Heterogeneous imperialism and the regulation of sexuality in British West Africa

Journal of the History of Sexuality

Volumn 14, Issue 3, 2005, Pages 291-315

  Phillips, Richard ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF LIVERPOOL   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 33645766508     PISSN: 10434070     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/sex.2006.0029     Document Type: Review

References (118)

1. Michel Foucault, History of Sexuality, trans. Robert Hurley (London, 1978), 1:103.
2. Ronald Hyam, Empire and Sexuality: The British Experience (Manchester, U.K., 1990), 2, 152.
3. Josephine E. Butler, Revival and Extension of the Abolitionist Cause (Winchester, U.K., 1887).
4. Butler's publications and letters are reprinted, with those of other purity campaigners, in Josephine Butler and the Prostitution Campaigns: Diseases of the Body Politic, 5 vols., ed. J. Jordan and I. Sharp (London, 2003).
5. R. C. Harris, "The Simplification of Europe Overseas," Annals of the Association of American Geographers 67 (1977): 469-83.
6. Laura Ann Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule (Berkeley, 2002).
7. Philippa Levine, Prostitution, Race and Politics: Policing Venereal Disease in the British Empire (London, 2003), 227.
8. Lenore Manderson, "Colonial Desires: Sexuality, Race and Gender in British Malaya," Journal of the History of Sexuality 7 (1997): 373.
9. Kristin Mann and Richard Roberts, Law in Colonial Africa (London, 1991), 3.
10. The first of the English Contagious Diseases Acts (1864) provided for regulation in designated areas; this temporary legislation expired in 1866, when it was renewed with the Contagious Diseases Act (1866) and succeeded by the Contagious Diseases Act (1869), which extended coverage to a series of additional areas. This act was suspended in 1883 and repealed in 1886. In India the Cantonments Act (1864) provided for regulation in military zones; the Indian Contagious Diseases Act (1868) extended regulation to civilian areas before being repealed in 1888. See Judith R. Walkowitz, Prostitution and Victorian Society: Women, Class and the State (Cambridge, 1980), 1, 2.
11. Richard Rathbone, "Law, Lawyers and Politics in Ghana in the 1940s," in Contesting Colonial Hegemony: State and Society in Africa and India, ed. D. Engels and S. Marks (London, 1994), 227-47, 231.
12. Butler, Revival and Extension, 13.
13. Laura Ann Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault's "History of Sexuality" and the Colonial Order of Things (Durham, N.C., 1996).
14. Laura Ann Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault's "History of Sexuality" and the Colonial Order of Things (Durham, N.C., 1996). Ibid.
15. Levine.
16. Ibid., 292.
17. Lenore Manderson, Sickness and the State: Health and Illness in Colonial Malaya (Cambridge, 1996).
18. Josephine E. Butler, "A Grave Question That Needs Answering by the Churches of Great Britain," reprinted from the Sentinel (London, 1886), 1.
19. Levine, 1, 25.
20. The first domestic CD act (1864) applied to Portsmouth, Plymouth (including Devonport and Stonehouse), Woolwich, Chatham, Sheerness, Aldershot, Colchester, Shorncliffe, the Curragh, Cork, and Queenstown. The act of 1866 also included Windsor. The modified act of 1869 was extended and applied also to Canterbury, Dover, Gravesend, Maidstone, Winchester, and Southampton (a total of eighteen stations). See Walkowitz, 2.
21. E. B. Van Heyningen, "The Social Evil in the Cape Colony 1868-1902: Prostitution and the Contagious Diseases Acts," Journal of Southern African Studies 10 (1984): 170-97.
22. M. Leavitt, "West Coast of Africa," Sentinel 16, no. 6 (June 1890): 65.
23. Church of England Purity Society annual report (London, 1902), 11.
24. Richard Phillips, "Imperialism and the Regulation of Sexuality: Colonial Legislation on Contagious Diseases and Ages of Consent," Journal of Historical Geography 28 (2002): 339-62;
25. Church Missionary Society, Church Missionary Society's African Missions: Sierra Leone (London, 1863, 1899).
26. Correspondence, Sierra Leone Church Times, 17 February 1886: 4.
27. Phillips, "Imperialism."
28. Public Record Office, London (hereafter PRO), CO 267/331, Gray to the clerk of council, 15 February 1876.
