Conceptualizing the energetic developing field of rural criminology is challenging and doing justice to a study field within a continental context is ambitious. Indeed, the Global North possesses more examples of scholarly work in some areas of criminology, but believing it is a European or North American discipline is a false impression. Neglecting the contributions and historical developments of criminology on the African continent impedes the advancement of criminological scholarship overall. Africa is host to two of the ten oldest universities globally; however, there is a neglect of historical contributions mainly owing to language. Therefore, understanding the African continent – with diversity centred around regions, culture, gender, ethnicity, religion, colonization and linguistics – is imperative to discussing criminology in general, and rural criminology specifically.

Five distinct regions and dominant languages are identifiable in Africa: West Africa (Francophone); Central Africa (mostly Francophone); North Africa (Arabic speaking); East Africa (Swahili with an Anglophone influence); and the Southern part of the continent (Anglophone). The division illustrates one principal distinction: linguistics, which is paramount as the words used to codify various laws regarding the same crimes are diverse within Africa and worldwide. Yet multi-lingualism is absent or rare in academia, challenging comparative epistemological questions.

For example, some easily identifiable examples of linguistic challenges in rural criminology emanate from how violent crime and livestock theft are defined. Essentially, violence is illegal criminal behaviour in rural towns and farms, commonly referenced as ‘rural violence’ in the Global North. However, in South Africa scholars use the unique phrases ‘farm attacks’ and ‘farm murders’ when referring to violent crimes on agricultural operations (see Clack and Minnaar, 2018). Also, livestock theft in different parts of the world and across the African continent uses different terminology: for example, stock theft (South Africa); cattle raiding (European countries and the United States); larceny (the Caribbean and certain states in the United States); cattle rustling (Eastern and Northern Africa); cattle lifting (India); or cattle duffing (Australia and New Zealand) (refer to Masiola and Tomei, 2015).

It is imperative, therefore, first to understand the linguistics used before engaging in comparative research and keyword searches.