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Polygamy, Sexual Danger, and the Creation

of Vagrancy Legislation in Colonial Natal

J E R E M Y M A RT E N S

In May 1869 J.W. Turnbull, a barrister and newly elected member of the
Natal Legislative Council, introduced a bill expressly designed to protect
white women and girls living in the southern African colony. Bill 1 of 1869
proposed, first, that males convicted of assault with intent on any female be
permanently branded on their foreheads and, secondly, that in all cases where
males were executed for crimes perpetrated on females, their corpses be
publicly suspended in an iron cage.1 Inspired by a ‘black peril’ panic that
alarmed settlers in the late 1860s and early 1870s,2 this astonishing measure
won Turnbull the admiration of some sections of the colonial press,3 but was
too draconian for Turnbull’s more experienced fellow legislators.
Accordingly, on second reading the bill was referred to a select committee
and was comprehensively refashioned before being passed and promulgated.
Given the severity of Turnbull’s original bill, the dispassionate tone of
the law as passed is striking. Law 15 of 1869 (‘For the punishment of idle
and disorderly persons, and vagrants, within the Colony of Natal’) was
modelled after English vagrancy legislation adapted for use throughout the
British Empire in the nineteenth century. Based on the 1824 Vagrant Act,4 it
allowed for the conviction of persons found trespassing, loitering,
indecently exposing themselves or behaving riotously. Furthermore, the law
enabled urban municipalities to impose a curfew for black people and
allowed for the conviction of ‘every coloured person’ found ‘wandering’
after dark.5
In focusing on the making of Law 15, this article will attempt to explain
the remarkable transformation of Turnbull’s extreme proposals into colonial
Natal’s vagrancy law. It will try to account for why unfounded fears about
African men raping white women found expression in legislation based on a
widely adopted imperial statute that made no explicit reference to the crime
of rape and which was primarily directed at controlling unemployed black
people in towns.6 In doing so this article will argue that widely held beliefs
about the ‘barbaric’ nature of African marriage practices underpinned white
settlers’ understanding that African men in Natal towns presented a danger
to settler society in general and a sexual threat to white women and children
The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, Vol.31, No.3, September 2003, pp.24–45
PUBLISHED BY FRANK CASS, LONDON
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VA G R A N C Y L E G I S L AT I O N I N C O L O N I A L N ATA L 25
in particular. Moreover, urban male Africans’ ‘uncivilised’ habits – defined
variously as an unwillingness to work, an absence of wealth and fixed
property, a tendency for itinerancy, an inclination to live off the labour of
women and an inability to control sexual urges – closely resembled the
characterisation of vagrants in Britain and its Empire. It was the supposed
unmanliness of urban African men that necessitated their control and shaped
the racial classification of Law 15 of 1869.

I
In the late 1860s and early 1870s white Natal was gripped by the fear that
female settlers were in imminent danger of being raped by African men.
Etherington argues that the scare was born of a ‘broader fear of losing
control’. African economic competition, the influx of black migrant
labourers into the colony, the proliferation of firearms and the autonomy of
African communities all worked to undermine settlers’ sense of security.
There were no factual grounds for white alarm for ‘practically no one was
raped’.7 In this respect the scare was similar to other moral panics in
southern Africa where the perceived dangers posed to whites were ‘far less
a tangible reality than a panicked state of mind which dwelt on the
substance of things feared and the vision of things unseen’.8 Male settlers
nevertheless attributed the ‘increasing’ number of ‘outrages’ to lax
legislation and called for the enactment of strict laws to safeguard white
women and children.
Responding to their constituents’ concerns, in October 1867 elected
members of the Natal Legislative Council passed a resolution requesting
that Lieutenant Governor Robert Keate consider ‘introducing the
punishment of transportation beyond the seas, instead of death, in certain
cases of crimes committed by Natives’.9 Although the exact nature of these
crimes was not specified, Keate was informed that the ‘crimes alluded to
were those of Rape and assault with intent to commit Rape upon White
women, which it was said had lately increased’.10 Keate passed on the
address for the opinions of the Natal Attorney General, M.H. Gallwey and
Theophilus Shepstone, Secretary for Native Affairs. Although Gallwey
advised that the address was requesting Keate to violate those sections of
Natal’s Charter that forbade distinctions on the basis of colour, he believed
that the legislature could impose a more severe punishment for the crime of
rape. Moreover, Gallwey argued that under Native Law the Lieutenant
Governor, as Supreme Chief, already possessed the power to banish black
prisoners for life, and for that reason African prisoners could legally be
transported to the island of Inyack.11 Shepstone for his part heartily
supported transportation as a deterrent but, owing to its proximity to Natal,
was unsure whether Inyack was an appropriate destination.12
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In his despatch on the matter to the Duke of Buckingham, Secretary of

State for the Colonies, Keate expressed his willingness to alter the
punishment of banishment of Africans into that of transportation. He went
so far as to enquire of his superior whether there was any place within the
Empire to which prisoners sentenced to transportation in Natal could be
sent.13 However, Buckingham curtly reminded Keate that ‘transportation has
been given up in all parts of the British Dominions, and that there are many
reasons for feeling assured that it could not be maintained by Natal without
injurious consequences’.14
By early 1868, some months before Buckingham’s reply arrived in
Natal, public indignation at the ‘increasing frequency with which assaults
by natives are occurring’ had begun to provoke strident editorials and a
lively correspondence in the colony’s newspapers. Natal Witness editor
David Buchanan remarked on the need for measures to be taken ‘to prevent
the increase of crime, and to ensure the capture and conviction of this
particular class of offenders. This is a subject worth the attention of the
executive, as well as of the legislature, and should be dealt with in a fair,
firm and practicable manner.’15 Other settlers were less circumspect. ‘J.S.’
fulminated that

