Crossing the Color Line: Race, Sex and the Contested Politics of Colonialism in Ghana by Carina E. Ray (review)

The regulation of sexuality in European colonies is a popular topic, but rarely has it been examined in such a nuanced way. This well-sourced book covers the sixteenth century to the present day, although the primary focus is on African European concubinage and marriage in the Gold Coast during British colonization, between the 1890s and the 1950s. The strength of this book is Ray's close study of the thousands of pages of material covering the small number of interracial relationships investigated by the Colonial Office, which make up the bulk of part 1, along with the few cases of intermarriage in Britain and the repercussions there and in the Gold Coast from 1919 to the present day, as detailed in the shorter part 2. Her analysis of available records shocks and moves readers, offering delicately nuanced interpretations of the lives and relationships (not just sexual) of the men and women caught up in scandal. Indeed, few historians can match her skill in demonstrating the interplay between race, sexuality, and class.

This is exemplified in chapter 2, which discusses Marcus Clarke, the first colonial officer investigated for violating a 1907 ban on concubinage. Clarke was accused of attempting to procure young African girls for sex, and Ray reveals how the case was less about illicit sex than about the racial and class implications of his position as a "West Indian of partial African descent" (58) who had been imported into the Gold Coast as a European official with European wages. This episode demonstrates how cases of sexual misconduct were only ever partly about sex. Indeed, Clarke's case publicized how difficult it was for colonial administrators to actually distinguish between colonizer and colonized in certain cases, as well as the dangers of investigating such cases. While the "litmus test for deciding whether disciplinary action had to be taken" was whether sexual behavior had created "a public scandal" in the colony (119), officials soon realized that almost every investigation itself caused a scandal. When attempts were made to cement hierarchies of power through sexual regulation, colonial officials ended up creating "powerful tools of coercion and sabotage used by both Africans and Europeans to achieve a range of different goals, chief among them extorting money, redressing workplace grievances, and ruining rival officers' careers," which "undermined British authority and credibility" (18). In the process, Ray argues, a less moralistic, more pragmatic colonial administration than is usually supposed was created, with Africans as central agents in sexual encounters.

She also attempts to invert the gaze, focusing partly on Ghanaian attitudes to "mixed-race" relationships and offering an essential counterpoint to the more commonly studied "black peril" panics in the United States and Africa. Indeed, chapter 7 is an illuminating study of how Ghanaian men articulated a "white peril" panic and were concerned about "immoral" relationships between European men and local women. Here, Ray makes an unusual but compelling argument that the first Ghanaian calls for independence did not happen after the Second World War, as scholars generally claim, but were actually Ghanaian reactions to the 1919 Liverpool riots, which had been directed against British working-class women who had married West Africans. Women's bodies became sites of male power contestation, and such relationships were used "as proof of the demoralizing influences of European men, and by extension colonial rule" itself (200).

Throughout the book, Ray deals thoughtfully with the silences of the official documents, especially in more recent cases where she has been able to interview the actual participants of such relationships or their offspring. The case of the working-class Ghanaian German, Jewish British Annan family in chapter 6 is a striking example of how she supplements research in government archives with oral history, providing a complex and moving story of global migration and marriage "across the color line...