Law, Violence and Penal Reform: State Responses to Crime and Disorder in Colonial Malawi, c.1900–1959

Abstract

The historical analysis of state punishment in colonial Africa has been dominated by studies of individual arenas and practices of judicial authority: prisons, detention, flogging, and the death penalty. This article on Malawi adopts a more holistic approach, focusing on ‘penality’ – the broader nexus of criminal justice infrastructure and discourses – rather than ‘punishment’, to explore the shifts and tensions within colonial judicial and penal policy. Drawing on sociological theories of punishment from Durkheim to Foucault, the development and functioning of such penality is analysed, beginning with a study of state concerns about African criminality, colonial courts and justice, before moving to an analysis of the forms and functions of state punishments. The article then explores state responses to large-scale disorder and rebellion in 1915 and 1959, and highlights how the experiences of colonial justice shaped Malawi's struggle towards independence.

Notes

¹ C. Clifton Roberts, Tangled Justice: Some Reasons for a Policy of Change in Africa (London, Macmillan, 1937), p. 93.

^*The author wishes to thank John McCracken and the anonymous peer reviewers for their helpful and perceptive comments on earlier drafts of this article.

² See, for example, D.M. Anderson, Histories of the Hanged: Britain's Dirty War in Kenya and the End of Empire (London, Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 2005); C. Elkins, Britain's Gulag: The Brutal End of Empire in Kenya (London, Pimlico, 2005).

³ M. Chanock, Law, Custom and Social Order: The Colonial Experience in Malawi and Zambia (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1985); J. McCracken, ‘Authority and Legitimacy in Malawi: Policing and Politics in a Colonial State’, in D.M. Anderson and D. Killingray (eds), Policing and Decolonisation: Nationalism, Politics and the Police, 1917–65 (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1992), p. 159. For a general survey, see D. Killingray, ‘The Maintenance of Law and Order in British Colonial Africa’, African Affairs, 85 (1986), pp. 411–37.

⁴ É. Durkheim, ‘Two Laws of Penal Evolution’, Année sociologique, 4 (1901), pp. 65–95.

⁵ See G. Rusche and O. Kirchheimer, Punishment and Social Structure (New York, Columbia University Press, 1939).

⁶ M. Foucault, Surveiller et punir: naissance de la prison (Paris, Gallimard, 1975); N. Elias, The Civilizing Process: The History of Manners and State Formation and Transformation, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Oxford, Blackwell, 1994).

⁷ D. Garland, Punishment in Modern Society: A Study in Social Theory (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1990), p. 17.

⁸ Whilst ‘penality’ refers to the nexus of criminal justice infrastructure and discourses, the term ‘coercive networks’ is deployed to include the wider, often non-state and extra-judicial, networks of power that allowed colonialism to function. See T. Sherman, ‘Tensions of Colonial Punishment: Perspectives on Recent Developments in the Study of Coercive Networks in Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean’, History Compass, 7 (2009), pp. 659–77.

⁹ See Penal Code (Laws of Nyasaland) 1929, s. 25. Other, rarely deployed, sanctions were being bound over, police supervision, and forfeiture.

¹⁰ H. Johnston, British Central Africa (London, Methuen, 1897); Great Britain, Papers Relative to the Suppression of Slave-Raiding in Nyasaland (1892), Cmd. 6699.

¹¹ R. Oliver, Sir Harry Johnston and the Scramble for Africa (London, Chatto and Windus, 1959); A.J. Hanna, The Beginnings of Nyasaland and North-Eastern Rhodesia 1859–1959 (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1956), pp. 173–265; F. Lugard, The Rise of Our East African Empire: Early Efforts in Nyasaland and Uganda (Edinburgh, Blackwood, 1893), pp. 51–917.

¹² McCracken, ‘Authority and Legitimacy’, p. 166.

¹³ See J.-G. Deutsch, ‘Celebrating Power in Everyday Life: The Administration of the Law and the Public Sphere in Colonial Tanzania, 1890–1914’, Journal of African Cultural Studies, 15 (2002), pp. 93–103.

¹⁴ J. McCracken, ‘Coercion and Control in Nyasaland: Aspects in the History of a Colonial Police Force’, Journal of African History, 27 (1986), pp. 127–47; H. Duff, African Small Chop (London, Hodder and Stoughton, 1932), p. 340.