[t]hese disgusting cases are indeed becoming too frequent for us to

restrain our indignation at the lukewarmness of the authorities, in not
using some endeavour to suppress these abominable crimes. That they
can be suppressed there cannot be a shadow of a doubt, and if our
Executive will not make the attempt we must do it ourselves. And the
first step I would recommend is to hold a public meeting, and show
His Excellency the immediate necessity of adopting some measure of
security to the white population, – and this must be done at once; or,
secondly, if the Government refuse to act, let a second meeting be
convened, at which there will be no lack of resolutions, and of such a
nature that there will be no mistaking the feeling of every man in the
colony.
If, through the supineness of our Government, we must have Lynch
law, why then let us have it, and show them that as Englishmen we
will at all risks defend our families.16

In the absence of new legislation from the government, municipal

authorities attempted to restrict the movements of black people. In January
1868 the Pietermaritzburg City Council passed a by-law that proposed a 10
p.m. curfew and prohibited ‘Coolies, Kafirs, Hottentots or other Colored
persons’ from carrying ‘offensive weapons’ in town.17 This by-law was
deemed ultra vires, however, and was disallowed.18 In a separate effort to
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VA G R A N C Y L E G I S L AT I O N I N C O L O N I A L N ATA L 27
spur the government to action, inhabitants of Durban formed a Vigilance
Committee and sent a memorial signed by 397 settlers to the Lieutenant
Governor. The memorialists expressed alarm at ‘the frequent assaults
committed by coloured Men upon the female portion of the community’
residing around Durban, and claimed that it was ‘unsafe for females to
travel along the various roads or to be left at their own houses unguarded’.
They maintained that such assaults were ‘of constant occurrence’, but that
they were not widely reported because the victims objected to appearing in
public at the trials of the offenders. For this reason it was urged that the
examination of victims be held in private.19
Furthermore, the memorialists demanded that ‘immediate steps be
taken’ by the government both to prevent ‘these offences so destructive of
domestic security and comfort’ and to apprehend and punish the
perpetrators. To this end they suggested that a ‘system of registration might
be carried out by the Magistrates of the various Boroughs and Townships of
the Colony to include every Kaffir coming to reside therein or offering
himself for employment’. Under such a system every African would be
required to wear a registration badge, and any person employing an African
without a badge would be fined. It was recommended further that a law be
passed to prohibit African men ‘from being in any Road, street or footpath
in any Borough or Township without having a proper pass from their
employers, or some duly appointed authority’, and that the system of
transportation be adopted.20
This increased public agitation prompted the executive to conduct
further enquiries. In March 1868 the Colony’s Clerks of the Peace were
instructed to compile returns of cases tried or charges made of assaults by
Africans on white women,21 and the Durban Town Council was requested
to furnish suggestions on the cause and remedy of the ‘evil’.22 The Town
Council’s reply mirrored the Durban memorial, and suggested that a
system of registration and passes for Africans be introduced, that ‘native
villages’ be established close to towns, and that a scheme for ‘giving and
requiring written characters with all servants not engaged for the first
time’ be adopted.23 Such measures would inconvenience the white
population, but were necessary ‘to give security to the female part of the
community’.24
By the beginning of winter, elected members of the Legislative Council
were also pressing the government to pass legislation. During a Council
session in June, Captain Harford asked Colonial Secretary Douglas Erskine
‘whether the Government intended taking any special notice of the increase
of Kafir outrages, and more especially those committed on European
females?’ He added that
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if immediate notice was not taken by the Government a system of

Lynch law would ensue, and that some law as that which exists in
England against housebreakers ought to be passed in this colony. In
the present state of things he would have no more compunction in
shooting a Kafir committing an outrage than he would have in killing
a rat.

Erskine replied that the executive was still awaiting the Secretary of State’s
decision regarding the implementation of transportation as a punishment for
these crimes, and that in the meantime the government thought it advisable
to strengthen the police force.25
When Buckingham’s despatch on the subject of transportation finally
reached Natal, it was read to the Legislative Council. In ruling out
transportation, the Secretary of State had suggested that the building of
‘well constructed prisons’ in Natal would be ‘the proper course’ in checking
the evil. It is clear from Erskine’s comments to the legislature that the Natal
executive was not happy with the despatch, and that it understood that some
other form of legislation would have to be passed in the near future. Erskine
pointed out that he had made the despatch public ‘as it was considered
necessary that a Bill should be introduced There was no chance of this
colony ever being in a position to afford the model prisons as those referred
to in the despatch If any hon. Member had a motion to bring forward he
would be glad to hear it.’26 This announcement was made towards the end
of the 1868 Legislative Council session, and the subject was dropped until
the following year.
Although action was postponed by the legislature, ‘outrages’ remained a
burning public issue. In April 1869 the Pietermaritzburg City Council again
passed the ‘curfew’ by-law that had been disallowed the previous year. It also
amended an existing by-law so as to prohibit any ‘person or persons’ from
standing or congregating ‘on any footpath street or public place within the
borough, so as to obstruct free traffic or endanger the public peace’.27 Both
by-laws were again deemed ultra vires. Erskine informed the municipality
that no law existed to prevent people from congregating in public, and that
the ‘curfew’ by-law was illegal as a Vagrant Act was not in force in Natal.28
Nevertheless, there remained strong public support for the passage of
legislation providing ‘for the protection of European females from native
outrage’.29 J.W. Turnbull, the newly elected Legislative Council member for
Pietermaritzburg City, duly introduced Bill 1 of 1869 at the opening of the
1869 Legislative Council session. This measure proposed that:

[w]hereas assaults on women and female children in this colony are of

frequent occurrence, and it is expedient to make the punishment for
such crimes more notorious and deterring:
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VA G R A N C Y L E G I S L AT I O N I N C O L O N I A L N ATA L 29
Be it therefore enacted, by the Lieutenant Governor of Natal, with
the advice and consent of the Legislative Council thereof, as follows:-
1. That in all cases where any man or boy over the age of fourteen
years shall be convicted of an assault with intent on any woman or
female child, such man or boy, in addition to the punishments at
present inflicted for such crimes, shall be sentenced to have the letter
R distinctly, conspicuously, and permanently branded on his forehead
by the public executioner.
2. That in all cases where any man or boy over the age of fourteen
years shall be sentenced to death for any crime perpetrated on the
body of any woman or female child, and such sentence shall be
carried into execution, the body of such criminal after death shall be
publicly exposed in an iron cage to be suspended in such place as the
judge may direct 30

