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Abstract
In 1912, in a grand public spectacle, the majority of the white population of the Witwatersrand mobilized against perceived “outrages” on women and children committed by African men in either a consensual or non-consensual manner: the “Black Peril.” As a case study, this paper focuses on select popular culture sources generated by this particular “scare” as its evidentiary base. It builds on prior historiographical appeals to affect and emotion in understanding “Black Peril” scares. The paper reexamines the “Black Peril” by attending, first, to its discursive output and therein to embodied, affective, or emotional, and automatic, or unconscious, “ways of knowing.” Second, it reads this discourse alongside non-discursive, unconscious, or automatic, baseline understandings of race and segregation from which the outbursts sprang. The paper tentatively suggests the possibility of a group identity that was not primarily constituted against, or through, fear and anxiety (of Africans). Instead, it was made in a self-referential and self-witnessing manner, and was self-assured, perhaps even imperious.
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Notes
1 “Church Commission on the Black Peril,” July 1–9, 1912 (hereafter Church Commission,) SANNC account, 14, 847. Heartfelt thanks to Karin Shapiro, Shane Graham, the Safundi editorial team, and two anonymous reviewers for their belief in, and guidance on, this article. Through the years, the material benefitted greatly from conversations with Elizabeth Thornberry, and participants in the Estelle Friedman seminar at the Berkshire Women’s History Conference, the NEWSA conference, the Columbia University Seminar on Contemporary Africa, and the University of the Western Cape South African Contemporary History and Humanities Seminar. The University of the South provided research and conference funding.
2 The Black Peril discourse was, at times, articulated in a language of contagion and infection, which led to talk of a “cure.” The most striking example of this is an advertisement in The Rand Daily Mail for a small black handgun with the caption: BLACK PERIL – THE ONLY CURE. The Rand Daily Mail (hereafter RDM), 1 May 1912.
3 For a good introduction to ongoing debates in, and the literature of, colonialism and panics, see Harald Fischer-Tiné, editor, Anxieties, Fear and Panic in Colonial Setting. Fischer-Tiné and Christine Whyte note that the “history of colonial empires has been shaped to a considerable extent by negative emotions such as anxiety, fear and embarrassment, as well as by the regular occurrence of panics” (“Introduction: Empires and Emotions,” in Anxieties, Fears, 1). I share the focus on panic, affect, and emotion, but hope my work brings a potential new analysis to bear.
4 The Petition was printed in RDM, 27 April 1912. This article is heavily reliant on the RDM. I am using it to illustrate my popular racism approach, but I am aware that, based on its inherent biases and target audience, the reliance potentially limits the universality of my findings. While the RDM was slanted towards the British, and settler capital, it was the closest source to a paper of record at this time. It reached about beyond the Witwatersrand in scope and ambition. Its ability to conceptualize, publicize, and successfully carry off the “Black Peril” petition drive speaks to its scope and popularity. The early years of the RDM are touched on in Gibson, Final Deadline. It eagerly awaits a historical monograph.
5 For example, the RDM conducted an ongoing editorial campaign against coverage from the Cape newspapers in particular, one of which described the reaction to the scare as “most deplorable.” The Mail replied: “One hears that Johannesburgers are suffering from a scare, and that the evil has been exaggerated. In fact the men on the Reef are told that they ought to take these things more calmly. No doubt one can attain a proper state of calmness without much difficulty, in the security of Capetown.” RDM, 26 April 1912.
6 The 1913 “Report on Assaults on Women,” written by a commission created after the RDM petition and the general “Black Peril” uproar, found no evidence for assaults in “objective fact nor ostensible historical ‘cause’” (Cornwell, “George Webb Hardy’s The Black Peril,” 443–44). Fischer-Tiné and Christine Whyte note that “Interestingly, in most of the case studies in the present volume [on colonial panics], a solid basis for imperial anxiety or panic appears to have been absent. This begs the question of what, if these anxieties or panics were misplaced, is the point in studying the underlying events….” Their answer, which this article shares, is that even when the “events so feared rarely came to pass,” they still generated “huge amounts of ‘real’ documentation, communication, and discussion…[that] help us get a better understanding of the inner workings of empires and the complexities of colonial relations” However, my analysis depends upon the “misplacement” as central and constitutive (Fischer-Tiné and Whyte, “Introduction,” 10–11).