¹⁵ Native Courts' jurisdiction was extended in 1949 to allow sentences of two years incarceration in response to the sharp increase in praedial larceny during that year's famine. Nyasaland Protectorate, Annual Report of the Department of Native Affairs during the Year 1949 (Zomba, 1950) [hereafter Native Affairs Report, 1949]. See M. Vaughan, The Story of an African Famine: Gender and Famine in Twentieth-Century Malawi (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1987).

¹⁶ Malawian National Archives [hereafter MNA], Zomba, S2/10/20 Sir George Smith to Secretary of State for the Colonies, 24 January 1921; MNA, S1/152/19, Minute by Hector Budd, 12 May 1919; McCracken, ‘Coercion and Control’.

¹⁷ Rhodes House Library [hereafter RHL], Oxford, MSS.Afr.s.2475, Magistrate's Court Case Book, Lilongwe 1914–16.

¹⁸ Native Affairs Report, 1926, Northern Province.

¹⁹ McCracken, ‘Coercion and Control’, p. 127.

²⁰ S. Hynd, ‘“The Extreme Penalty of the Law”: Mercy and the Death Penalty as Aspects of State Power in Colonial Nyasaland, c.1903–47’, Journal of Eastern African Studies, 4 (2010), pp. 541–58.

²¹ RHL, MSS.Brit.Emp.s.347, Belcher, ‘Reminiscences’, p. 93.

²² S. Hynd, ‘Fatal Families: Narratives of Spousal Killing and Domestic Violence in Murder Trials in Kenya and Nyasaland, c.1920–57’, in R. Roberts, E. Burrill and E. Thornberry (eds), Domestic Violence in Africa: Historical and Contemporary Perspective (Athens, Ohio University Press, 2010), pp. 159–78.

²³ Nyasaland Protectorate, Annual Report of the Judicial Department During the Year 1953 (Zomba, 1954) [hereafter Judicial Report, 1953]; MNA, POL 5/2/2, Blantyre Monthly Police Reports, September 1944, May–June 1946, cited in McCracken, ‘Coercion and Control’.

²⁴ RHL, MSS. Brit.Emp.s.356, Sir Charles Ross, ‘Reminiscences’, p. 74; Native Affairs Report 1935, 1937; H.D. Ng'wane ‘Economics of Kacasu Distilling and Brewing of African Beers in a Blantyre-Limbe Village’, in R.J. Apthorpe (ed.), Present Interrelations in Central African Rural and Urban Life (Lusaka, Rhodes-Livingstone Institute, 1958), pp. 133–48.

²⁵ MNA, 4-4-8R 2952, Procedures to be Followed in Nyasaland, 1924–1959.

²⁶ Chanock, Law, Custom and Social Order.

²⁷ J.L. Comaroff, ‘Governmentality, Materiality, Legality, Modernity: On the Colonial State’, in J.-G. Deutsch, P. Probst and H. Schmidt (eds), African Modernities: Entangled Meanings in Current Debate (Oxford, James Currey, 2002), pp. 107–34; RHL, MSS.Brit.Emp.s.347, Belcher, ‘Reminiscences’, p. 252; MNA, S 1/384/26, R v Njali alias Ntokoma and Aiba, Liwonde.

²⁸ Duff, African Small Chop, p. 334.

²⁹ RHL, MSS.Brit.Emp.s.347, Belcher, ‘Reminiscences’, p. 212.

³⁰ D. Roberts, I'll Do Better Next Time (Chichester, Barry Rose, 1995), p. 47.

³¹ M. Chanock, ‘The Law Market: The Legal Encounter in British East and Central Africa’, in W.G. Mommsen and J.A. de Moor (eds), European Expansion and Law: The Encounter of European and Indigenous Law in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Africa and Asia (Oxford, Berg, 1992), pp. 279–305; L.A. Benton, Law and Colonial Cultures: Legal Regimes in World History (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2002).

³² Chanock, Law, Custom and Social Order, pp. 125–6.

³³ Duff, African Small Chop, p. 335 and Nyasaland under the Foreign Office (London, G. Bell, 1903), pp. 239, 317.

³⁴ See Chanock, Law, Custom and Social Order.

³⁵ C.J.W. Fleming, ‘Crime and Punishment in Northern Malawi’, Society of Malawi Journal, 30 (1977), pp. 7–9. Colonial ethnographic accounts are problematic in their limited understandings of local vernaculars and penal practices. There is a general need for more historical research into pre-colonial justice and punishment.