Commenting on the bill, Natal Witness editor R.E. Ridley lambasted the
Executive Council for not introducing legislation the previous year, and
congratulated Turnbull for knowing better than to ‘waste his time by
consulting those who are wedded to their own peculiar conservative and
Kafir-patronising notions’. Ridley acknowledged that Bill 1 seemed ‘to
clash’ with the Charter of Natal, which provided that no Natal laws should
be repugnant to the laws of England. However, ‘although it is certainly
repugnant to the spirit and letter of the law of England’ to legalise polygamy
and lobola, it did not seem to Ridley ‘repugnant to the laws of England that
we should suspend a criminal by the neck, or even in a cage, for a somewhat
longer time than the laws of England now consider necessary’.31
Sober heads prevailed in the Legislative Council, however, and a select
committee, consisting of Shepstone, Gallwey, Turnbull and another elected
member, Polkinghorn, was appointed to consider the bill. It decided after
discussion that ‘with a view to prevent the occurrence of such assaults and
for the better protection and security of the people, provisions be made in
the Law based upon the Statute of 5 George IV, c.83, to extend only to the
municipalities’.32 Turnbull’s bill was consequently renamed, and
transformed into Law 15 of 1869.33 The first section, based on section IV of
the 1824 Vagrant Act,34 applied to areas outside boroughs. It allowed for the
conviction, as idle or disorderly, of persons unable to give a good account
of themselves and found trespassing on private property, loitering near
private buildings, publicly and indecently exposing themselves with intent
to insult females, or behaving in a riotous or indecent manner in public.
The second section of Law 15 extended these provisions to boroughs
and in addition allowed for the conviction of ‘every coloured person’ in
town found ‘wandering abroad after, and before such hour as such
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[borough] Corporation may fix, and not giving a good account of himself,
or herself’. The penalty upon conviction for the offences contained in the
first two sections was a fine or imprisonment with or without hard labour
and spare diet. The remaining sections of the law required that all borough
corporations erect buildings for the overnight shelter of those black people
unable to leave town before the curfew, and furthermore defined the words
‘coloured person’ as ‘any Hottentot, Coolie, Bushman, Lascar, or any of the
people commonly called Kafirs, whether they are refugees from any of the
surrounding states or tribes, or belonging to the tribes originally in this
colony and its neighbourhood’.35
Furthermore, the select committee had concluded that vagrant
legislation alone would not adequately protect the white female community
from black attackers. Thus its report presented to the Legislative Council on
30 June 1869 advised that ‘another Bill more particularly providing for the
prevention of the crime of rape should be passed’.36 The following day
Turnbull introduced a new bill (‘[f]or better preventing the crime of Rape’)
that, like the vagrant measure, specifically targeted people of colour.
Section One imposed the death penalty on ‘every Hottentot, Coolie,
Bushman, Lascar, or native convicted of the crime of rape on the body of
any white female’.37
The Legislative Council passed both the vagrant and rape bills, and in a
report, Gallwey recommended that Lieutenant Governor Keate assent to
both measures. With regard to the Vagrant bill, Gallwey endorsed
Theophilus Shepstone’s opinion that there

were many servants in this City [Pietermaritzburg] and in Durban who

were members of tribes resident beyond the borders of the Colony and
were in no way affected by the tribal responsibility for acts committed
by members of a tribe such as obtains in this Colony, and who thus
evade instructions given by the Supreme Chief.
Moreover an Order issued by the Supreme Chief that Natives
should not be abroad after a certain hour might clash with a Master’s
lawful commands; and this law was considered necessary.38

Gallwey also pointed out that the police authorities favoured the measure,
and that Africans themselves ‘admit that they have no right to be abroad
after the hour that Her Majesty’s Troops are compelled to return to
Barracks’.39 Keate agreed with his Attorney General, and the vagrant bill
received his assent to become Law 15 1869.
Gallwey also urged Keate to assent to the rape bill, on the grounds that
‘its rejection would cause much public indignation’, and that there were
other measures in force in Natal that discriminated along colour lines.40
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However, Keate remained unconvinced by this argument and he reserved
the measure for the signification of Her Majesty’s pleasure. Although he did
not wish to run counter to the settlers’ ‘very strong feeling on the subject’,
and while he remained partial to the punishment of transportation in cases
of rape, Keate was concerned that the provisions in the bill discriminated
against black people. The existence of such a stringent measure, especially
one that did not apply to whites, would be inconsistent with settlers’
demands that ‘Native Law’ be abolished so that Africans could be brought
under ‘civilised Law’. Furthermore, the measure would oblige the
Executive Council to commute sentences and would virtually ‘transfer the
equalization of punishments of whites + blacks from the Law to the
Executive’.41 Earl Granville, Secretary of State for the Colonies, shared
Keate’s qualms. In rejecting the rape bill, he explained that equal laws were
important for the sake of morality ‘because savages will hardly believe that
the Government really abhors the crime which it punishes, if it do not
punish it in all alike’.42 Although the Colonial Office was prepared to
sanction a law that would make rape a capital crime, it would have to apply
to whites as well as blacks.
Etherington has shown that the rape scare continued to generate anxiety
until 1874. However, if one uses popular agitation for repressive legislation
as an index, the panic appears to have reached a climax between 1868 and
1870.43 A half-hearted attempt was made in the Legislative Council to pass
a modified rape bill in 1870, but the measure was abandoned before the end
of the session. The Pietermaritzburg City Council drafted a vagrancy by-law
in early 1870, but perhaps baulking at the expense of constructing overnight
barracks, did not pursue the matter again until the following year.44
However, it is likely that continuing concerns about ‘outrages’ finally
prompted the Pietermaritzburg Council to adopt Section Two of Law 15 of
1869 as a by-law in March 1871. As well as prohibiting lewd, riotous,
disorderly, idle and suspicious behaviour, this measure empowered
magistrates to fine or imprison ‘[e]very coloured person found wandering
abroad within the Borough after 10 o’clock p.m., and before 5 o’clock a.m.,
and not giving a good account of himself or herself’.45 Durban passed a
similar by-law in January 1874.46
It should be emphasised that while Law 15 of 1869 was modelled on
imperial legislation, as an early colonial attempt to control and regulate the
movements of Africans in towns it anticipated the comprehensive urban
segregation measures so characteristic of twentieth-century South Africa.
Night curfews for black people, overnight barracks for Africans erected by
municipalities and explicit racial definitions were all to become hallmarks
of apartheid influx control laws. The central provisions of Law 15 itself
continued to be implemented in Natal until the 1980s.47 Swanson has
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described the introduction in 1874 of a pass-registration system to control

