BOOK REVIEWS 121 clatures. There are other mistakes which have not been mentioned because of the shortage of space. Second, she makes a number of important statements which have recently been proved to be either half-true or entirely dubious. For example, on p. 41, she says, "the Karamojong rejected the civilisation of Europe." Recent research has shown that the colonial government tended to preserve Karamoja District as a kind of "human Zoo", in Uganda. In fact, many of the people in Karamoja were not exposed to the so called "civilisation of Europe" (Incidentally she misspelt "Karamojong"). More evidence on the subject will be shown in our forthcoming publication on Uganda. On page 10 she says, "In Uganda, how- ever, Swahili is disliked by the dominant Ganda whose language, Luganda, was taught in schools all over the area..." This is a serious statement because it raises serious questions of linguistic communication in East Africa, inter-tribal, cultural penetration and political integration. And thus it must be backed by serious empirical data. And yet as I have argued elsewhere the question of either rejecting or accepting Swahili or any other language depended largely on its functional utility. Thus Muteesa I, the King of Buganda, learnt Swahili because he used it to procure guns, etc. It has as yet to be established empirically whether the Baganda as a group rejected Swahili especially where it served functional purposes. On page 86 she says, "All three territories, with Zanzibar now united to Tanzania, have become one-party states and this of course can make a sense of unity." To begin with, the banning of opposition parties in Kenya and Uganda is very recent. Indeed in Uganda it took place in late December, 1969. It is, of course, too early to appraise the likely consequences of banning opposition parties. Suffice it to say that even in Tanzania where a one-party situation was in many ways a spontaneous growth, the phenomenon has not always been an integrating factor. Third, she relies heavily on Secondary Sources. The book has, of course, positive dimensions. Her analysis of the reasons why tribal societies persist is sound especially when she points out on page 14 that "new economic inequalities created new forms of ethnic rivalry after the granting of independent rule." Her identification of the problems of political integration in Uganda may be controversial but it is candid and has a lot?to offer. In fact this little book contains a lot of important economic and political facets dealing with integration which are rewarding.

Makerere University College APOLO NSIBAMBI Kampala, Uganda

Alan Milner (ed.), African Penal Systems. London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969, xiii + 501 pp., no price given.

Though it may be a rather negative form of praise to put it this way, the first thing to be said about this book is that it is far better than it might have been. It could indeed have been dreadful. A round-up of the penal systems of Africa, state by state, could have been the occasion for a series of "national" contri- butions in the worst sense, formal, uncritical, and larded with uninformative 122 official statistics. As it is, it has other limitations; but albeit in varying degrees, all the contributors have made some attempt at an independent analysis and assessment, and some contributions are very independent indeed. There is, in short, not much whitewash. Secondly, several of the contributors make a valiant effort to face three related questions. Are there, or were there, distinctive approaches to the nature of crime and the treatment of offenders characteristic of traditional African cultures? Have such approaches anything to contribute to the solution of modern problems? And how have they affected the present-day treatment of offenders in African states since Independence? The contributors, that is, have seriously tried to bring to their task an anthropological as well as a legal and penological approach to their problems. Thirdly, though there is much of interest in the first part of the book, which consists of straightforward accounts of the present-day system in several African states, there is greater illumination in depth in the more specialized, albeit less comprehensive, essays in the second part. Among these, Milner and Asuni's impressively scholarly paper on psychiatry and the criminal offender and Welsh's review of the use of the death penalty in South Africa are outstanding contri- butions to knowledge; while the interesting and otherwise somewhat neglected topic of the penal law in relation to economic development is well analysed by Costa, and the one attempt to assess the experience of imprisonment from the prisoner's point of view is to be found in Tanner's essay in an East African setting. As Milner points out in his preface, "criminology has not yet begun to flourish in Africa", and the chief limitation of any book on this subject is bound to be lack of material. The main reason for this is simply that, like the penal system itself, research in criminology is grossly under-provided with the neces- sary resources, though it has to be added that some African governments are secretive about their prisons, as has been shown in recent prosecutions in South Africa. This book is especially valuable accordingly in providing some illumi- nating insights. It is not easy to imagine how a work on penology could be exactly cheerful reading; in evaluating the content of such a book, the sort of questions which the humane and (in a broad sense) liberal reader will have in mind will presum- ably be: Are things worse than they must inevitably be? Granted that the first aim must be the prevention of crime and the protection of the law-abiding public, are offenders treated as humanely as the circumstances permit? Are conditions such as to allow both prisoners and their captors to retain and even develop their human dignity? And in addition, those with a special interest in the recent history of Africa will ask: Were penal conditions unduly harsh under colonial rule? Have they improved or deteriorated since Independence? This book enables us to answer these questions, at any rate in broad outline; and the answers are mostly in the negative. Though the picture is not one of unrelieved gloom, yet the overwhelming impression is one of "man's inhumanity to man", and first and foremost among the causes must be put the insufficiency of resources. Seidman in his historical perspective of the Ghana prison system, for instance, makes it abundantly clear that a strong and persistent "strain of humane feeling" in the system has been equally persistently frustrated by overcrowding, and in this Ghana does not seem to be untypical. Equally vividly, Milner and Asuni demonstrate the impossibility of affording psychiatric