³⁶ L.J. Chimango, ‘Traditional Criminal Law in Malawi’, Society of Malawi Journal, 28 (1975), pp. 25–39.

³⁷ W.H.J. Rangley, ‘Notes on Cewa Tribal Law’, The Nyasaland Journal, 3 (1948), pp. 5–10; Duff, African Small Chop, pp. 334, 340.

³⁸ See Durkheim, ‘Two Laws of Penal Evolution’.

³⁹ Chanock, Law, Custom and Social Order, p. 125.

⁴⁰ D.R. Mackenzie, The Spirit-Ridden Konde (London, Seeley, Service and Co., 1925), p. 83.

⁴¹ MNA, S1 Confidential Reports on the Prerogative of Mercy, R. v Jason & Wiskot CC58/47.

⁴² Chanock, Law, Custom and Social Order, p. 129. On the impact of Christianity more widely see J. McCracken, Politics and Christianity in Malawi, 1875–1940 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1977).

⁴³ G.W. Mwase, Strike a Blow and Die: A Narrative of Race Relations in Colonial Nyasaland, R. Rotberg (ed.), (Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1967), p. 114.

⁴⁴ Chanock, Law, Custom and Social Order, pp. 145–216. However, unlike Native Authorities elsewhere, Nyasaland's chiefs were appointed against a background of economic crisis during the Great Depression and the lack of the basic tools of coercion – tribal policemen and tax-collectors – weakened their authority.

⁴⁵ Native Courts Ordinance, No. 13 of 1933. African Urban Courts were only introduced in 1951 for Zomba and Blantyre. See M. Hailey, An African Survey: A Study of Problems Arising in Africa South of the Sahara, revised 1956 (London, Oxford University Press, 1957) for a comparative perspective on Native Courts.

⁴⁶ F. Bernault, ‘The Shadow of Rule: Colonial Power and Modern Punishment in Africa’, in F. Dikötter and I. Brown (eds), Cultures of Confinement: A History of the Prison in Africa, Asia and Latin America (London, Hurst and Co., 2007), p. 77.

⁴⁷ Native Affairs Report, 1934, Northern Province.

⁴⁸ Native Affairs Report, 1934, Northern Province, 1935, Southern Province.

⁴⁹ Between 1949 and 1952 an average of £6,732 was raised in the subordinate courts. See Judicial Report, 1952, Table X.

⁵⁰ Native Affairs Report, 1938; Penal Code (Laws of Nyasaland) 1929, s.27, 29.

⁵¹ Direct compensation was only allowed under s.31 of the Penal Code, for physical injury. See R. v. Tadeo 1923–60 ALR Mal., 837.

⁵² See F. Bernault, ‘De l'Afrique ouverte à l'Afrique fermée: comprendre l'histoire des réclusions continentales’, in F. Bernault (ed.), Enfermement, prison et châtiments en Afrique: du 19e siècle à nos jours (Paris, Karthala, 1999), pp. 15–64.

⁵³ Bernault, ‘The Shadow of Rule’, p. 56; B. Bâ, ‘La prison coloniale au Sénégal, 1790–1960: Carcéral de conquête et défiances locales’, French Colonial History, 8 (2007), pp. 81–96.

⁵⁴ Unlike other colonies, Nyasaland did not have a system of prisons run by Native Authorities.

⁵⁵ Nyasaland Protectorate, Annual Report of the Prisons Department for the Year Ending 1933 (Zomba, Government Printer, 1934) [hereafter Prisons Report, 1933].

⁵⁶ See D. Branch, ‘Escaping the Carceral Archipelago: Imprisonment and Colonialism in Kenya c.1930–52’, International Journal of African Historical Studies, 38 (2005), pp. 239–66; R.B. Seidman and J.D. Abaka Eyison, ‘Ghana’, in A. Milner (ed.), African Penal Systems (London, Routledge and K. Paul, 1969), pp. 74–7; Bernault, ‘The Shadow of Rule’, pp. 63–5.

⁵⁷ Bernault, ‘The Shadow of Rule’, p. 58. Prisons perhaps had a lesser role in the inscription of racial difference between rulers and ruled than in other territories, at least before the late 1940s, as racial tensions were a lesser issue, with only 9,000 ‘white’ settlers and a small Coloured or Asian population. Whilst physical segregation was enforced in prison, statistics for much of the period grouped ‘Asians’ and ‘Coloureds’ together.

