The Death Penalty in Africa
Foundations and Future Prospects
Over the past decade the death penalty has sharply declined across the African continent, and the number of executions outside of North Africa has fallen to a trickle. While this would seem to fit within the general global decline in executions and the increasing number of abolitionist jurisdictions worldwide, it is a process that bears little relation to public opinion in Africa or to the strong retributivist sentiments held by the continent's political elites. This study places modern capital punishment in Africa within the context of religious and culturally specific notions of life, death, and burial as well as the Western imposition of criminal and penal policy during the colonial era. The tensions of the death penalty in present-day sub-Saharan Africa, increasingly limited to English-speaking and common-law Africa (as well as majority-Islamic regions), reflect these historical origins.
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