7 The “Black Peril” discourse crystallizes around a primitive, uncontrollable, African masculinity that was being stimulated by the vices of the cities (alcohol, compound life, even “obscene pictures” and “shady bioscope exhibitions”), and that threatens European civility and female virtue in every setting.
8 Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow, 237. Decades of experimental data in cognitive and neuropsychology that have confirmed that intuition (more pejoratively thought of as irrationality), affect, emotion, and the unconscious are far more powerful forces in our lives, decision making, and storytelling (the building blocks of history, we might say), and crucially, can be seen to operate in more distinctive, systematic, or predictable ways, than have been previously understand. Kahneman calls this level of understanding – fast thinking – because it operates, continuously and powerfully, but outside of conscious awareness, which he terms – slow thinking. Slow thinking is responsible for subjectivity and a sense of agency, but it is often at odds with fast thinking. My project owes a great debt to Kahneman. His work, and collaboration with Amos Tversky, has been popularized by Michael Lewis in The Undoing Project.
9 This eclectic collection of evidence (Church Commission) was gathered for the Sixth General Missionary Conference of South Africa that had set itself the task, under the direction of the Reverend James Henderson of Lovedale, to investigate the conditions of urban and rural, European and African, life that might have contributed to the “Black Peril.” Henderson sent out over 130 questionnaires with 23 specific questions. Leading European and African intellectuals, including Sol Plaatje, several Moffats, W.T. Brownlee, W.C. Scully, John Dube, and J.K. Bokwe sent highly confidential answers to the lengthy questionnaire. Henderson also tried to compile statistics, and in general, gather whatever evidence he could that would speak to the issue.
10 Participants in the “Black Peril” discourse articulate, debate, and invest in the specifics of a segregated world, like the forging of passes, closed compounds, and allocation of voting rights. They explore a literal separation of the “races” – a scenario in which African laborers working on fields, in mines, and at factories, would withdraw to closed compounds at night, and have no interaction with white residential communities. Previous work on segregation and race has relied on sources from politicians, bureaucrats, and social scientists. See, for example, Dubow, Racial Segregation and the Origins of Apartheid; Posel, Making of Apartheid; Evans, Bureaucracy and Race.
11 Popular racism evokes both Dubow’s “scientific racism” and Diana Wylie’s “cultural racism” from Starving on a Full Stomach. Dubow allows that he focused on discourses of “intellectual debate” in order to “situate” “popular racism”: “Because so much of popular racism exists as a matter of unstated assumptions and unthinking responses; it often has more to do with the absence than the presence of considered thought, and is therefore particularly intractable to deal with,” see Dubow, Scientific Racism, especially 6–7. I hope this essay successfully grapples with that intractability. Leslie Witz’s reading of the discourse surrounding Huberta the Hippo demonstrates the potential of popular culture in South African historiography (Witz, “The making of an Animal Biography”).
12 Schaefer, Religious Affects: Animality, Evolution, and Power, 4. Here, I am using discourse as a shorthand for Hunt’s “language, text, and representation” (“The Self and History,” 1586). For a recent account of affect and emotion in history and historiography, see Plamper, History of Emotions; for a cogent critique of the affective turn in the humanities and the emotional turn in history, see Leys, “The Turn to Affect”; for an embrace and defense of an affective approach, with a focus on affective economies, see Schaefer, Religious Affects.
13 Lynn Hunt, past president of The American Historical Association, has recently argued for an “embodied self” and new “ways of knowing” as useful analytical devices to which historians might turn in seeking new ways to explore the past. Hunt notes that historians have “long been allergic to psychological forms of explanation,” and she is wary of being accused of resurrecting 1970s style psychohistory. She turns to neuroscience and neurohistory, through the work of Daniel Smail (On Deep History and the Brain) as well as other neuroscience inspired theoreticians of consciousness and the self (see Hunt, “The Self and its History,” 1577–78), and Hunt, Writing History in the Global Era. It is the reliance on neuroscience, particularly experimental neuroscience, that Leys attacks. I suggest that attention to affective economies, critically informed psychoanalytical inspired analysis (see Hook below), and the experimental cognitive psychology that led to the dual-process model, and their intersection might be fruitful avenues to explore in reinvigorating the historical study of bodies, selves, and society.