⁵⁸ By 1952, prison labour produced £1,961 worth of foodstuff, and generated £1,283 revenue from all other industries, placed against an overall cost of £42,287 to the government of the Prisons Department. Prisons Department Report, 1947.

⁵⁹ Prisons Department Report, 1933. Additionally, in 1939 a system of extra-mural labour was established allowing offenders facing up to six months imprisonment in lieu of a fine or costs not exceeding £5 to be employed on public works instead; Prisons Department Report, 1939.

⁶⁰ Prisons Department Report, 1947.

⁶¹ Recidivism was also partially linked to a lack of aftercare provision for released prisoners which saw some immediately re-offend by stealing food as they lacked jobs and money.

⁶² Rangley, ‘Notes on Cewa Tribal Law’, pp. 5–10.

⁶³ Prisons Department Report, 1930.

⁶⁴ Prisons Department Report, 1931.

⁶⁵ Prisons Department Report, 1933; Roberts, I'll Do Better Next Time, pp. 87–8, 99.

⁶⁶ Prisons Department Report, 1930, 1947.

⁶⁷ See S. Pierce and A. Rao, Discipline and the Other Body: Correction, Corporeality and Colonialism (Durham, NC, Duke University Press, 2006).

⁶⁸ Prisons Department Report, 1948.

⁶⁹ Prisons Department Report, 1930.

⁷⁰ Prisons Department Report, 1944, 1947.

⁷¹ Prisons Department Report, 1949.

⁷² National Records and Archives [hereafter NRA], London, CO 525/217/8, Report of the Commission of Enquiry into the Disturbances at the Zomba Central Prison, 3 November 1949.

⁷³ National Records and Archives [hereafter NRA], London, CO 525/217/8, Report of the Commission of Enquiry into the Disturbances at the Zomba Central Prison, 3 November 1949, Asst Supt. Prisons Mallett, cross-examination.

⁷⁴ National Records and Archives [hereafter NRA], London, CO 525/217/8, Report of the Commission of Enquiry into the Disturbances at the Zomba Central Prison, 3 November 1949, Commissioner of Prisons P. Hamilton-Bayly, cross-examination.

⁷⁵ National Records and Archives [hereafter NRA], London, CO 525/217/8, Report of the Commission of Enquiry into the Disturbances at the Zomba Central Prison, 3 November 1949, Testimony of Prisoner Suleman Catchi.

⁷⁶ National Records and Archives [hereafter NRA], London, CO 525/217/8, Report of the Commission of Enquiry into the Disturbances at the Zomba Central Prison, 3 November 1949, Asst Supt. Mallett, cross-examination.

⁷⁷ National Records and Archives [hereafter NRA], London, CO 525/217/8, Report of the Commission of Enquiry into the Disturbances at the Zomba Central Prison, 3 November 1949, Draft Report, undated.

⁷⁸ NRA, CO 525/221/1, Prisoners Removal [Southern Rhodesia] Legislation, 1949.

⁷⁹ M. Fry, ‘Penal Reform in the Colonies’, The Howard Journal of Criminal Justice, 8 (1951), pp. 90–5.

⁸⁰ RHL, MSS.Brit.Emp.s. s.22 G 738, Anti-Slavery and Aborigines Protection Society, Treatment of Offenders 1954–7; NRA, CO 912 Advisory Committee on the Treatment of Offenders in the Colonies.

⁸¹ Elias, The Civilising Process; C. Strange, ‘The Undercurrents of Penal Culture: Punishment and the Body in Mid-Twentieth Century Canada’, Law and History Review, 19 (2001), pp. 366–84. In Nyasaland, the process of sanitising state violence ran concurrently with, and was aided by, the bureaucratisation of colonial governance.

⁸² NRA, CO 537/1918, Prison Administration: Criminal Justice Bill.

⁸³ Prisons Department Report, 1947, 1952.

⁸⁴ There was a sharp rise in 1953 due to convictions for breaches of soil regulations rules during anti-colonial agitation. Prisons Department Report, 1953.

