Black Peril, White Virtue
Subtitle: Sexual Crime in Southern Rhodesia, 1902-1935
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Published: July 2000
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 272
ISBN-13: 9780253337283
Subjects: African history: from c 1900 -; Racism & racial discrimination; Women's studies; First World War, 1914-1918; Inter-war period, 1918-1939; c 1900 - c 1914; Offenses Against Women; Race And Ethnic Relations; Social Science; History - General History; History: World; Zimbabwe; Africa - General; Political Freedom & Security - Civil Rights; World - Colonial Studies; Criminology; Discrimination & Racism; 20th century; History; Race relations; Sex crimes
First sentence: At a little after 8 P.M. on Saturday, October 17, 1908, Miss Janette Falconer, who worked as a shop assistant in Umtali, a small town near the Mozambique border, left the Cecil Hotel for her lodgings.
Description: "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."--BOOK JACKET.