Containing the ‘Wandering Native’: Racial Jurisdiction and the Liberal Politics of Prison Reform in 1940s South Africa

In South Africa in the 1940s, an extensive public discussion about prison reform was led by a powerful collective of white liberals concerned with the growing rates of incarceration in the Union, particularly of urban Africans. This article argues that liberals understood prisons as significant sites in negotiating the ‘problems’ arising from African urbanism. The large migration of Africans to urban areas during the rapid industrialisation of the 1940s hyperbolised what was known as the ‘Native Question’, a set of colonialist concerns about how to manage Africans within the changing racial jurisdictions of South African society. Much of the anxiety surrounding the Native Question concerned the threat of African criminality, seen to be located predominantly in the figure of the ‘wandering native’, either unemployed, unhoused, or simply out of place according to the logics of racialised statutory law. The question of how best to punish this figure elicited extensive research from liberal commentators'. This new form of information drew Africans into a form of governance that rested on ideas of civilisation and ‘Christian trusteeship’, a term used by one of South Africa's most important penal reformists, anthropologist Winifred Hoernlé. Punishment as an idea as much an institution preoccupied liberals because it threw up for review the critical discussion of social jurisdiction, the responsibilities at stake in the rapidly emerging social contract of industrial capitalism, and the thorny and perduring question of racial difference and universalism.