14 Doris, Talking to Our Selves, 49, 51–3. In the larger project from which this article is drawn, I take seriously the implications for history, and the humanities in general, of the “dual process” model of cognition, which destabilized established notions that people were “generally rational” and that their thinking was “normally sound.” Now supported by an immense wealth of research, which while subject to sharp scientific debate around its specifics, is consistent on its largest point, dual-process has revolutionized economics and psychology. I follow John Doris, a philosopher and self-described moral psychologist (working at the intersection of cognitive science, moral psychology, and philosophical ethics) who puts it of ourselves (and, for historians, of our historical subjects): “You may not know what you are doing, or why you are doing it, and if you did know, you might not like it.” Doris calls this the “subversive unconscious” (ix).
15 “We in the USA – and, I think, scholars in South Africa – imagine whiteness…as formed over and against a ‘Black’ other,” (David Roediger, “Foreward,” Rethinking White Societies, 2020, x). Bret Shadle develops a concept of “prestige” to explain the formation and maintenance of white supremacy in Kenya, during the early years of the twentieth century, but does not develop its embodied, subjective, affective, or intuitive dimensions as such (Shadle, Souls of White Folk, 2015). Please see text and footnotes above for literature that argues for fear and anxiety within the South African context. This conceptual edifice of fear and anxiety, and lack of perceived control and self-belief, may be beginning to crack. For example, in his work on colonial Kenya, Will Jackson insists that where “British imperialists presented themselves, their identities, and their hold on power as safe and secure…such acts of self-assertion only thinly concealed a subterranean – and no less constant – strain of doubt.” But he then notes that, even during Mau Mau, where “fears were justified [unlike the reality of the “Black Peril”],” only one in five of the mentally ill subjects about whom he is writing even mentioned Africans or Mau Mau as a cause of their distress, see Jackson, “Settler’s Demise,” 73–5. My article suggests that a move towards confidence, or imperiousness, may be possible in South Africa, and I hope this proves inspirational to scholars of colonial Kenya and Zimbabwe, in particular.
16 Due to its narrow source base, and experimental orientation, this article is employing the term “group identity,” but scholars have begun to suggest that popular culture, and “lived experience” might be helpful in analyzing more determinative group identities like “whiteness.” For example, David Roediger praises last year’s Rethinking White Societies in Southern Africa, 1930s – 1990s as the “fullest flowering of a study of whiteness based in workplaces, unions, and everyday life yet produced,” (Roediger, “Forward,” x). For a focus on the constitutive possibilities of the “minutiae of racialized experience…the typically unspoken facets of white…sensibility,” Derek Hook, A Critical Psychology of the Postcolonial: The Mind of Apartheid, 2012, 3. For Kelly Oliver, a philosopher and critical theorist, “subjectivity is made possible” by the “ability to respond to” and “address” others. Her theory of self and social interaction relies on a self that is formed through affective and discursive ties between people (dialogic), rather than through processes that mark the self’s difference (antagonistic) from its image in society and from other people. Oliver uses the term, witnessing, to claim that subjectivity and identity are not formed through (or mostly through) “hostility towards others,” but rather through different [and perhaps ‘new’] kinds” of “connection.” (Kelly Oliver, Witnessing: Beyond Recognition, 2001, especially 5–7.)
17 Anxieties, Fear and Panic looks at multiple colonial settings, but has several key essays from historians of South Africa and Africa. Fischer-Tiné and Whyte point to a paradox (one of several inherent in this historical terrain) that “anxiety, fear and angst” became part of the “everyday experience” of “culturally alien colonizers,” because they found themselves as a “minuscule elite” capable of “exercis[ing] power over an often numerically stronger ‘native’ population” (“Empires and Emotions,” 1–2). I address this paradox, and others, later in the text.
18 Van Onselen, New Ninevah, 45–54. Jeremy Martens sees a similar pattern in an earlier ““Black Peril”” scare in Natal (Martens, “Settler Homes, Manhood and ‘Houseboys’”). For another interesting case study from a later period, see Hyslop, “Incident at Ziman Brothers.”
19 Thornberry, “Rape, Race, and Respectability in a South African Port City,” 863–4. Historians have used the “Black Peril” as an early example of the “Swaart gevaar” (Black danger) discourse to explain how political parties were able to push through racially restrictive legislation; see for example Nightingale, Segregation.
