Prison Personnel in the Colony of Natal from circa 1850 to the Prison Reform Commission of 1905-1906

Abstract

White colonial ideology was produced as a result of the fractured nature of the relations – social, political and economic – between black and white in the colony of Natal. Apart from the racial tensions between warders and prisoners of different races, tensions within the colonial edifice itself – particularly between police officers and gaol officials – reveal deep divisions within the colonial state. The article is primarily based on material housed in the Pietermaritzburg Archives Repository; some quotations from The Black Peril by an imprisoned journalist, George Webb Hardy, have also been included.