Sex, Race, Gender and Power: Southern Rhodesia and the American South

Jock McCulloch. Black Peril, White Virtue: Sexual Crime in Southern Rhodesia. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000. ix + 272 pp. ISBN 0-253-33728-3 (cl).

Laura F. Edwards. Scarlett Doesn't Live Here Anymore: Southern Women in the Civil War Era. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000. ix + 271 pp.; ill. ISBN 0-252-02568-7 (cl).

Black Peril, White Virtue: Sexual Crime in Southern Rhodesia is a richly researched analysis of Black Peril laws passed in early twentieth-century Southern Rhodesia to combat the perceived danger of native black men raping white women. Scarlett Doesn't Live Here Anymore: Southern Women in the Civil War Era synthesizes the best recent scholarship on the lives of American black and white southern women in the nineteenth century. Although these are two different kinds of histories, they have much in common. Most notably, each grapples with the complex interconnections among race, gender, sex, and power. In white-dominated societies, although black and white women shared a lack of power due to their gender, racial difference almost always overrode their similar status. White women had a stake in racism and saw no possibility for power in joining forces with even more powerless black women. Jock McCulloch and Laura Edwards complicate this intricate story by exploring how women, regardless of race and despite their lack of legal, economic, or political power, shaped society. African women who migrated from village to town, white women who brought attention to white men's sexual relations across the color line, women who left husbands and went to court over domestic abuse—all find a voice in these two excellent books.

Between 1902 and 1916, Southern Rhodesia experienced a series of moral panics collectively known as Black Peril, in which public hysteria over white women's accusations of rape or sexual assault by black men led to the passing of a series of laws ostensibly to protect white women. Legislation included a 1903 law that prescribed capital punishment for attempted rape. These laws resulted in the executions of as many as twenty native men and long prison sentences for hundreds of others. McCulloch points out that prosecuting Africans for rape on flimsy evidence was an anomaly; in the rest of the British Empire, men were rarely convicted of rape charges due to the assumption that women had somehow invited the attack. Black Peril, White Virtue seeks to explain the impetus behind these panics and subsequent laws in colonial Zimbabwe. McCulloch argues that Black Peril was rooted in tensions that extended beyond raw racism and stereotypical views of black male hypersexuality. He shifts the focus to white settlers who sought power vis-à-vis England, and white men who were nervous about white women.

On one level, Black Peril was related to problems of a sexual nature—miscegenation, venereal disease, prostitution. But it also resulted from the resentment white settlers harbored against the British South Africa Company (BSAC), which administered the territory. Many settlers complained that the BSAC, along with the British government and people, did not understand the difficulties they faced living in Rhodesia as a minority among Africans. Furthermore, McCulloch argues that much of the Black Peril legislation "was designed to restrain the sexual impulses of white women. The Immorality Suppression Ordnance No. 9 of 1903, for example, prohibited women from having illicit sexual relations with black men," while a 1916 ordinance "prescribed two years in jail for any girl or woman who by words, writing, signs, or suggestion enticed a native to have illicit sex"(5). Finally, Black Peril was as much about constructing white identity as about controlling black behavior. White identity in Southern Rhodesia was particularly fragile because many whites there lived on the economic edge. Black Peril helped them to draw sharper boundaries around their own community as whites.

One of the most interesting cases McCulloch explores is the trial of...