29. PRO, CO 267/332, minutes of Legislative Council, 1874. There are no records of this proposal or of the colonial government's reactions to it. The minutes of the Executive Council do not record any meetings at all in December 1874, and those for the Legislative Council do not record any reference to contagious diseases.
30. PRO, CO 270/332, minutes of Legislative Council, 24 November 1876.
31. Sir Cornelius Hendrichsen Kortright (1817-97) was governor of the West African settlements from 1875 to 1877. See Who Was Who (London, 1920), 1:295. Kortright's name appeared on the statute books for Trinidad in relation to Ordinance 19 (2 August 1868), "An Ordinance enacted by the Governor of Trinidad, with the Advice and Consent of the Legislative Council thereof, for the better prevention of Contagious Diseases, C. H. Kortright."
32. Luise White, Comforts of Home: Prostitution and Colonial Nairobi (Chicago, 1990), 176.
33. PRO, CO 267/332, Lovell to Governor Rowe, 19 February 1876.
34. PRO, CO 267/332, dispatch 44, 24 February 1877.
35. PRO, CO 267/331, Kortright to the earl of Carnarvon, Colonial Office, 24 February 1877.
36. West African Reporter, 19 September 1876: 2.
37. Robert B. Clarke, Description of the Manners and Customs of the Liberated Africans. . . (London, 1843), 92.
38. Richard F. Burton, Wanderings in West Africa, 2 vols. (London, 1863), 1:267.
39. PRO, CO 267/331, Gray to clerk of council, 15 February 1876.
40. PRO, CO 267/333, War Office to undersecretary of state, Colonial Office, 7 July 1877.
41. Sierra Leone Blue Book (Freetown, 1874).
42. Soma Hewa, Colonialism, Tropical Disease, and Imperial Medicine (Lanham, Md., 1995);
43. R. Macleod and M. Lewis, eds., Disease, Medicine, and Empire: Perspectives on Western Medicine and the Experience of European Expansion (London, 1988).
44. PRO, CO 267/333, dispatch on sanitary condition of Freetown, 26 May 1877.
45. West African Reporter, 19 September 1876: 2.
46. "The Moral Dangers of Militarism in America," Sentinel 21, no. 7 (July 1899): 89.
47. John Morris, Our Sin and Our Shame (London, 1885), 3.
48. William Catchpool, "The War System and Immorality," Sentinel 9, no. 12 (December 1887): 144.
49. Alfred S. Dyer, Slavery Under the British Flag (London, 1886), 44, 95.
50. J. C. Martens, " 'Almost a Public Calamity': Prostitutes, 'Nurseboys' and Attempts to Control Venereal Diseases in Colonial Natal, 1886-1890," South African Historical Journal 45 (2001): 27-52.
51. In 1841 the governor remarked upon the "total absence of any armed force in the colony," a condition that did not change significantly until the next century. Robert Clyne, Colonial Blue: A History of the South Australian Police Force, 1836-1916 (Adelaide, 1987), 67.
52. South Australian Police Department, 8 September 1875, cited in ibid., 982.
53. Radhika Ramasubban, "Imperial Health in British India, 1857-1900," in Macleod and Lewis, 38-60. In postmutiny India investments in health and sanitation (living quarters, water supply and drainage, hospitals) were designed to improve the efficiency, retention, and recruitment of British soldiers.
54. Tom Gale, "The Struggle against Disease in Sierra Leone: Early Sanitary Reforms in Freetown," Africana Research Bulletin 6, no. 2 (1976): 29-44.
55. PRO, CO 267/331, Kortright to Carnarvon, 24 February 1877.
56. Paul Mmegha Mbaeyi, British Military and Naval Forces in West African History, 1807-1874 (London, 1978), 62.
57. Ibid., 176.
58. Anthony Clayton and David Killingray, Khaki and Blue: Military and Police in British Colonial Africa (Athens, 1989).
59. White.
60. Havelock Ellis, Studies in the Psychology of Sex ( Philadelphia, 1910), 3:260.
61. Edward W. Blyden, "African Life and Customs," Sierra Leone Weekly News (1908): 24 (reprinted, London, 1980).
62. White.
63. Clarke, 76.
64. J. Holman, Travels in Madeira, Sierra Leone, Tenerife . . . (London, 1840), 123;
65. T. E. Poole, Life, Scenery and Customs in Sierra Leone and the Gambia (London, 1850), 1:296.
66. Cited by A. Gill, Ruling Passions: Sex, Race and Empire (London, 1995), 33.
67. Michael P. Banton, West African City: A Study of Tribal Life in Freetown (London, 1957);
68. E. Muga, Studies in Prostitution (Nairobi, 1980).
69. Kenneth Little, African Women in Towns (Cambridge, 1973); White.
