How “Post” was Post-Colonial Policing in Independent Tanzania?

• In Event: Colonial Legacies in Africa

Abstract

This paper examines the colonial legacy of policing, and particularly the policing of gender and sexuality, to offer new insights to the question, how “post” is “post-colonialism?” To evaluate how colonial policing shaped the policing of gender and sexuality following formal British rule in then-Tanganyika, I build upon scholarship on persistent colonial legacies, critical criminology, and gender and sexuality politics. I use archival data and discourse analysis to uncover the contested investment in policing institutions and ideas during the critical juncture of independence. Achieving Tanzanian independence did not happen as a single event but was continually negotiated and bureaucratically constituted. The colonial police and surveillance system and constructions of nonnormative criminality were key battlegrounds in the independent nation-building project. This paper sheds light on how the policing of gender and sexuality was institutionalized and contested over major power transitions. Because the police system and formulations of who was a criminal and what was a crime were primary technologies of control, they therefore should be central to understanding the continued work of decolonization and liberation.

Author

• Kaden Paulson-Smith, University of Wisconsin-Green Bay