togt (day) labourers in Pietermaritzburg and Durban as ‘the beginning of
urban native administration in Natal’.48 Promulgated five years earlier, Law
15 can certainly be regarded as an important precursor to racially based
urban control measures adopted later in the colony.
Moreover, the legal significance of Natal’s vagrancy law extends further,
for its definition of ‘coloured person’ was incorporated into racist
legislation passed after 1869. Perhaps most notably, Natal’s Criminal Law
Amendment Act 31 of 1903 stated that ‘[i]llicit sexual intercourse between
any white woman and any coloured person as defined by the Law 15, 1869,
shall be unlawful’.49 Act 31 remained in force in Natal until the Union of
South Africa’s Immorality Act of 1950 superseded it. In fact C.R. Swart, the
apartheid government’s first Minister of Justice, cited as a precedent the
definition of ‘coloured person’ contained in Law 15 of 1869 when
introducing the 1950 Immorality Amendment Bill.50

II
In a survey of the historical development of vagrancy laws in Europe and
North America, Adler argues that scholars should look beyond narrow
economic interests when explaining the enactment of these measures.51 As
early as the sixteenth century, those defined as vagrants in early modern
England were believed to threaten social order in general, and not merely
the vested interests of the ruling classes. Drifters and ‘vagabonds’ were
‘beyond the moderating influences of church, family, and community’,
introduced disorder, were responsible for a ‘bevy of evils’ and ‘challenged
the fibre of society’. In colonial America, vagrancy legislation ‘provided
residents with a mechanism to repel moral threats to the community’.
Vagrants, along with Sabbath-breakers and those who swore in public,
challenged the moral character of small colonial towns, and it was
understood that legislation was required to protect communities from these
‘deviants’. Similar concerns shaped vagrancy statutes enacted in the
nineteenth century, both in Europe and North America.52
In a study of the controversy that led to the enactment of the revised
1824 Vagrant Act (the measure on which Natal’s Law 15 of 1869 was
modelled), Roberts points out that in early nineteenth-century London the
regulation of ‘the lower orders’ was of paramount concern to the middle
class.53 Bourgeois commentators fretted that ‘large populations, expanded
commercial activity and estrangement between social ranks’ would lead to
an increase in ‘crime, pauperism and disorder’. The existing vagrancy laws
were deemed inadequate, and there were calls for stricter laws to alleviate
the ‘crisis of labour discipline’. In the minds of middle-class Londoners, this
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disorder was closely related to the moral dangers posed to women by the
urban environment. The throngs of disorderly migrant workers who filled
London’s public spaces threatened to contaminate female virtue. In
particular, intentional indecent exposure by working-class men was viewed
with alarm. It was asserted that the ‘obscene bestialities’ committed in
public places to the disgust of women and children gratified the ‘wretches’
that performed them ‘because they are a sort of tacit insult and offence
offered to the better part of society’. This perceived link between indecent
exposure and other working-class threats was embodied in the 1824 Vagrant
Act. The offence of ‘wilfully’ exposing the person in public ‘with intent to
insult any female’ was in the legislation grouped together with the
infringement of property rights and the promotion of public disorder.54
In an examination of late nineteenth-century English vagrancy
legislation, McLaren also underlines the connections drawn by lawmakers
between vagrancy and sexual danger.55 Turn-of-the-century England was
gripped by a moral panic ‘whipped up out of the notion that women and
children were being preyed on by untold numbers of brutes and perverts’.
Traditionally, English law had ‘primarily associated indecency with lower-
class males’, an association reinforced by the amended Vagrancy Act of
1898 which held that those men convicted of sexual deviancy, such as
pimps, male prostitutes and exhibitionists, ‘would be punished in the same
manner as vagrants’.56
Although the equation of vagrants with sexual deviants might at first
appear unusual, McLaren points out that in Europe and North America
tramps and drifters were commonly believed to pose both a social and
sexual threat to society. Moreover, vagrants, male prostitutes, transvestites
and vagrants all had one thing in common – namely, the failure to live up to
newly created masculine standards. In late nineteenth-century France, for
example, the stereotype of the unmanly urban lout came to the fore during
a panic over gangs of working-class petty criminals. These gang members
were deemed unmanly because they used knives, were cruel, made
cowardly attacks on the defenceless and exploited women sexually.
Similarly, vagrants were unmanly because, like women, they did not work.
Vagrancy ‘was the refuge of “cowards” given to drugs, drink, gambling, and
sexual immorality’. Such behaviour had fearful and tragic effects. In the late
nineteenth century, a prominent French expert on criminal vagabonds,
Judge Émile Fourquet, attributed a purported increase in murders, thefts,
rapes and assaults on children to tramps. The serious danger that male
perverts and vagrants supposedly posed to respectable society was
symptomatic of ‘a more general shoring up of the definition of “normal”
masculinity’, which was based more upon the construction of threatening
unmanly ‘others’ than on positive assertions of manliness. By policing
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masculinity and ‘protecting’ females, argues McLaren, powerful men

