Description: From 1902 until the mid-1930s, Southern Rhodesia was swept by a series of panics, known by the name Black Peril, prompted by the presumed sexual threat to white women by black men. Tension over Black Peril provoked a flood of legislation designed to control the sexuality of African men and women and the sexual "transgressions" of white females, including the introduction of the death penalty for attempted rape. Over the next decades more than 20 men were executed, though many were innocent of any serious crime. As Jock McCulloch shows, the panics were complex events which encompassed such issues as miscegenation, the management of venereal disease, the politics of concubinage, and the construction of whiteness. The way in which the state and civil society responded to those controversies was important in establishing the boundaries of race, class, and gender. Driven by fear and the desire for retribution and cleansing, the panics also involved very real demonstrations of state power. They served the interests of the white community by dramatizing the dangers it faced, thereby giving it some leverage against its enemies. But as this history shows, those gains only came at a price.

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