Based in the Politics Department at Newcastle University and funded by a Leverhulme Trust Research Project grant [RPG-2021-386], this project examines the contested memory politics surrounding the reuse of ex-carceral sites in four African Countries, Nigeria, Ghana and South Africa, Kenya.

It explores how contemporary understandings and attitudes towards these nodes of colonial control and brutality shape their 'afterlives'.

The sites range from ex-Slave Forts in Ghana (now a heritage site), ex-colonial prisons in Nigeria (now a park), ex-Mau Mau internment camp in Kenya (now a school), to an ex-apartheid era police station (now a post-apartheid era police station).

These stretch across different eras of colonializing violence, slavery, colonialism, anti-colonial struggles, apartheid, and over different regions of the continent.

The project is interested in how sites are presented as sites that tell particular stories as well as how these narratives are challenged or read in different ways.  In explore these divergent understandings and engagements with these sites we engage with how these relate to struggles around the production of identities, understandings of groups' place in the word, and imagined futures.