sought to control both the working classes and independent women.57
Rogues, vagabonds, the idle and disorderly were regarded with no less
suspicion by respectable society in Britain’s dependencies, and vagrancy
legislation was used throughout India and the colonies as a tool for social
control. In the early nineteenth century the rulers of Madras adopted the
provisions of English vagrancy acts in an effort to regulate the behaviour of
the labouring poor that conflicted with their interests.58 Nineteenth-century
Indian cities were understood to be places of moral and physical danger,
‘riddled with disease, prostitution, and increasingly with political
extremism’, and vagrancy and public nuisance laws were vigorously
applied against economically marginal groups who were routinely
associated with all types of crime.59
The perceived association between criminal activity and vagrancy also
informed the campaigns against thuggee and dacoity in British India. The
official attitude towards India’s ‘floating’ population and ‘wandering’
communities was one of suspicion. Like European gypsies, itinerants were
suspected of criminal, immoral and debauched behaviour, and Indian
officials insisted that the suppression of thuggee depended upon effective
policing of ‘the Stroller, the Vagrant, and the fugitive from Judicial
Process.’60 Special legislation was enacted in 1836 and 1843 to target the
crimes of thuggee and dacoity, and in 1848 an additional law imposed a
punishment of seven years for the offence of belonging ‘to any wandering
gang of persons, associated for the purposes of theft or robbery’.61 Renewed
concerns about ‘wandering tribes’ in the Punjab and North West Provinces
in 1871 led to the creation of the Criminal Tribes Act, which was eventually
extended throughout India. This law established a system of registration for
members of ‘criminal tribes’ and restricted and regulated their movements.62
The myriad dangers posed by vagrants were also emphasised in the
settler colonies. In nineteenth-century New Zealand, police and courts gave
high priority to the arrest and conviction of vagrants. Local police
characterised criminal elements as lazy, idle, itinerants and strangers while
the public frequently blamed vagrants for a host of ills in New Zealand
society.63 Itinerant communities were also the target of official and public
disapproval in the Australian colonies. In late nineteenth-century Melbourne,
vagrants were portrayed as ‘posing a constant and insidious threat to good
order and progress’ and were criticised for their ‘libidinous’ and ‘obscene’
habits.64 Vagrancy laws in colonial Victoria, which were modelled on
England’s 1824 Vagrant Act, were valued by police for their flexibility and
usefulness; one vagrancy law alone detailed over 100 offences.65
The criminal, and especially sexual, dangers supposedly posed by
itinerants and vagrants were often racialised in the Australian colonies.
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Settlers in Queensland associated the ‘barren meanderings’ of ‘primitive’
Aboriginals with rape, treachery and cannibalism. Moreover, white settlers
insisted that Aboriginal men were predisposed to raping white women, even
though this allegation was exaggerated out of all proportion to incidences of
rape that actually took place.66 Melanesian itinerant labourers employed by
Queensland farmers were also branded as habitual rapists. It was asserted
that ‘Kanakas’ were ‘foaming at the mouth with malevolent desire for white
women’ and in towns such as Bundaberg and Mackay ‘no woman or young
girl dare venture about at night for fear of being indecently assaulted by the
walkabout kanakas’.67 Again, there was little evidence to support these
accusations.
It is clear therefore that vagrancy and sexual danger were closely
associated in the minds of the dominant classes in nineteenth-century
Europe, North America and the British Empire. Seeking to control those
deemed threatening to society, lawmakers constructed laws that defined and
regulated social outsiders. Gender helped to shape this process, for it was
‘unmanliness’ that often defined deviancy. In nineteenth-century Natal,
similar concerns informed settlers’ belief that independent male Africans in
town were a danger to white women, and led to the enactment of Law 15 of
1869.

III
In a study of the urban factor in Natal ‘native’ policy, Swanson makes the
compelling argument that the interaction between the colony’s black and
white communities was ‘nowhere more vivid, articulate and transforming
than in the rising towns from early times’.68 Pietermaritzburg and Durban
were centres of economic growth and social change which ‘inexorably
involved an increasing African population in the material goals of European
culture, not merely on farm and trading post but under the transforming
power of urbanism’. It was widely understood by white Natalians from the
beginning of white settlement that the civilised urban environment would
exert a powerful formative effect on savage Africans, and they fretted about
the negative consequences that would flow from this contact. The ‘mass
propinquity, adaptation and competition’ resulting from urbanism was a
source of profound anxiety. As early as 1843, the year Natal was annexed
to the Crown, Henry Cloete, Civil Commissioner under the military
occupation, warned that Africans should be kept well away from ‘the
contaminating influence of the Chief Town or Port’.69
In spite of such warnings, the successful development of both Durban and
Pietermaritzburg was dependent upon African enterprise. Three of the seven
African locations set up in 1850 were in the immediate vicinity of the two
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principal towns. Africans took full advantage of the economic opportunities

