{"id":35739,"date":"2014-02-07T23:15:27","date_gmt":"2014-02-07T23:15:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=35739"},"modified":"2015-09-28T18:44:00","modified_gmt":"2015-09-28T18:44:00","slug":"decrying-white-peril-interracial-sex-and-the-rise-of-anticolonial-nationalism-in-the-gold-coast","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=35739","title":{"rendered":"Decrying White Peril: Interracial Sex and the Rise of Anticolonial Nationalism in the Gold Coast"},"content":{"rendered":"

Decrying White Peril: Interracial Sex and the Rise of Anticolonial Nationalism in the Gold Coast<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

The American Historical Review<\/a>
\nVolume 119, Issue 1<\/a> (February 2014)
\npages 78-110
\nDOI: 10.1093\/ahr\/119.1.78<\/a><\/p>\n

Carina E. Ray<\/a><\/strong>, Associate Professor of African and Afro- American Studies
\nBrandeis University, Waltham, Massachusetts<\/em><\/p>\n

In the summer and fall of 1919, the African-owned Gold Coast<\/a> press was awash with news stories and impassioned commentary about the postwar race riots<\/a> that had recently devastated Liverpool<\/a>, Cardiff<\/a>, and other major port cities in Britain. Angered by the sexual politics underlying the riots, Gold Coast commentators were quick to point out that the ports’ white rioters were not the only ones aggrieved by interracial sexual relations. Atu, a regular columnist for the Gold Coast Leader<\/em>, responded to news that black men were targeted for repatriation<\/a> after being attacked on the ports’ streets for \u201cconsorting with white women\u201d by reminding his readers \u201cthat in their own country white men freely consort with coloured women, forming illicit alliances, and in many cases leaving on the coast abandoned offspring to the precarious protection of needy native families.\u201d He continued, \u201cIt does not require\u00a0much skill to diagnose the canting hypocrisy underlying\u201d the riots, but the question now was whether \u201cany sensible man [could] suppose that these men will return to\u00a0their homes to view with complacency the spectacle of white men associated with \u00a0coloured women.\u201d In a few short lines, Atu vivified the \u201ctensions of empire\u201d created \u00a0by the movement of African men between metropole and colony, and their different \u00a0systems of raced and gendered sexual access.<\/p>\n

Not long after, the Leader<\/em> published a series of commentaries under the provocative \u00a0title \u201cImmoral Sanitation.\u201d The unnamed author of the series\u2019 first installment declared that unseemly sexual liaisons between African women and European\u00a0men had transformed the \u201csocial life\u201d of Sekondi, a busy coastal town in the Gold Coast\u2019s Western Province, into \u201ca condition of depravity.\u201d Elsewhere in the colony, \u00a0\u201ca woman who boldly acknowledges herself the kept mistress of a European is thrown out of society and virtually looked down upon by men and women of respectability,\u201d \u00a0claimed the writer. In Sekondi, however, he accused \u201cenergetic advocates of this dishonourable mode of life\u201d of enticing young women into sexual relationships with European men, whose \u201ccarnal lust\u201d was causing the moral deterioration of the town\u2019s womenfolk. The claims made in the \u201cImmoral Sanitation\u201d series, argued Leader columnist Atu, were more broadly applicable to \u201cother parts of the country where this traffic,\u201d which he likened to \u201cprostitution on the part of African women by a class of white men of a low caste,\u201d was carried on.<\/p>\n

The Leader\u2019s<\/em> lurid tales of illicit relationships between profligate white men and debauched African women during the early twentieth century contrast sharply with historical accounts of respectable marriages between entrepreneurial African women and European men during an earlier time period in coastal West Africa.\u00a0These unions produced West Africa\u2019s prominent Afro-European trading families and are often credited with successfully integrating European men into local West African societies and empowering African women during the long period of contact preceding the nineteenth-century advent of formal colonial rule. Interracial marriages\u00a0contracted in accordance with African customary law, and less frequently those recognized as lawful by the religious and administrative bodies associated with the European presence on the coast, were indeed regular features of the region\u2019s\u00a0littoral trading enclaves. Constrained by a dearth of sources, scholars have had comparatively little to say about the range of coercive and less seemly sexual encounters, including concubinage, prostitution, and rape, that also characterized the interracial sexual economies of West Africa\u2019s coastal trading hubs. While it is difficult to speculate about native Gold Coasters\u2019 reactions to these relationships prior to the twentieth century, scattered commentary from as early as 1902 in the Leader<\/em>, the colony\u2019s most politically radical newspaper, suggests that disquiet over them was not new.\u00a0With the appearance of the \u201cImmoral Sanitation\u201d series and likeminded commentaries, however, this simmering discontent boiled over into full-blown condemnation of local interracial sexual relations. These rare primary sources vividly illustrate how a diverse group of politically marginalized yet highly politicized Gold Coast men from the colony\u2019s embattled intelligentsia, along with disillusioned demobilized soldiers and seamen in post\u2013World War I<\/a> Britain, used these illicit relationships to challenge the moral legitimacy of British colonial rule. On the one hand, by portraying African women as either immoral race traitors or innocents in need of protection from predatory Europeans, these men were able to claim a leadership role as moral stewards of the nation. On the other hand, by casting European men as sexually promiscuous interlopers, they challenged the very idea that Europeans were morally suited to rule the colonial world…<\/p>\n

Read or purchase the article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Decrying White Peril: Interracial Sex and the Rise of Anticolonial Nationalism in the Gold Coast The American Historical Review Volume 119, Issue 1 (February 2014) pages 78-110 DOI: 10.1093\/ahr\/119.1.78 Carina E. Ray, Associate Professor of African and Afro- American Studies Brandeis University, Waltham, Massachusetts In the summer and fall of 1919, the African-owned Gold Coast […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1295,12,459,8],"tags":[1629,5490,3224,16934,16935,751],"class_list":["post-35739","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-africa","category-articles","category-history","category-media-archive","tag-american-historical-review","tag-carina-e-ray","tag-carina-ray","tag-gold-coast","tag-gold-coast-leader","tag-the-american-historical-review"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35739","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=35739"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35739\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":42967,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35739\/revisions\/42967"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=35739"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=35739"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=35739"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}