⁸⁵ See D. Konate, ‘Ultimate Exclusions: Imprisoned Women in Senegal’, in F. Bernault (ed.), Enfermement, prison et châtiments en Afrique: du 19e siècle à nos jours (Paris, Karthala, 1999), pp. 155–64.

⁸⁶ Prisons Department Report, 1947.

⁸⁷ See R. Waller, ‘Rebellious Youth in Colonial Africa’, Journal of African History, 47 (2006), pp. 77–92; C. Campbell, ‘Juvenile Delinquency in Colonial Kenya, 1900–1939’, The Historical Journal, 45 (2002), pp. 129–51; L. Fourchard, ‘Lagos and the Invention of Juvenile Delinquency in Nigeria, 1920–1960’, Journal of African History, 47 (2006), pp. 115–37; S. Heap, ‘“Their Days are Spent Gambling and Loafing, Pimping for Prostitutes, and Picking Pockets”: Male Juvenile Delinquency on Lagos Island, 1920–60s’, Journal of Family History, 35 (2010), pp. 48–70.

⁸⁸ Prisons Department Report, 1944.

⁸⁹ Prisons Department Report, 1939, 1944.

⁹⁰ NRA, CO 859/73/11, Juvenile Delinquency; Prisons Department Report, 1947, 1953.

⁹¹ See Hynd, ‘“The Extreme Penalty of the Law”’.

⁹² Penal Code (Laws of Nyasaland) 1929, s.170, Criminal Procedure Code 1929, s.316–20; NRA, CO 859/636, Capital Punishment for Rape.

⁹³ MNA, J5/12/19, R. v. Saidi, 1923.

⁹⁴ MNA, S1/42/22, Local Legislation to Obviate the Necessity of Passing Sentence of Death.

⁹⁵ MNA, J5/12/16, R v. Misi Kwanda, Judge Jackson to DC Wade, Dowa, 28 June 1920.

⁹⁶ MNA, J5/5/44, R. v. Sanderam, Judgement by Chief Justice Reed, 13 April 1931.

⁹⁷ See Foucault, Surveiller et punir, pp. 48–9.

⁹⁸ MNA, S1/946/19, Sir George Smith, ‘The Empire at War: Nyasaland’, p. 8.

⁹⁹ MNA, S1/2664/23, Murder trial R. v. Makoshonga.

¹⁰⁰ MNA, 4-4-8R 2952, Judge Thomas, 12 February 1940.

¹⁰¹ RHL, MSS.Afr.s.2475, Magistrate's Court Case Book, Lilongwe 1914–16; Prisons Department Report, 1905.

¹⁰² R. Boeder, Alfred Sharpe of Nyasaland, Builder of Empire (Blantyre, Society of Malawi, 1981), p. 104; NRA, CO 525/13, Despatch 24 August 1906; MNA, J2/6/2/1912, cited in Chanock, Law, Custom and Social Order, p. 126.

¹⁰³ Nyasaland Protectorate, Blue Book 1920; Roberts, Tangled Justice, p. 94.

¹⁰⁴ Penal Code (Laws of Nyasaland) 1929, s. 28; 1957, s. 27.

¹⁰⁵ NRA, CO 525/153/12, Floggings and Whippings – Returns 1933–4; Rep. v. Witness & 2 Others, 1966–8 ALR Mal., p. 578.

¹⁰⁶ Prisons Department Report, 1953; R. v. Makwakwa, 1961–63 ALR Mal., 350. No women or males over 45 years were to receive corporal punishment.

¹⁰⁷ Rep. v. Witness & 2 Others, 1966–68 ALR Mal., p. 578.

¹⁰⁸ Native Affairs Report, 1950.

¹⁰⁹ Nyasaland Protectorate, Blue Book 1951.

¹¹⁰ Native Affairs Reports, 1945–1955. In 1954, eleven courts were also given the power to award sentences of public work.

¹¹³ MNA, S 1/946/19, Smith, ‘The Empire at War’, p. 8.

¹¹¹ See Mwase, Strike a Blow; G. Shepperson and T. Price, Independent African: John Chilembwe and the Origins, Setting, and Significance of the Nyasaland Native Rising of 1915 (Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 1958); R. Rotberg ‘Chilembwe's Revolt Reconsidered’, in R. Rotberg, Rebellion in Black Africa (London, Oxford University Press, 1971), pp. 133–63; D.D. Phiri, Let us Die for Africa: An African Perspective on the Life and Death of John Chilembwe of Nyasaland/Malawi (Blantyre, Central Africana, 1999).