this proximity afforded, providing casual labour at relatively high wages and
monopolising much of the lucrative market for agricultural produce to the
detriment of white farmers. The homestead economies of the polygamous
communities living in these locations initially adapted well to these demands,
and the increasing wealth and independence of Africans close to town caused
white anger and resentment. Settlers complained that the towns were both
corrupting Africans and entrenching the worst of their savage customs. The
wealth accrued from sale of produce allowed Africans to purchase more cattle
and therefore to ‘buy’ more female labour in the form of wives. This wealth
also ensured that there was no incentive for African men to enter long-term
labour contracts with whites, allowing men in town to remain idle and
independent of control. It was believed that the combination of independence,
proximity to settlers and the formative power of the urban setting inevitably
bred in Africans a dangerous contempt for whites. Colonists insisted that
Africans could only become truly civilised through labour, and as long as
urban Africans shunned regular employment, the immoral temptations of the
urban milieu would produce bands of threatening, semi-civilised men given
to drunkenness, immorality and crime.70
It has been noted that the 1860s rape scare was largely an urban
phenomenon.71 This may be unsurprising given that most of the colony’s
white population lived in Pietermaritzburg and Durban, but there is also
reason to suspect that the ‘broader fear of losing control’ that fuelled white
anxiety would have been especially acute in the urban setting.72 In the 1860s
an economic depression in Natal exacerbated the labour shortage and
heightened competition between black and white producers. Parle has
documented the adverse effects of poverty and unemployment on
Pietermaritzburg’s white inhabitants in the 1860s,73 and in the light of these
circumstances it is likely the belief that independent Africans in the
‘immoral’ towns of Natal presented a danger to white society was sharpened.
Certainly, in the late 1860s, white Natalians were quick to attribute the
supposed increase in ‘native outrages’ to Africans who had been corrupted
by their proximity to the vices of urban civilisation. Buchanan of the
Witness lamented that ‘[t]he transition of the native from his state of
unsophisticated and comparatively innocent barbarism, towards the putrid
civilization for which his ignorance fits him, is not unattended with its
difficulties and dangers’. Uncorrupted and peaceful while in the rural areas,
‘gaols, handcuffs and gallows’ only became necessary once ‘the Kafir has
begun to learn the virtues of his fellow colonists of light complexion’. When
‘the native leaves his kraal for service in our towns’, he was presented
with the spectacle of white men ‘reeling along the streets, to a Hottentot
kennel’ and ‘female infamy in our streets’. In towns, ‘the native hears and
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VA G R A N C Y L E G I S L AT I O N I N C O L O N I A L N ATA L 37
sees enough to break down every barrier of respect; and the throngs of
children in the streets tell what share white men have in the vice that elicits
no remark’. Black rapists were a symptom of the ‘moral unwholesomeness’
of the urban setting, and ‘moral purification, or prevention’ as well as the
systematic enforcement of a ‘proper distance’ between Africans and settlers
was required if the blight of ‘outrages’ was to be eradicated.74
Buchanan was not alone in pinpointing urban vices as a cause for
assaults on female settlers. ‘Pater’ asserted that the ‘growing practice of
white females rolling drunk in our streets and being conveyed to the lock-
up surrounded by a host of Kafirs enjoying the sport, lowers every white
female in the colony in the eyes of the natives, and goes far to break down
the barrier that till very recently existed between us and the Kafir’. The
existence of immoral white women, and thus indirectly the spate of
‘outrages’, were also attributable to the ‘practice of young men (calling
themselves gentlemen) and merchants bringing the said young women just
referred to into Natal, and turning them adrift on the community to live a
life of beastly degradation [and t]he rule of the British army of sending
so many men out to our colony and not allowing them to bring wives’.75
‘Pater’ called for changes that would reform this dangerous state of affairs
and concluded with the injunction that ‘every English man and woman draw
the just line of distinction between us and the natives’.
While settlers insisted that the urban setting with its vices and immoral
temptations encouraged African men living and working in towns to attack
white women, this was only part of the explanation. The majority of male
settlers living in Pietermaritzburg and Durban did not present a danger to
society, for their level of civilisation rendered them immune to temptation.
Africans, in contrast, had not yet attained a similar level of self-control. In
explaining why urban Africans were not completely civilised, whites
asserted that the barbarous domestic condition of African society produced
wandering unmanly idlers who lived off the labour of women, had no
respect for women, lacked discipline and who therefore presented a sexual
danger to female settlers.
In their 1868 memorial addressing the subject of ‘native outrages’, the
397 supporters of the Durban Vigilance Committee expressed the strong
conviction that

the Native Marriage Customs of the Kaffirs, especially the sale and
purchase of wives, greatly tend to aggravate these offences, debarring
the young men from getting married, and that if any measure could be
devised for a modification of such customs it would greatly tend to
allay the frightful evil to which Your Memorialists advert[.]76
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Durban Town Councillors also attributed the rape of white women to the
‘unnatural state of things among the native population induced by
Polygamy’. They asserted that the ‘discouragement of Polygamy’ was ‘of
vital and indeed primary importance’ if the safety of female settlers was to
be maintained.77 And in a Witness editorial Ridley insisted that being ‘but
another phase of slavery’, the sanction of African marriage practices
brought ‘similar curses in its train’. Polygamy and lobola were the root
causes of ‘the increasing attacks and assaults upon white girls and women
made by the colored males’.78
Settlers had a number of theories to explain the connections between
African domestic institutions and the rape of female settlers. In the first
instance, the ‘great “social evil” of polygamy’ ensured that only older richer
men could afford to marry, leaving ‘hot-blooded youths frustrated’. Ridley
warned that when

one man is allowed to have five wives, it is clear that four must go
unmarried and wifeless, as nature is pretty uniform in the supply of
the two sexes. If in England they point with sorrow to the fact that
there are no less than 500,000 unmarried women, in Natal we reverse
the picture, and present to the world of philanthropists a formidable
phalanx of savage unmarried men, greater by far in proportion to the
respective populations.79

Secondly, settlers argued that polygamy and lobola taught African men to
disrespect women and so when they came into town they thought nothing of
attacking white women. The issue of ‘outrages’ was in fact ‘doubly a
woman’s question’, one ‘in which our own females demand our action, and
one also in which their black sisters are intimately interested’. Urging the
government to abrogate polygamy and lobola for the sake of both white and
black women, Ridley proclaimed:

A nation whose monarch is a woman ought not to tolerate injustice to

womankind. All the world over, the degree of fair usage and
protection which man accords to his more tender companion, has
come to be regarded as the most correct text of advancement in
civilization and in all the refinements which adorn the most forward
nationalities. On the converse, take whatever numerous and extensive
kingdoms of the earth you like as an example, wherein woman is
dishonored to a slave, and it is a certain fact that man will there be
found degraded to a serf.80

