"An Open and Public Scandal" in the Transvaal: The 1906 Bucknill Inquiry in a Global Context

In 1906 an international scandal erupted over allegations of sodomy among Chinese mine workers in the British-ruled Transvaal Colony in southern Africa. In a letter to Lord Elgin, the British colonial secretary, the British parliamentarian Frederick Mackarness wrote that the rampancy of sodomy among the Chinese was "undisputed by all those white men" on the Rand. Mackarness further asserted that the sleeping accommodations of the Chinese workers were "calculated to produce this result"; that sodomy took place on the open veld, as well as in the dormitories; that venereal diseases of the rectum were prevalent among the Chinese; and that the Chinese were encouraging the practice of sodomy among the natives.¹

Mackarness's letter fueled controversy around Chinese labor importation to the Transvaal. To address a native labor shortage after the end of the Anglo-Boer War, the Conservative government in Britain had permitted the South African mine owners, or Randlords, to import indentured Chinese laborers to work in the Transvaal's gold mines. From the outset of this policy in 1904, a diverse coalition agitated against Chinese labor importation. This coalition included Afrikaaner farmers and British workmen in the Transvaal, who saw the Chinese as a threat to their economic security, and nonconformist clerics and members of the Radical faction of the Liberal Party in Britain, who characterized Chinese labor migration as being tantamount to slavery.² The sexual immorality of the Chinese in general—and the supposed Chinese propensity for sodomy in particular—served as one more argument against the use of Chinese labor.

In response to Mackarness's letter, Lord Elgin instructed the Transvaal governor, Lord Selborne, to investigate the claims. Lord Selborne in turn appointed John Bucknill, a British legal officer in the Transvaal, to conduct an inquiry. Bucknill interviewed twenty-six witnesses over four days in September 1906, while Lord Selborne corresponded with numerous other informants, including mayors, doctors, ministers, and mine managers across the colony. While the Bucknill inquiry, as it came to be known, was conducted in secret to avoid embarrassing the colonial government, Mackarness's associates later leaked the findings to the British media, contributing to the end of Chinese labor migration to the Transvaal.

Historians of South Africa have studied the Bucknill inquiry within the Transvaal colonial context. Rachel K. Bright characterizes the scandal as part of a wider "moral panic" that also encompassed concerns about female prostitution and antiwhite violence.³ Ross G. Forman has similarly attributed the "hysteria" around the Bucknill inquiry to "prevailing conceptions of an empire under threat from external economic and political forces."⁴ In arguing that it was part of a broader moral panic, these historians have correctly situated the Bucknill inquiry within the colonial politics of race and labor. But we currently have no explanation for why the specific charge of sodomy gained such widespread traction, especially since Mackarness and his informants provided little concrete evidence to substantiate their claims about the prevalence of sodomy. Karen L. Harris suggests that the allegations embodied "European orientalist prejudice," and Bright has more recently described the inquiry as an attempt to use "colonial knowledge . . . to control Chinese bodies."⁵ I would argue that we need to go beyond Orientalism to uncover the underlying historical significance of sodomy in relation to Chinese labor migration.

Situating the Bucknill inquiry within its long-term and global contexts, I will argue that the sodomy allegations represented the culmination of a half century of anti-Chinese rhetoric that cast male Chinese migrants to the English-speaking world as purveyors of the unnatural vice. I will first suggest that the allegations about sodomy among the Chinese in the Transvaal did not arise out of nowhere; by the turn of the twentieth century, the Chinese had acquired a long-standing reputation for sodomy in the white settler states. I will then examine how different groups in the Transvaal—including anti-Chinese activists, colonial bureaucrats, petty officials, and Chinese mine workers themselves—mobilized this reputation to advance their own interests. The final section documents the global fallout from the...