Zambezia (2001), XXVIII (iij.BOOK REVIEWBlack Peril, White Virtue: Sexual Crime in Southern Rhodesia, 1902-1935, By Jock McCulloch, Indiana University Press, 2000, ISBN 0-253-33728-3.This book on how the sexual fantasies of men from a distinctly Europeancultural background turn around to haunt them adds to the collection ofbooks on colonialism that are a spin-off of Foucaulfs critique of westernculture. McCulloch's book is distinguished by a sharp focus on inter-racial sexual relations considered transgressions in a discourse on colonialpower in Southern Rhodesia. This is notwithstanding the fact that, duringthe last decade, several historians on Southern Rhodesia have shownthat colonialists disrupted the lives of many Africans, manipulated andexploited them, even in matters of their sexuality (Barnes, Jeater, Schmidt).Against the background of a western intellectual culture, where forcenturies, sex has been associated with irrationality and/or sin and,therefore, something to avoid discussing so openly, McCulloch's boldnessis bound to draw some attention.However, the story is a grim one for the African reader. McCullochshows how fears associated with western cultural myths about Africansexuality led to serious abuses of Africans by British colonisers. At theheart of the story of Black Peril are African men, deemed as black as theywere uncivilised and immoral, and consequently, falsely accused ofviolently attacking white women for whom they worked as domesticservants. African men, presumed to have an intense appetite for sexbecause they were coming from a much-denigrated cultural backgroundwhere one man could have two or three wives, were easy to accuse ofraping white women. This was worsened by the demand put on youngAfrican men joining the labour market to leave their wives behind in therural areas and, while they lived in towns, to look upon sexual relationshipswith women as both sinful and a distraction from work. In domesticemployment, African men were reduced to doing chores that they hadalways left to women in the culture. Making beds, cleaning floors, cooking,serving food, and doing laundry are just a few examples of duties carriedout under the supervision of white women who, themselves, were viewedby their male counterparts as subordinate members of society responsiblefor the smooth running of the domestic sphere.It is not surprising at all that sex between white women and blackmale servants working close to them in the private world of the homebecame an issue. Domestic servants were bound to experience problems275276 BOOK REVIEWSwith white women, fearing that, as men, who were young and sexuallyactive and members of a patriarchal world of their own, they would havemoments when they felt emotionally disturbed by their women bossesand vice versa. But that is not the main issue for McCulloch. He isconcerned by the ideas that inform whites about sexual desire amongAfricans and cause them to panic at the thought of their wives beingtaken advantage of in their households. Just to show how pervasive anddemeaning to blacks the mythology about African sexuality is, McCulloch'sbook begins with a shocking story about a white woman, Ms Falconer,who claims she was raped by a black man when, in fact, she had bumpedinto a wandering baboon. This mind-boggling story will make any Africanreader stop and read it again, as whites often publicly denigrated Africansas baboons or kaffirs. In this and other stories from colonial records,McCulloch illustrates how fears about the sexuality of Africans, based onignorance about them, became the basis for accusing black men of crimesof rape that they did not commit.He tries to show that British society has precedents that further ourunderstanding of this behaviour. However, the background to this problemtakes us beyond British habits to the grounding of them in Christianthought, for, in the latter is a pervasive western philosophy derived fromthe Greeks, which says that the desire for sex brings humans, even thebest of them, close to the animal and must, therefore, be handled withcaution by those gifted with reason and power to regulate socialdevelopments, namely, men. Those humans with difficulties controllingsexual desire, like women, maintained Aristotle and Plato, are closer toanimals by nature and must not be allowed to have public roles. That iswhy men only ran governments for many centuries in western patriarchies.Southern Rhodesia was no different.Stories about African men attacking white and African women unableto function without giving men sexual favours show how this unscientificand outdated cosmology was used to manipulate and control Africanpeople as gendered human beings placed below whites in the hierarchyof being. Worse still, McCulloch shows how whites tried to control Africanwomen who were seen as worse than their male counterparts, and as aneven lower species incapable of morality altogether and, therefore,unemployable dangerous carriers of sexually transmitted diseases (p.128). The African woman was presented in colonial records as a threat tomen in a language that was so demeaning that any African woman whoreads the records and has suffered because of colonialism is bound tofeel insulted by the blatant sexism of colonial administrators andmissionaries.BOOK REVIEWS 277British imperialists were so threatened by the sexual habits of Africansthat they lived in constant apprehension, for as McCulloch writes:Black Peril was a rich metaphor. It symbolised the erosion of whitemale authority over women, it was an emblem of racial pollution, and itsuggested that cities were unsafe. It was also a reminder of the threat ofarmed resistance . . . Black Peril hysteria served the interests of thewhite community by dramatising the dangers it faced and giving itsome leverage (p. S3).Driven by this fear and determined to reassert their control, whitecolonial settlers went around villages shooting blacks, raping their women,and beating up people in order to make them pay tax, dispossessing themof their resources, forcing them into employment in the white economyand, generally, in the words of the Methodist missionary, John White,behaving in an uncivilised manner.Unfortunately. McCulloch does not discuss African sexuality asAfricans saw it, but only as Europeans perceived it. This is the book'smajor weakness, for one would have expected that the author wouldhave, at least, tried to go beyond the textual evidence in colonial recordsin order to find out the African point of view and, thus, present a morebalanced account. It would have been interesting, for instance, to find outwhat the response of the Africans was to what the author describes asthe "rich metaphor" of the Black Peril. This would not have been difficultto investigate given the fact that many elderly African former domesticservants from the period McCulloch discusses are still alive and wouldhave shed more light on the African perspective. A book about colonialsexual politics across the racial divide cannot be balanced without adiscussion of the African perspective, especially since Africans were atthe receiving end of white abuse that was based on the white people'sself-generated myths about African sexuality. Thus, one would haveexpected McCulloch to pay some attention to the sexual perceptions ofthe very people whose rights he so passionately defends in the book.This weakness, notwithstanding, Black Peril is an interestingcontribution to scholarship on the colonial history of Zimbabwe and will,no doubt, fuel debate on past and present race relations in a countrywhich is still grappling with the legacy of colonialism and the racialpolarisation which it entrenched. Hopefully, it will lead people to realisethat there is a need to treat each other as human beings, regardless ofrace or gender.ReferencesBARNES. T. A. (1992) "The fight for control of African women's mobility incolonial Zimbabwe, 1900-1939" in Signs, 17(3), 586-608.JEATER, D. (1993) Marriage, Perrvesion and Power: The Construction ofMoral Discourse in Southern Rhodesia, 1890-1930 (Cambridge, CUP).r278 BOOK REVIEWSSCHMIDT, E. (1992) Peasants, Traders and Wives: Shona Women in theHistory of Zimbabwe, 1870-1939 (Portsmouth, Heinemann).University of Zimbabwe ISABELLA MUKONYORA