Barbarous Natal Africans failed to accord to women ‘due appreciation,

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VA G R A N C Y L E G I S L AT I O N I N C O L O N I A L N ATA L 39
defence and regard’; after all, ‘vicious and brutal polygamy’ was little more
than ‘woman slavery and legal rape’. Hence when such men came into
towns ‘respectable females are knocked down in the streets [and] tender
children are torn from their beds’.81
Thirdly, settlers maintained that polygamy encouraged unmanly and
uncivilised habits in men that led to depravity and lasciviousness. Ridley
insisted that ‘Kafir indolence and vice are fostered and strengthened by
polygamy’.82 During the rape scare it was argued that this sensual idleness
presented a danger to white society. At a meeting held to protest the
polygamy law, Dean of Maritzburg James Green proclaimed that ‘[a] people
of whatever race, colour or religion, living in ease, comparative wealth,
idleness, and safety, would naturally become self-indulgent ; these
[Africans] were living in a singular degree of comfort, ease, and idleness,
and the natural and necessary result was that there was an increase of
licentiousness and immorality’.83 Shepstone’s system of indirect rule was
blamed for exacerbating the problem. In a speech to the Natal Farmers’
Club, R. Baynes declared that ‘nothing can tend more effectually to keep the
native in his present listless apathy, indolence, sensuality and polygamy,
than increasing the extent of the locations’.84 Ridley fingered Shepstone
himself, insisting that he was responsible for entrenching polygamy, when
‘polygamy entails upon the white race this bitter curse’.85
If African domesticity inclined black men to the assault of white women,
this propensity was made worse by the independence of black men in Natal
towns. During the scare, African migrant workers from beyond the colony’s
borders were consistently blamed for ‘outrages’. The Durban Town Council
surmised that ‘the offenders of the kind in question are to a large extent
refugees or immigrants from a distance rather than what may be called
resident Natives’.86 The Witness implored the Secretary of State for the
Colonies ‘to prevent the importation of Kafir vagabonds into Natal; where
they are nursed and petted by the Government, and protected in all their
indolence and vice, to the serious inconvenience and injury of its whole
inhabitants’.87 Furthermore, Shepstone himself asserted that,

having no domicile, no tribe or family in the Colony, [African

migrants] are subject to none of the restraints or means of control
which are applicable to the permanent native population. The
presence of a large body of men in the Colony under such conditions,
cannot fail soon to become a source of anxiety to the Government.
Changed by regular food, from the state [of] attenuated starvelings to
that of well conditioned full-blooded men; – transferred suddenly
from a despotic personal rule under which their every word must be
well weighted before uttered, to a country whose only sign of
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Government to them is the timid control of their employers, is it to be

wondered at, that they become licentious, that complaints are heard of
assaults upon women, and that experiencing no restraining power they
act as though none existed?88

Shepstone supported the enactment of Law 15 because it would serve to

control migrants living and working in the colony’s towns.89 He also
favoured the creation of a rural police force that would

patrol among the estates and on the main roads, so as to check and
regulate the movements of these men, to prevent their wandering
about the country without the knowledge of their employers, to curtail
the temptation as well as the opportunity to commit the outrages of
which so much has of late been heard, and to contribute generally to
the suppression of all kinds of crime outside the boundaries of
boroughs and townships.90

In his analysis of Natal’s rape scare of the 1860s and 1870s Etherington
argues that the ‘many powerful forces of change at work in southeast
Africa’ at that time created unease among the colonial population. Within
Natal, Africans successfully competed with whites in the agricultural and
transport sectors. Outside the colony, the autonomy of independent and
semi-independent African polities was perceived as a threat to white
dominance.91 It is argued here that this combination of African competition
and autonomy was felt most keenly by whites living in Pietermaritzburg and
Durban. In the context of an economic depression that threatened white
interests, independent black men in towns who shunned menial wage labour
and competed with settlers were regarded with fear and contempt. As in
early nineteenth-century London and colonial Queensland, disorderly
migrant labourers with indecent and uncivilised habits were seen as
presenting a threat to settler society in general and white women in
particular. In resorting to vagrancy legislation, white Natalians hoped to
neutralise this threat.

IV
In the late 1860s all white Natalians acknowledged the need for legislation
to check ‘the invasion of the privacy of domestic life, the disturbance of
hours of rest, and the trespass during the night, of idle vagabonds’. This
need was all the more pressing because ‘peculiarities in our local
circumstances’ made the capture and conviction of offenders difficult.
Houses were built far apart and back premises were open, ‘the means of
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VA G R A N C Y L E G I S L AT I O N I N C O L O N I A L N ATA L 41
approach and retreat under cover of trees and shrubs is easy: the tread of the
naked foot is stealthy: the natural freedom with which natives roam about,
and are admitted to see their relatives and friends in service, affords them a
pretence, when vicious, for trespassing’.92
White Natalians, especially those living in Pietermaritzburg and Durban,
were in the nineteenth century forced to confront the fact that their control
over Africans in Natal was limited. The relative autonomy and prosperity of
African communities in the colony were resented. This independence
encouraged a pattern of temporary migrant labour, allowed African men a
level of choice in the kinds of employment they entered and enabled
Africans to compete with colonists. In the straitened circumstances of the
1860s the ‘mask of effortless control slipped’ and white fears that hearth
and home were in imminent danger from black men increased.93 Whites
responded with calls for stricter legislation to safeguard both white women
and their economic interests. The result of these demands was the
transformation of Turnbull’s bill from a proposal ‘to revive a barbarous
system of repression long since obliterated from the statute books of
civilized nations’ to ‘a kind of vagrant law, which, when put in force, will
clear the streets of our two principal towns of the large number of black
wanderers of both sexes, who are not only the cause of much annoyance, but
have become the source of real danger to person and property’.94
In spite of the dramatic contrast between the proposals contained in
Turnbull’s original bill and the final form of Law 15 of 1869, white
Natalians understood the connections between vagrancy and sexual danger.
Similar connections were drawn in Europe and North America, where
vagrancy laws helped to define deviant outsiders and shore up hegemonic
masculinity. Natal’s vagrancy law served a similar function by racialising
vagrancy and facilitating the control of independent black men in towns.95
In defining independent urban black men as dangerous outsiders Natal
settlers drew from the well of ideas that made up their understanding of
civilised masculinity. It was proclaimed that savage African domestic
institutions encouraged idleness in black men, left young black males
sexually frustrated, taught black men to disrespect women, allowed black
men to shun regular employment and to evade control. In sum, the tenets of
civilised masculinity shaped the settler belief that whites and blacks were
different and informed the understanding that independent urban African
men posed a serious danger to settler society in Natal.

