Black Peril, White Virtue: Sexual Crime in Southern Rhodesia, 1902-1935

In the period from 1902 until the mid-1930s, Southern Rhodesia was swept by a series of panics, known by the name Black Peril, that were precipitated by the presumed sexual threat posed by black men to white women. Tension over Black Peril provoked a flood of legislation designed to control the sexuality of African men and women and the sexual "transgressions" of white females, including the introduction of the death penalty for attempted rape. Over the next decades more than twenty men were executed, though many were innocent of any serious crime. As Jock McCulloch shows, the panics were complex events which encompassed such issues as miscegenation, prostitution, the management of venereal disease, the politics of concubinage, and the construction of whiteness.