Night-Life and Everynight Governance at the Makala Central Prison
Speaker: Denis Augustin Samnick
On the night of 16 May to 17 May 2017, the Makala Central Prison in Kinshasa (DR Congo) was the target of an external attack, resulting in the release of almost 5,000 inmates, the death of two warders and the burning down of numerous administrative offices. Seven years later, on the night of 1 to 2 September 2024, 129 inmates of the same prison were killed by the army and police. Accused of attempting to escape, the dead inmates were among hundreds of others who emerged from their detention wards at around 2 a.m., cracked the side walls of the prison, destroyed the offices and carried out mass rapes on nearly 320 female inmates. Far from being a trivial event, such nocturnal incidents highlight the necessity for a specific grammar of night-time governance of prisons in the DRC. This proposal puts forward the argument that such a grammar is an added value for research on everyday governance in general, and the everyday governance of prisons in particular. The literature on everyday governance do not explicit the nocturnal temporality of public policies. However, the concept of everynight governance that I bring to the fore in this proposal makes it possible to grasp the intimate, under-analyzed or non-apparent aspects of nocturnal life in prison. In everynight governance, the multi-actor public governance that is observable during the day is not completely obliterated, but it gives way to a tightening of security, telephone and remote control of administrators, organized abandonment of inmates, and a relative chaos that is more or less fatal and more or less controllable. The questions are as follows: What grammars of prison governance emerge when night falls on the Makala Central Prison in Kinshasa? What methodological, epistemological, anthropological and criminological implications can be drawn from night-time prison life? Based on more than 80 interviews conducted at the Makala central prison in Kinshasa in January and February 2022, July and August 2022, January and February 2023, and January 2024 as part of my doctoral thesis, this proposal will answer these two questions in three stages. Firstly, it will raise the epistemic contradictions between the empirical data on nights in prison and the literature on prisons in Africa. Secondly, the proposal will highlight the carceral economy of night, as well as the changes in public and security governance that it implies. Thirdly, this research will put forward night-frame analysis as an epistemic perspective likely to render nightlife in prisons and beyond intelligible.
Key words: Everynight governance, Public Governance, Night-Frame Analysis.