Criminological Science and the Criminal Law on the Colonial Periphery: Perception, Fantasy, and Realities in South Africa, 1900-1930
This article, by framing criminology and criminal law together, suggests that in the early years of the South African state both bodies of discourse served to evade reality and to construct a sense of self and other as a part of the development of the administration of South African criminal law. It considers the derivation of South African criminology from contemporary metropolitan formulations. South African legal doctrine and practice likewise depended on extra-South African sources. These imported discourses provided lenses through which a descriptive confrontation with the realities of the processes of criminalization, and the administration of criminal justice could be avoided precisely by hose “expert” in these fields. Instead, science and law, far from being pragmatic disciplines, provided the means by which to fantasize about the nature of white justice and black criminality.