70. PRO, CO 267/331, Kortright to Carnarvon, 24 February 1877, emphasis added.
71. White, 176.
72. Taslim Olawale Elias, Ghana and Sierra Leone: The Development of Their Laws and Constitutions ( London, 1962).
73. West African Reporter, 19 September 1876: 2.
74. Elias.
75. Engels and Marks, 1-15, esp. 2.
76. Rathbone, "Law, Lawyers and Politics in Ghana in the 1940s," in ibid., 228.
77. Cited by Elias, 240.
78. Anthony Pagden, Lords of All the World: Ideologies of Empire in Spain, Britain and France c. 1500-1800 (New Haven, 1995).
79. P. Scully, "Rape, Race, and Colonial Culture: The Sexual Politics of Identity in Nineteenth-Century Cape Colony, South Africa," American Historical Review 100 (1995): 335-59;
80. Barbara Bush, Imperialism, Race and Resistance: Africa and Britain, 1919-1945 (London, 1999);
81. S. Klausen, " 'For the Sake of the Race': Eugenic Discourses of Feeblemindedness and Motherhood in the South African Medical Record, 1903-1926," Journal of Southern African Studies 23 (1997): 27-50.
82. L. M. Thomas, "Imperial Concerns and 'Women's Affairs': State Efforts to Regulate Clitoridectomy and Eradicate Abortion in Meru, Kenya, c. 1910-1950," Journal of African History 39 (1998): 121-45.
83. Kristin Mann, Marrying Well: Marriage, Status and Social Change among the Educated Elite in Colonial Lagos (Cambridge, 1985), 71.
84. Renée Ilene Pittin, Women and Work in Northern Nigeria (Basingstoke, U.K., 2002);
85. Diana Jeater, Marriage, Perversion and Power: The Construction of Moral Discourse in Southern Rhodesia 1894-1930 (Oxford, 1993).
86. E. G. Ingham, Sierra Leone after a Hundred Years (London, 1894), 316.
87. Jean Marie Allman and Victoria Tashjian, "I Will Not Eat a Stone": A Women's History of Colonial Asante (Oxford, 2000), 75,
88. African courts continued to exist in Freetown, the Gold Coast, and Lagos, mainly to hear disputes between locals. See Mann and Roberts, 13.
89. Ibid., 14; "The Marriage Amendment Ordinance," Sierra Leone Weekly News, 3 September 1887: 2.
90. "The West Indies," Sentinel (April 1889): 41.
91. Elias, 236.
92. A. Montagu, Ordinances of the Colony of Sierra Leone ( London, 1857), 103, 109.
93. Attorney-General of Sierra Leone, Supplement to the Laws of the Colony and Protectorate of Sierra Leone (London, 1932).
94. Elias, 305.
95. Clarke, 88.
96. "Police Intelligence," Sierra Leone Weekly News, 6 September 1884: 2.
97. Sierra Leone Weekly News, 9 May 1885: 2.
98. Sally Engle Merry, Colonizing Hawai'i: The Cultural Power of Law (Princeton, 1999), 16.
99. Martens.
100. Jonathan Sadowsky, Imperial Bedlam: Institutions of Madness in Colonial Southwest Nigeria (Berkeley, 1999), 34-35.
101. General History of Africa, vol. 7, A. A. Boahen, ed., Africa Under Colonial Domination, 1880-1935 (London, 1990), 14.
102. A. I. Asiwaju, West African Transformations: Comparative Impact of French and British Colonialism (Ikeja, 2001).
103. Michael Crowder, West Africa Under Colonial Rule (London, 1968).
104. PRO, CO 270/25, minutes of Legislative Council (1859). In 1859 the colonial chief justice told the Legislative Council that "the present state of health in the colony urgently demanded the services of a larger medical staff." The Sierra Leone Ram complained of the "deplorable condition of Sierra Leone" and argued that "the people . . . look in vain for new public buildings, improved roads and genuine sanitation" (20 March 1886: 1).
105. Freetown Independent, 27 April 1876: 2.
106. Gale.
107. Hewa, 6.
108. PRO, CO 267/331, Kortright to Carnarvon, 24 February 1877.
109. Crowder, 396.
110. Richard Phillips, "Writing Travel and Mapping Sexuality: Richard Burton's Sotadic Zone," in Writes of Passage: Reading Travel Writing, ed. J. Duncan and D. Gregory (London, 2000), 70-91.
111. Rudi Bleys, The Geography of Perversion: Male-to-Male Sexual Behavior Outside the West and the Ethnographic Imagination, 1750-1918 ( New York, 1995), 32;
112. Megan Vaughan, Curing Their Ills: Colonial Power and African Illness (Cambridge, 1991), 21;
113. see also Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (1967; London, 1986), 177.
114. Martens.
115. Helen Callaway, Gender, Culture and Empire: European Women in Colonial Nigeria (Basingstoke, U.K., 1987), 238.
116. Engle Merry, 260.
117. Burton, 1:265.
118. White.