INTRODUCTION

Sub-Saharan Africa has undergone a “remarkable transformation” in the last twenty years: the death penalty has been extinguished in law or in practice across most of the continent, a sea change from an era when authoritarian, military, and apartheid regimes extensively wielded the state power of execution. With few exceptions, including a spate of recent executions in Nigeria and The Gambia and the reinstatement of the death penalty for terrorism in Chad and Cameroon, the trend across the continent has been unidirectionally toward abolition. Of the 54 countries on the African continent, only ten of them, fewer than one in five, are actively retentionist, defined as a country where the death penalty is a lawful sentence and that has carried out an execution in the past ten years. An enormous swath of the continent is de facto abolitionist, defined as a country in which an execution has not occurred in the past ten years, including virtually all of Francophone Africa and most of the common law countries explored in this book. Former colonies of Portugal have, without exception, abolished the death penalty. While capital sentences across the continent number in the hundreds annually – especially where the death penalty remains mandatory upon conviction – actual executions in Sub-Saharan Africa are rare.

How did a continent with such an extensive legacy of death penalty abuse transform into a vanguard of abolition? And why, in many places, does this transformation remain incomplete? In the past two decades, African governments have become more democratic, better-organized, and less economically predatory, and they possess greater capacity to respond to serious challenges, including crime. The African state may still be weak, but it no longer seems to be in crisis as it was during the 1980s when organizational failures, deep ethnic divisions, and regime fragility contributed to high rates of state executions.