Death in a Black Maria: Transport as punishment in an African carceral state Samuel Fury Childs Daly Department of African and African American Studies, Duke University, USA Abstract In March 1980, fifty men suffocated to death in the back of a police van, known as a Black Maria, in Lagos, Nigeria. In the Black Maria Tragedy, as it came to be called, several cur- rents of Nigeria’ s postcolonial history converged. They included the persistent problem of crime, the question of how much power to give men in uniform, and the problems of migration and regional integration (most of the victims came from neighboring coun- tries). This article examines the 1980 incident not only for what it reveals about Nigeria, but about the larger workings of punishment in a postcolonial state. What tech- niques of punishment endured after the end of colonialism? Which of them did African governments find useful, and which did they discard? Where did the technology of the Black Maria come from, and what part did it play in the machinery of the Nigerian state? Looking beyond Nigeria, the Black Maria incident suggests that prison transport is an important part of the carceral landscape – and one that is easy to miss. Keywords Nigeria, Black Maria, policing, transportation, immigration, ECOWAS, logistics On the afternoon of 2 March 1980, a shootout between a police officer and two car thieves took place in Tin Can Island, an industrial area of Lagos, Nigeria. The officer killed one of the men but the other escaped, and the area was cordoned off to find him. The police detained every young man they intercepted, put them through an ordeal of interrogations, Corresponding author: Samuel Fury Childs Daly, Department of African and African American Studies, Duke University, USA. Email: samuel.daly@duke.edu Special Issue: African Penal Histories in Global Perspective Punishment & Society 1–16 © The Author(s) 2022 Article reuse guidelines: sagepub.com/journals-permissions DOI: 10.1177/14624745221076774 journals.sagepub.com/home/pun