives of colonial incarceration in Africa – a talk by Laura Routley

Building Africa is delighted to announce the fifth of its speaker events, ‘The architecture of colonial imprisonment: The afterlives of colonial incarceration in Africa’ – to be given by Laura Routley.

17.00-18.30, Thursday 29 February

Brunei Gallery, SOAS, 10 Thornhaugh Street, London WC1H 0XG

The event is free and open to everyone.

To register for this event here. 

For details of the rest of the programme, visit our website.

The Building Africa Exhibition runs to 16 March 2024 at the Brunei Gallery at SOAS. It is open until 20.00 on Thursdays.

The architecture of colonial imprisonment: The afterlives of colonial incarceration in Africa 

The history of incarceration in Africa stretches from the slave trade to the current day.  Prisons were often some of the first buildings built by colonial powers in Africa.  Numerous colonial incarceration practices across time and space resulted in the erection of varied architectures of incarceration slave forts to detention camps.  This talk explores how some of these sites are currently used and remembered in Ghana, Kenya and South Africa.  It explores how the architecture of these sites, their positioning within a broader landscape, and their contemporary usage, shapes the ways in which they are understood by the communities that surround them, and engage with or avoid them.

Dr Laura Routley is a Reader in African Politics at Newcastle University.  She is also the Principal Investigator on the Leverhulme funded research project – Afterlives of colonial incarceration: Africa, Prisons, Politics and Architecture, which explores the memory politics of former sites of colonial imprisonment across Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, and South Africa.