Book Review: Pan-African Issues in Crime and Justice
| Published date | 01 May 2005 |
| Date | 01 May 2005 |
| DOI | 10.1177/146680250500500208 |
| Author | Rod Earle |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
The various pathways to their imprisonment are comprised of gender and
racial stereotyping. It is simply the scale of the injustice that is so manifest in
the USA. If the same values of decency and democracy the USA wishes to see
imposed on other nations were applied to its own prisoners, the USA might
indeed be a beacon for others.
Anita Kalunta-Crumpton and Biko Agonizo (eds)
Pan-African Issues in Crime and Justice
Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004. 276 pp. £49.95 ISBN 0–7546–1882-X (hbk)
•Reviewed by Rod Earle, University of Surrey, UK
There are a number of good reasons to read this timely collection of essays
about the criminological crisis facing people of African descent. In 2005 the UK
government holds the presidency of the EU and simultaneously chairs the G8
group of leading world economies. This follows the 20th anniversary of the
Ethiopian famine and Band Aid in 2004. Bob Geldof and Tony Blair are likely
to dominate the headlines. The temptation to see Africa through a lens
provided by the Band Aid generation is hard to resist. The tendency to see the
condition of Africa as ‘benighted’, ‘a stain on the conscience of the world’, as
Tony Blair once remarked, is powerful and persuasive. But the rising chorus of
compassion can stifle both more strident voices and the lessons of history.
In the south of the continent President Thabo Mbeki has talked in more
assertive and hopeful terms, of the transition from apartheid that will, in time,
initiate an African Renaissance. The historian Basil Davidson (1992, 1997) sees
the appalling events in Central Africa as marking the conclusion of the imperial
epoch in Africa, the terminal exhaustion of the attempt to impose western-style
nation models on diverse African societies. It is to these themes that the authors
of this collection orientate their contributions. Their objective is to initiate
within criminology a Pan-African perspective as a counterpoint to its prevailing
North American and Eurocentric pre-occupations.
Anita Kalunta-Crompton opens the collection by situating criminology
within the Orientalist tradition identified by Edward Said. ‘Criminology and
Orientalism’ draws on Maureen Cain’s (2000) derivations of Said within the
context of Western criminology and argues for a criminology ‘beyond the
West’. Kalunta-Crompton provides a brief summary of the way in which
conventional criminology has rendered people of African descent as ‘other’ and
marginalized their perspectives from the discourses of crime, law and order. She
concludes by affirming the potentials of a mutual and reciprocal approach to
learning from the experiences and theorization of Africans.
The concluding chapter of the book, contributed by the second editor, Biko
Agonizo, is more explicitly polemical. Agonizo advances the case for a more
holistic understanding of the conditions encountered in Africa and by Africans,
one that engages more fully with the histories of colonialism and slavery. The
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