Why is contact between law enforcement and the average citizen in Africa so frequently lethal?
Kenyan teacher, activist, and social media campaigner Albert Ojwang is finally achieving in death precisely what he always wanted to do while he was alive–draw attention to the state of affairs in his country, in particular police highhandedness as an instance of official impunity. No doubt Ojwang would have been pleased by the explosion of collective rage that greeted his death in police custody; yet, he would have been disappointed that demonstrations aimed at shining a light on police misconduct have resulted in sixteen fatalities and untold injuries to hundreds in the hands of the same Kenyan police.
Given the frequency of police custody deaths in the country (police watchdog Independent Policing Oversight Authority reports that twenty Kenyans have died in police custody “in the last four months”), the real surprise about Ojwang’s death in police custody therefore is the furor that it has generated. For, from the perspective of the authorities, Ojwang, a young thirty-one at the time of his untimely death, should have been just another citizen randomly “found unconscious during routine police inspection.” In 2024 alone, Kenyan police were responsible for a reported 118 extrajudicial killings.
Kenyan police, to be sure, have no copyright on casual brutality. In South Africa, where the killing of thirty-four striking miners by the country’s Police Service at Marikana in August 2012 is rightly marked as a tragic milestone, “Annual deaths in police custody remain consistently in the hundreds” [PDF]. Nigerians, too, are no stranger to death by law enforcement, or official impunity more broadly. While the October 2020 #EndSARS protests did much to expose ordinary citizens’ frustration at persistent police malfeasance, unfortunately, experience since then has shown that the police in Nigeria have learned nothing and forgotten nothing. A 2024 Afrobarometer report [PDF] detailing “corruption, brutality, and lack of professionalism” among numerous other failings confirms that police misbehavior is continent-wide.
Why do the police across Africa tend to treat ordinary people with such stark inhumanity and disdain? Why is contact between law enforcement and the average African citizen so frequently lethal? Why have repeated attempts to reform the police and policing been more unsuccessful than not?
One influential line of argumentation is that the police in postcolonial Africa is brutal because the postcolonial state of which it is a mere symbol was conceived in blood. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this perspective has found and continues to enjoy broad appeal among scholars who insist that African countries were dealt a bad hand at political independence, and that the well-lamented struggles of many of them owes directly to the “violent legacy” of colonialism. For this school, what is true for the police is truer for the military. While the severity of colonial governmentality must be conceded, the idea that the police (or the army) in postcolonial Africa are somehow doomed to violence because of the trauma of colonialism underestimates and misjudges the power of Africans to correct institutional failings and exercise control over their own lives. Among other things, suggesting that Africans are irrecoverably in thrall to the colonial experience is no different from endorsing the revolting idea that the colonial overlords should be asked to return because their successors are lacking in capacity and initiative.
A second explanation of continued police brutality in Africa is that, for many countries, the violence of the colonial experience has been deepened and complicated by the singular savagery of military rule. In this formulation, the police are only good at “enforcing” the law because, similar to the rest of the society, prolonged military rule has left them culturally corrupted. While, again, there is something to be said for finding remnants of militarism in countries where soldiers once ran rampant, the argument fails to explain why, essentially, there is no difference in police attitude towards civilians between countries that experienced protracted military rule (e.g., Nigeria, Ghana) and those that have successfully kept the military in the barracks (e.g., Kenya, Senegal, Tanzania, Malawi).
Most observers agree that police training could be better. Across the continent, police watchdogs and civil society groups have consistently pointed to the poor training and shabby equipping of the police. There is no question that police training is an area in which various African states can find improvement; whether undertraining or poor training suffices as an explanation for the manner and levels of brutality witnessed in just too many cases is a different matter. Suppose, for instance, that police brutality can be blamed on inadequate training. How do we explain persistent and society-wide disregard for human person dignity, as evidenced by incessant mental and bodily violations, especially of women and the weakest in society, a daily ritual of mutual degradation in which, assuredly, the very victims are all too eager to participate?
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Cornell University political philosopher Olufemi Taiwo has argued that the problem of police brutality in Africa; that, and the many “egregious instances of the violation of the subject that are standard fare in human rights reports and agitation,” has less to do with poor training and more with what he calls “the near nonexistence of the legal subject” in Africa [PDF]. Taiwo, to be sure, has nothing against more and better training; his position is that it is bound to come to nought for as long as “operators of the modern legal system,” those charged with the administration of criminal justice, and everyday Africans take seriously and are agitated by the individual legal subject, one that is “possessor of reason, bearer of interest, author of actions, formally inferior to no other,” and “is the object of solicitation.”
If Taiwo is correct, the debate about the brutality of policing in Africa, in order to be fruitful, must go beyond the standard explanations (some of which have been adumbrated above) to include deeper philosophical questions and reflections about the conception of the individual human person in Africa, and how we treat the weakest among us. It is not the law or law enforcement in Africa (alone) that is on trial; it is Africans as a people.
Amani Diallo contributed to the research for this article.