20 David M. Anderson’s article on “Black Perils” in Kenya is a good example of work that de-emphasizes the instrumental political use of the panics, but does insist on their ability to illuminate fears, and “deeper anxieties.” He ties these fears and anxieties to ongoing “social and cultural challenges,” and notes their role in the construction and maintenance of “settler society” (Anderson, “Sexual Threat and Settler Society.”) See also McCulloch, Black Peril, White Virtue; Graham, “Reading the Unspeakable: Rape In J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace”; Cornwell, “George Webb Hardy’s The Black Peril.”
21 Etherington, “Colonial Panics Big and Small in the British Empire (1865-1907),” in Anxieties, Fear and Panic, 202. Van Onselen also allows for a “society ridden with fear and race prejudice,” and “acute European anxiety” (Van Onselen, New Ninevah, 26–7, 49–50).
22 Keegan discusses the possibility that white women, bored and repressed in a world of domestic ennui, might welcome the attentions of black men with whom they commonly shared long hours as too subversive of dominant perceptions to be tolerated. Keegan also highlights the concerns of “poor whiteism,” which was alleged to be feeding interracial sexual contact through consensual relationships, and through actual and alleged assaults, reflected a distinct challenge to the racial dominance of white society and the cultural distinctions upon which it had come to stand (Keegan, “Gender, Degeneration and Sexual Danger”).
23 Krikler invokes “psycho historical language” based on Freudian psychology, with regard to trauma and repression, in explaining Afrikaner fears of a race war or “black revolt,” (for which there was no “convincing evidence at all” at the time or in the archive) (Krikler, “Social Neurosis and Hysterical Pre-Cognition in South Africa”; see also White Rising: The 1922 Insurrection and Racial Killing in South Africa, especially Chapter 5, which employs a social psychological approach towards incidents of racial violence). In White Writing, and especially “Mind of Apartheid,” J.M. Coetzee delineates a psychologically-based analysis of apartheid thinking, albeit from the top down, that depends upon paradoxes and conflicted states of mind, a “double, ambivalent motion – succumbing drawing back” (Coetzee, “The Mind of Apartheid,” 22). Psychological terminology and insights peek through Van Onselen’s materialist framework, including his use of “hysteria” to describe “Black Peril” episodes, and an appeal to unconscious understandings in communication with, and gifting to, “houseboys” (Van Onselen, New Ninevah, 38–9, 45).
24 Fischer-Tiné and Whyte, “Introduction,” 3, 5, and Will Jackson, “The Settler’s Demise,” in Anxieties, Fears, and Panic, 74.
25 Jackson, “Settler’s Demise,” 75–6. Nightingale hints at an analysis that integrates emotion, affect, paradox, and political instrumentalism, but focuses on the latter: “Whites often justify segregation in terms of their racial supremacy. But just as important are justifications based on whites’ vulnerability…Their intimate race war also involved gender conflict between white men and black men over women’s widely worshiped (but just as widely mistrusted) control over their own sexual feelings. Such conflicts infused segregationist policies with a paradoxical mixture of emotions, …[in Johannesburg whites’] social anxieties…daily agonies and arrogances…accumulate[d] into a much more potent political force than in other colonial cities” (Nightingale, Segregation, 12, 262–63). Grace Hale’s Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890-1940, which looks at popular culture, consumption, race, and segregation in the US South, uses the figure of the “mammy” to examine the “contradictions central to the culture of segregation (they are manifold)” (113).
26 RDM, 15 April 1912. Although it is outside the scope of this article, Van Onselen has a fascinating coda to this origin case of the 1912 “Black Peril” which he calls a “single act of savagery” which did more to “unleash the horrors of racial hatred on the Witwatersrand than any other incident before World War One.” In 1912, after two years of intense police work, evidence emerged that the Harrison rape (as it was known) was conducted by a group of men and women allied with an Amalaita gang from Turffontein, and that the assault was justified to the group as retaliation for Harrison’s mistreatment of her African domestic servant (Van Onselen, New Ninevah, 59–60).
27 For example, from Hillary near Durban, a report of an attempted rape of a white woman in her house by an African employed as a gardener, from Kimberley, an attempt by an unknown assailant in a house, see RDM 26 April, 29 April 1912, respectively.
