Randy on the Rand: Portuguese African Labor and the Discourse on "Unnatural Vice" in the Transvaal in the Early Twentieth Century.

This essay traces the development of "European," or white, attitudes toward: same sex behavior among black Africans working the mines in the early twentieth century. It connects these attitudes both to the internal concerns of South Africa in the aftermath of the Anglo-Boer War of 1899-1902 and to external concerns about the relationship between the British and non British African colonies. It shows how political tensions were refracted through reference to non-European sexualities in order to enhance the fiction of South Africa as a morally constituted settler colony. It also situates turn-of-the century ideas associating male-male sexual contact with contamination and contagion in several contexts: the expansion of Portuguese power in southern Mozambique; the British disapproval of Portuguese methods of colonization across the world; and. the conception of the Portuguese within Europe as a marginalized "Other" Specifically, this essay analyzes the text of the January 1907 "Confidential, Enquiry into Alleged Prevalence of Unnatural Vice, amongst Natives in Mine Compounds on the Witwatersrand." In the process, the essay contributes to recent critical attention: to the development of homosexuality in the European imagination by suggesting how rural and colonial settings offered sites for thinking about sane-sex behaviors among nonwhite and working-class populations rather than among members of Britain's urban middle classes.