Empire and Sexual Deviance: Debating White Women’s Prostitution in Early 20th Century Salisbury, Southern Rhodesia

Abstract

This chapter examines the debates surrounding prostitution by white women in Salisbury’s Pioneer Street in the first two decades of the twentieth century.1 The prostitution of white women in early twentieth century Southern Rhodesia would appear at first to constitute a classic case of imperial deviance: white prostitutes not only flouted bourgeois codes of feminine respectability; by taking African clients, they transgressed the racial boundaries that structured settler society. By making their sexual availability public, moreover, these prostitutes presented to all in Salisbury the very visible manifestation of degraded white prestige. And yet, the colonial government (in the form of the British South Africa Company) adopted a position in favour of continued white female prostitution, particularly in Salisbury’s Pioneer Street. The colonial state preferred to supervise rather than eliminate sexual deviance. The state was prepared to tolerate the deviance of prostitution as a safety valve to what was perceived as a more grievous form of deviance — the sexual intimacy of white men with African women. It is within this context that prostitution was perceived by the colonial state as ‘a necessary evil’. The Salisbury residents, on the other hand, wanted prostitution to be eliminated, citing several reasons to justify this position. After an almost decade-long wrangle, the argument in favour of continued white female prostitution won out. The essay challenges, then, what has become a now-settled historical consensus — that inter-racial sex involving white women presented a far more heinous transgression than those involving white men — though, to be sure, the underlying interests at stake remained those of racial patriarchy.2