28 RDM, 18 April 1912.
29 The reported details of this assault are graphic, and impossible to verify. The alleged assailant was “in the employ” of the Van Rensburg family, therefore more akin to a “houseboy” than a man assigned a “vagrant” identity. Crucially, the report states that the “accused has admitted that he admitted a similar crime in Johannesburg about six months ago, but escaped capture,” which may speak to the scarcity of incidents in rural areas, as such, and the lack of baseline concern or alarm about the possibility of their occurrence (RDM, 29 April 1912).
30 RDM, 1 May 1912.
31 Ibid.
32 A recent example of work that looks at similar issues to the ones I explore, but from the point of view of spatial analysis, is Ginsburg, At Home with Apartheid, which foregrounds affective and intimate ties, and the paradoxes inherent in domestic settings.
33 On affective economy as “regularly occurring arrangements and distributions of affect,” see Hook, Mind, 89–90.
34 Ibid., 117, 127, 129, 149, 221.
35 For the USA and lynching culture, see Hale, Making Whiteness, especially Chapter 5, and Nightingale, Segregation.
36 For details on first Turffontein meeting, see RDM, 20 April 1912. While this article is purposefully restricted to 1912, drives had been proposed on the Rand in the past. From a 1908 press clipping: “[In response to] an outrage by a black upon a white woman, [a resident of Kenilworth] proposes a Vigilance Society: men will dress as women and saunter through the plantation at dusk.” University of Witwatersrand, Special Collections, A881 Gb 19 June 1908, the identity of the specific newspaper is unestablished. This kernel of evidence speaks to the fantastical, even cartoonish, nature of the response to the “Black Peril” I develop in this article.
37 It is instructive to keep in mind that, while this “drive” was undoubtedly violent, it represented the most extreme outbreak of popular violence during these years. Also, unlike the US examples (of lynching) to which it has been compared, it was subject to policing, and widely condemned by state and popular authorities.
38 For the drive, see RDM, 23 April 1912. One reason that I came to question how seriously the drives and other responses to the “Peril” reflected fear and anxiety was when I explored reports of another “Drive” in the RDM and other press. In some cases, news reports from both drives were literally run side by side. On 29 April 1912, The Star reported two stories in adjacent columns. One column was headlined: BLACK PERIL -GERMISTON INTRUDER - Screams bring prompt and exciting chase. The other was headlined - VERMIN DRIVE - FIRST HUNT - Huge Kopje stormed - Disappointing bag…Wild dogs too artful. The story’s lead reported: “The great vermin drive has begun.” In work elsewhere, I explore the cartoonish nature of the threat represented by the “wild dogs” that were the subject of the vermin drive in the eastern Transvaal, and how the drive, instead, can be analyzed as another example of embodied selves and affective economies.
39 Carl Nightingale’s Segregation, which explores a “global” “segregation mania” from 1890–1920s, emphasizes the “messier aspects of segregation,” its “contradictions,” and its “intrinsically paradoxical nature.” He describes “paradoxical dramas” on “multiple stages,” particularly “political dramas,” turning to the language of the stage and performance, but descriptively and not analytically (11–4).
40 Hook, Mind, 182. “Implicitly present without being explicitly stated,” fantasy precedes the reality that it thus enables. It “provides the subliminal narrative frame that underlies the conscious production of discourse” (Hook, Mind, 103, 129, and 129).
41 RDM, for Burton, 24 April, for petition, 7 May; for educated natives, 29 April, for labor saving 1 May 1912. Van Onselen’s work on domestic service on the Witwatersrand from the early 1980s is still the most comprehensive source on the matter (New Ninevah, Chapter 1).
42 Hook, Mind, 117.
43 Ibid., 158–60.
44 Ibid., 162–6.
45 Church Commission: Die Transvaaler, 3 May 1912.
46 Church Commission. For “virile,” see unattributed typewritten treatise, entitled “The ‘Black Peril’ Question, with outline of Causes and Cure.” For “protected,” see D.C. McArthur’s response to questionnaire.
