State of Peril: race and rape in South African literature by Lucy Valerie Graham (review)

This is a surprisingly readable and compelling book, given the topic that Lucy Graham is exploring. Starting with nineteenth-century texts, the book explores the trajectory of ‘rape narratives’ up to the present day in South Africa, drawing comparisons with similar narratives produced from the southern states of America. The introduction discusses current social issues surrounding rape and South Africa, giving a pressing urgency to the context of the literary narratives: Graham starts from the position that official denials regarding the prevalence of rape in South Africa are undermined by research, and seeks to establish that rape narratives have been ‘exploited for political ends in South African history’ (p. 4). It is a shame, then, that towards the end of the book Graham insists that her ‘study is not sociological’ (p. 134). It is, in fact, her engagement with the operation of literary text as part of the discourse that constructs the social context, and clearly makes links with real incidents of rape and what has been said about these in the media and elsewhere. This seems a particular strength of the book rather than something to deny.

The first chapter discusses nineteenth-century narratives of sexual violence with a focus on Olive Schreiner’s Trooper Peter Halket of Mashonaland (1897) and Rudyard Kipling’s short story ‘A Sahib’s War’ (1901). It outlines the roots of ‘black peril’ narratives within the context of the colonial era and imperial romance, which are defined as ‘sensationalized accounts of white women raped by black men’ (p. 4). The chapter also considers ‘white peril’ narratives – the ‘rape or sexual exploitation of colonized [black] women by colonizing [white] men’ (p. 4) – to suggest how the texts imply that both white men and white women are in danger from the seductive and violent continent. Graham’s richly layered analysis is illustrated here as she pays attention to the extra-textual material as well as the text. For example, in her analysis of the photograph Schreiner chose to illustrate the first publication of Trooper Peter Halket of Mashonaland, Graham suggests that this image places the text outside the merely literary or aesthetic to connect with historical realities, and with international attitudes towards black male sexualities and the ‘peril’ they represent for the white race.

Chapter 2 moves to early twentieth-century narratives, comparing rape narratives written by white men and white women – specifically, Francis Bancroft’s Of Like Passions (1907); George Webb Hardy’s The Black Peril (1912); and George Heaton Nicholls’ Bayete! (1923). This chapter suggests that anxieties relating to the rise of black voices – politically and in literary form – are reflected in these texts. Graham makes compelling links between South African and southern American societies, where similar anxieties were being enacted due to economic, social and political instability. Chapter 4 refers back to this chapter to consider how black writers have reimagined and rewritten such white-authored narratives of rape and race, while the third chapter considers how both ‘white peril’ and ‘black peril’ narratives indicate a social failure to imagine interracial relationships or ‘love’.

This study exposes the relationships between black men and white women, black women and white men, but also other relationships between black and white people in surprising ways. For example, in discussing the sympathies of Olive Schreiner towards the plight of black women raped by white men, Graham exposes how texts such as these underpinned laws forbidding interracial sexual relationships, as, at the root of the sympathy, there was a belief in the evil of miscegenation. In addition, by ‘tracing a history of rape portrayals’ (p. 6) into the present day, Graham draws attention to the more common – although less prominent – intraracial rapes represented in literature. This is perhaps the weakest part of the study, even though Graham is establishing an interesting development in the literary history of rape narratives. It is not entirely clear how the narratives...