Carina Ray has produced a unique and unprecedented study of inter-racial sexual relationships in the former Gold Coast Colony and the anxiety and hypocrisy that characterized British colonial responses to this widespread phenomenon. Drawing on legal records, official inquiries, colonial correspondence and African-owned newspapers, Crossing the Color Line traces the dramatic change in attitudes toward interracial relationships over the course of the nineteenth century and illuminates the complex repercussions of colonial efforts to prohibit European officers from taking African women as concubines in the early and mid-twentieth century.
One of the significant accomplishments of this book is how it brings colonial West Africa into the historiographical discussion of race and racism. As Ray correctly notes, historians of Africa have too often neglected race and racism as prisms through which to examine African history. This lacuna is particularly curious given the numerous coastal regions in Africa, including Ghana, where people of varied and mixed European, American, African and Asian heritage interacted during more than three centuries before the onset of European colonial rule. Crossing the Color Line exposes rich territory for analysis and reveals the complexity of racial identities on the Gold Coast in the colonial period.
British colonial discourse on inter-racial sex shows that above all, the British sought to preserve the image of whiteness that they believed was vital to exercising power in Africa. As Ray notes, with formal colonial rule came an “almost obsessive concern with the racial respectability of European officers” and the need for “increased social and spatial distance between Africans and Europeans”. One way Ray demonstrates this is by highlighting the colonial focus on concubines as distinct from other types of sexual partners. Colonial officials were unconcerned with sex between white officers and African prostitutes and the occasional sexual encounter between white officers and African acquaintances, as long as they did not cause a public scandal. Nor did they concern themselves with the mixed-race offspring produced from these unions (which is in stark contrast to concerns about the “métis question” in other colonial contexts). Rather, inter-racial sex was only threatening to the British when it took the form of a long-term relationship, as in concubinage or marriage. These relationships between white men and African women could compromise colonial power, they feared, because of the various kinds of sentimental and financial attachment they created between the African woman (and her family) and the white man. In the colonial imagination, these attachments could and likely would influence the officer’s behaviour, perhaps even making him sympathetic to the African point of view. In its most extreme form, when the attachment resulted in marriage, the white man would have effectively lost his cultural identity. As one colonial official noted, white men who married African women were “quite definitely mad” (134).
The contrast between attitudes toward inter-racial prostitution versus marriage was highlighted in the early 1940s when thousands of white soldiers came to the port towns of Accra and Takoradi as part of Britain’s war effort. Their presence caused an influx of African sex workers, subsequent epidemics of venereal diseases, and complaints from local inhabitants about the increasingly unhealthy conditions in their towns. The colonial government scarcely responded at all to this situation; meanwhile, the reported marriage of four British officers to African women at the time got urgently reported to the Colonial Office as a “distressing epidemic” and a potential public scandal (Chapter 5).
Another fascinating aspect of racial identities in the Gold Coast Colony revealed in this book is how civil servants from the West Indies fit into the colonial racial order. Owing to the perpetual shortage of white men able or willing to work in tropical Africa, Britain recruited men from its Caribbean colonies to serve in Africa. These men were almost always light-skinned compared to the average Gold Coaster, but African-descended, and they occupied an ambiguous racial space. As civil servants in Britain’s Gold Coast Colony, West Indians were categorized as “white”, and received the same salaries and higher status as Europeans. Their racial identity was determined in this case by the fact that they were not “Natives” and because they were perceived by the British as “culturally distinct in ways that would ideally influence Africans to embrace Western education and Christian values” (59). Nevertheless, as Ray demonstrates using the case of one such officer named Marcus Clarke, West Indians’ sexual connections with African women were viewed as less damaging to colonial authority than those of “European” white men.
Intertwined, of course, with these complex racial attitudes and behaviours, were assumptions about gender. Ray shows how, in the colonial mind, African women were dangerous as potential concubines but also because they were imagined to be sexual aggressors. Because she extends her analysis to the metropole, we are also able to see the importance of white women, or the near absence thereof, in the construction of race and gender in colonial Ghana. The near-absence of white women was essential to upholding imperial ideals of whiteness. British officers were forbidden to bring their white wives to Africa except in exceptional cases, and African men who lived abroad and married white women were denied passage back to Ghana unless they left their spouses behind. The presence of white women in the colony threatened to shatter the myth of whiteness as somehow pristine and refined, as supposedly exemplified in white femininity. A white woman with a working-class African husband was out of the question, and British authorities went to considerable trouble to keep them in Europe.
By tracing several cases of officers accused of concubinage, Ray also provides a unique glimpse into the numerous other kinds of relationships formed between European civil servants and the African people among whom they lived and worked. In most cases, the women who become concubines were the friends or relatives of African men who worked with or for a European officer. These intermediaries made introductions, and as relatives, they sometimes had a stake in the long-term success of the relationship. Also, many people used the colonial circular prohibiting concubinage as a tool for blackmail and revenge against European officers. The connections revealed by these cases make clear that the lives of European men became connected through friendship, work, socializing, recreation and sex, to a wide range of men and women in the communities in which they resided.
This book makes a significant contribution not only to the historiography of Ghana but also other bodies of scholarship concerning colonialism, race, and gender. It will be useful to researchers, teachers, and students interested in Africa’s colonial experience and the study of the intersection of race, gender, and sexuality.