47 Church Commission, Unattributed newspaper article, with ad for “Football Boots, 1912 styles.
48 Taussig, Shamanism, Colonialism, and The Wild Man, 134.
49 Select historians have gestured towards an inverted, unconscious, explanation. For example, Etherington argues that, “in a deeper sense, angst about thefts and invasions [panics akin to the “Black Peril] brought to the surface an irremediable, perpetually guilty conscience about the invasions and thefts of land that underpinned the whole colonial enterprise” (“Colonial Panics,” 205). Similary, Krikler notes that “seemingly irrational fears….arose from a process of repressing from conscious memory recent historical experience” (“Social Neurosis,” 492).
50 As one example, David M. Anderson argues that the more shocking and exceptional “Black Peril” cases, and circulating stories, were, the more they were capable of revealing underlying, even hidden, anxieties and fears within the settler community. They became “conduit[s] for anxieties already in place,” and “triggered” anxiety and fear. The “character” of the offence was “more important” than its “frequency” (“Sexual Threat,” 49, 66–8).
51 RDM, 7 May 1912.
52 Church Commission, Die Transvaaler – Zuid Afrika, 3 May 1912. I am willing to acknowledge that there likely were a select number of consensual interracial relationships, some of which, for a variety of reasons, may have spurred “Black Peril” accusations, but I do not follow Van Onselen (and historians who have relied upon his assertion) that consensual romances were far more common between male African domestic servants, and white or European women, especially fellow servants, than has been commonly acknowledged. Van Onselen does qualify this claim to exclude “bourgeois” households, due to the fact that they were not the sites of the socio-economic tensions he says were common to lower-middle- and lower-class households. For evidence, he relies upon the conjecture and insinuation of Sol Plaatje in The Mote and the Beam, the “Black Peril Commission,” and ministers attached to the South African Mission to the Compounds and Interior (Van Onselen, New Ninevah, 47–9).
53 RDM, 7 May 1912. In her response to the GMCSA questionnaire, the only female correspondent, a Mrs James Gray, notes that “Natives are often treated as machines, and their animal nature ignored” (Church Commission, Questionnaires).
54 “Human beings living in groups shape their lives [or behave and think in a racialized manner], not as isolated reflectors, but as participants in an ongoing negotiation – a negotiation that simultaneously constrains and expresses who they are” (Doris, Talking, 148). Will Jackson’s study of Kenyan colonialism (through its mentally ill), while not focusing on group identity, supports a reading of it as formed through these, and other, self-referential processes, and not through racial antagonism: “The settlers’ demise in Kenya was as much to do with social disintegration within the European community as it was any intrinsic racial hatred within the settler mind.” Crucially for this project, “‘The Settler’ was an affective ideal” (“Settler’s Demise,” 78).
55 RDM, 26 April 1912.
56 RDM, 13 June 1912. Van Onselen is unique among historians of the “Black Peril” in calling for a study of the “lull before and between the storms [of social tension].” To him, these periods reveal tension in domestic settings between employees and domestic servants, and between domestic servants themselves, as well as romantic relationships, or relationships of what society at the time would have considered, undue familiarity (Van Onselen, New Ninevah, 46–47).
57 RDM, 11 May 1912.
58 RDM, 7 May 1912.
59 My larger project elaborates on Kahneman’s notion of cognitive ease and helps to explain how society might be arranged to facilitate a sense of calm or carelessness. Cognitive ease suggests most people find “cognitive effort at least mildly unpleasant and avoid it as much as possible. Further, an environment….that facilitates the operations of [fast thinking] through cognitive ease by being predictable and easy to assess will be judged more favorably by our minds.” “Operating under conditions of cognitive ease lead to feelings of “safety and familiarity.” Indeed, this mood can be attained (although this is a “cognitive illusion”) in a regulated environment that does not raise anomalies or roil emotions, except infrequently. It is an environment in which a subject’s daily life and interaction do not require the intervention of slow thinking (Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow, 45, 102). Importantly, Kahneman argues that humans will do whatever they can to create societies that revert to a state of ease.
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Roger S. Levine
Roger S. Levine teaches courses on African, environmental and colonial history in the History Department, as well as the Environmental Studies and International and Global Studies programs. He is a cultural historian of modern South African and African history whose lifelong passion for and interest in African and South African history derives from his childhood in South Africa. He has published articles in Rethinking History, KRONOS: Southern African Histories, various edited collections, and The African Historical Review.