We inaugurate a new section of Afrique Contemporaine, ‘Emerging Issues’, with a broad view of French research on African prisons. This article underscores the relative paucity of works in the field, by historians for the most part, particularly in comparison with contemporary English-language research streams. The authors call for more study of prisons in Africa, particularly prison ethnographies, to understand penal economies and prisons in a variety of social, cultural, political and geographic contexts. The aim is to understand how African prisons adapt international, national and local punishment models for their own use. In doing so, scholars can use African prisons to interrogate global logics of incarceration and their relation to imprisonment policies while giving voice to Africans.