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

FROM THE PUBLISHER

In the early 20th-century, Southern Rhodesia was swept by a series of panics. The sexual threat posed by black men to white women, known as Black Peril, led in 1903 to the introduction of the death penalty for attempted rape. Over the next three decades more than twenty men were executed, many of them innocent. Their fate is a reminder that sexual relations between Europeans and colonial subjects were one of the most problem-laden features of colonial life.

WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING

Herman M. Hattaway