Jack the Ripper in South Africa? Charles van Onselen's The Fox and the Flies

ABSTRACT

The Fox and the Flies is supplied with the context not only of Charles van Onselen's oeuvre, devoted to labourers and peasants and members of the marginalised underclass, but of work on prostitution and ‘white slavery’ in South Africa and elsewhere in the world. The ‘Fox’, Joseph Silver, an international criminal and white-slavery trafficker, may possibly have been – as Van Onselen strongly suggests in this book – Jack the Ripper, the London serial killer. Just as likely, however, it is argued here, Silver was not Jack, but a conniving pimp and career criminal, a brutal man if not a serial killer. The point is made by evaluating the evidence supplied, but even more, by evaluating the effects of taking Silver as Jack, comparing the treatment Van Onselen affords Silver in The Fox and the Flies, with his sketch of him and his milieu in Studies in the Social History of the Witwatersrand.

Keywords:

• Jack the Ripper
• Whitechapel
• prostitution
• Joseph Silver
• Joseph Lis
• criminality
• white slavery
• policing