¹¹² RHL, MSS.Brit.Emp.s.347, Belcher, ‘Reminiscences’, p. 243.

¹¹⁴ S. Hynd, ‘Decorum or Deterrence: The Politics of Execution in Malawi, 1915–66’, Cultural and Social History, 5 (2008), pp. 437–48; L. White, ‘Tribes and the Aftermath of the Chilembwe Uprising’, African Affairs, 83 (1984), pp. 526–33.

¹¹⁵ A. Richards, ‘A Modern Movement of Witchfinders’, Africa, 8 (1935), pp. 448–60.

¹¹⁶ C. Baker, Seeds of Trouble: Government Policy and Land Rights in Nyasaland, 1946–64 (London, I. B. Tauris, 1993); J. McCracken, ‘Conservation and Resistance in Colonial Malawi: The “Dead North” Revisited’, in W. Beinart and J. McGregor (eds), Social History and African Environments (Athens, Ohio University Press, 2003), pp. 155–74.

¹¹⁷ See The Nyasaland Times, August–September 1953; R. Palmer, ‘Working Conditions and Worker Responses on Nyasaland Tea Estates, 1930–1953’, Journal of African History, 27 (1986), pp. 120–5.

¹¹⁸ McCracken, ‘Authority and Legitimacy’, p. 172.

¹¹⁹ Elias, The Civilising Process, pp. 273–314.

¹²⁰ See J. Darwin, ‘The Central African Emergency, 1959’, in R. Holland (ed.), Emergencies and Disorder in the European Empires after 1945 (London, Cass, 1994), pp. 217–33; C. Baker, State of Emergency: Crisis in Central Africa, 1959–60 (London, I. B. Tauris, 1997). Significantly, under the Federation, law and order remained a territorial rather than Federal responsibility.

¹²¹ Great Britain, Report of the Nyasaland Commission of Inquiry (London, HMSO, 1959), Cmnd. 814, s. 252 [hereafter Devlin Commission].

¹²² Great Britain, Report of the Nyasaland Commission of Inquiry (London, HMSO, 1959), Cmnd. 814, s.256.

¹²³ Great Britain, Report of the Nyasaland Commission of Inquiry (London, HMSO, 1959), Cmnd. 814, s.260.

¹²⁴ RHL, ‘Devlin Commission’, Boxes 5, 8, 9, 22.

¹²⁵ Devlin Commission, s.275, s.282, s.254.

¹²⁶ Darwin, ‘The Central African Emergency’, p. 218.

¹²⁷ Nyasaland had a 1:1,300 ratio of police to population, compared to 1:700 in Southern Rhodesia. Baker argued that Devlin later regretted the use of the term ‘police state’. See C. Baker, ‘Nyasaland 1959: A Police State?’, Society of Malawi Journal, 2 (1997), pp. 17–25.

¹²⁸ See Anderson, Histories of the Hanged; A.W.B. Simpson, Human Rights and the End of Empire: Britain and the Genesis of the European Convention on Human Rights (Oxford, Oxford University Press, rev. ed. 2004).

¹²⁹ Foucault, Surveiller et punir, pp. 264–80.

¹³⁰ See B. Ibhawoh, Imperialism and Human Rights: Colonial Discourses of Rights and Liberties in African History (Albany, State University of New York Press, 2007).

¹³¹ Chanock, Law, Custom and Social Order, p. 5.

¹³² McCracken, ‘Authority and Legitimacy’, p. 179.

¹³³ See F. Cooper and A.L. Stoler, Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1997); Sherman, ‘Coercive Networks’.

¹³⁴ Malawi Government, Report of the Presidential Commission on Criminal Justice (Zomba, Government Printer, 1967); C. Baker, ‘Criminal Justice in Malawi’, Journal of African Law, 11 (1967), pp. 147–51; P. Breitzke, ‘Murder and Manslaughter in Malawi's Traditional Courts’, Journal of African Law, 18 (1974), pp. 37–56; P. Forster, ‘Law and Society under a Democratic Dictatorship: Dr Banda and Malawi’, Journal of African and Asian Studies, 36, 3 (2001), pp. 275–93.

¹³⁵ Pierce and Rao, Discipline and the Other Body, pp. 3–4.