University of Western Australia

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NOTES

1. Natal Government Gazette, 4 May 1869. Note on Terminology: This article confines
offensive terms to direct quotations. In order to avoid cluttering the text, an exception to this
rule is the use of words such as ‘civilised’, ‘barbarous’ and ‘savage’. In no way should this
practice be seen as an endorsement of the racial ideas associated with these words.
2. N. Etherington, ‘Natal’s Black Rape Scare of the 1870s’, Journal of Southern African
Studies, 15, 1 (1988).
3. Natal Witness, 4 and 7 May 1869.
4. 5 George IV, c. 83, ‘An Act for the Punishment of idle and disorderly Persons, and Rogues
and Vagabonds, in that Part of Great Britain called England [21 June 1824]’.
5. Law No.15, 1869.
6. While Norman Etherington has analysed the rape scare that inspired Turnbull to introduce
his bill in 1869, the panic’s legislative legacy has yet to be studied.
7. Etherington, ‘Natal’s Black Rape Scare’, 36, 47, 50–51.
8. M. Swanson, ‘“The Asiatic Menace”: Creating Segregation in Durban, 1870–1900’,
International Journal of African Historical Studies, 16, 3 (1983), 420. Cited in Etherington,
‘Natal’s Black Rape Scare’, 36. It was a feature of rape scares in nineteenth- and twentieth-
century southern Africa that white fears were greatly exaggerated and that no causal
connection existed between white fears and actual cases of rape of white women by black
men. For South Africa, see C. van Onselen, Studies in the Social and Economic History of
the Witwatersrand 1886–1914 Volume 2 (New York, 1982), 1–73; J. Krikler, ‘Social
Neurosis and Hysterical Pre-cognition in South Africa: A Case Study and Reflections’,
Journal of Social History, 28, 3 (1995), 491–520; T. Keegan, ‘Gender, Degeneration and
Sexual Danger: Imagining Race and Class in South Africa, ca.1912’, Journal of Southern
African Studies, 27, 3 (2001), 459–77; J. Martens, ‘Settler Homes, Manhood and
“Houseboys”: An Analysis of Natal’s Rape Scare of 1886’, Journal of Southern African
Studies, 28, 2 (2002), 379–400. For recent studies of ‘black peril’ in Southern Rhodesia, see
D. Kennedy, Islands of White: Settler Society and Culture in Kenya and Southern Rhodesia,
1890–1939 (Durham, 1987), 128–47; J. Pape, ‘Black and White: The “Perils of Sex” in
Colonial Zimbabwe’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 16, 4 (1990), 699–720;
J.McCulloch, Black Peril, White Virtue: Sexual Crime in Southern Rhodesia, 1902–1935
(Bloomington, 2000).
9. Address No.49, 2 Oct. 1867, GH 878 (25–27), Pietermaritzburg Archives Repository (PAR).
10. Keate to Buckingham and Chandos, 6 March 1868, GH 1216 (168–70). See also M.H.
Gallwey, ‘On Resolution of Legislative Council ’, 30 Dec. 1867, AGO 1/10/2 (100–08),
PAR.
11. M.H. Gallwey, ‘On Resolution of Legislative Council ’, 30 Dec. 1867, AGO 1/10/2
(100–08). Gallwey pointed out that the Natal Legislature had no power to legislate for any
locality beyond the borders of the Colony. However, as the island of Inyack (Inhaca) in
Delagoa Bay had been annexed to Natal in 1861, it fell within the Colony.
12. T. Shepstone, ‘Mem. On R2564/1867’, 28 Feb. 1868, SNA 1/7/5 (231), PAR.
13. Keate to Buckingham and Chandos, 6 March 1868, GH 1216 (168–70).
14. Buckingham and Chandos to Keate, 23 June 1868, GH 49 (12–14).
15. Natal Witness, 7 Feb. 1868.
16. Ibid., 28 Feb. 1868 (original emphasis). For other correspondence regarding ‘Native
Outrages’, see Natal Witness, 17, 24, 27 and 31 March 1868.
17. A copy of By-Law 51, passed by the Pietermaritzburg City Council on 24 Jan. 1868, can be
found in City Council Minutes, 6 April 1869, 3/PMB 1/1/4 (343), PAR.
18. M.H. Gallwey, Report, 12 Feb. 1868, CSO 294 (222/1868), PAR.
19. ‘The Memorial of the undersigned Inhabitants ’, 5 March 1868, CSO 298 (696/1868).
20. Ibid. The memorialists maintained that the form of punishment ‘now administered to
coloured prisoners is wholly insufficient and that instead of deterring convicts and
others from the commission of crime, it forms only [a] matter of jest amongst them’. There
seems to have been a widespread belief amongst settlers that transportation was ‘terrible to
the Kaffir mind’.
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21. Erskine to Gallwey, 6 March 1868, AGO 1/8/10 (107A/1868). For the returns themselves,
see ‘Return of Cases tried or charges made of Assault by Natives on white Females from 1st
January 1863 to date, in the Counties of Durban, Victoria, and Alexandria ’, 23 March
1868; ‘Return made by the Clerk of the Peace for the Counties of Pietermaritzburg Umvoti
and Alfred and Division of Upper Umkomazi ’, 1 April 1868; Clerk of the Peace to
Gallwey, 13 March 1868, CSO 301 (934/1868).
22. Erskine to Snell, 23 March 1868, CSO 2306 (351).
23. Snell to Colonial Secretary, 22 April 1868, CSO 302 (1011/1868). Pietermaritzburg settlers
also favoured a system of written character references for African workers. See Natal
Witness, 24 and 27 March 1868.
24. Snell to Colonial Secretary, 22 April 1868, CSO 302 (1011/1868).
25. Natal Witness, 26 June 1868.
26. Ibid., 8 Sept. 1868.
27. City Council Minutes, 6 April 1869, 3/PMB 1/1/4 (343).
28. Erskine to Williams, 13 May 1869, CSO 2308 (496–98).
29. Natal Witness, 4 May 1869, 7 May 1869.
30. Natal Government Gazette, 4 May 1869.
31. Natal Witness, 7 May 1869. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison
(London, 1979), describes the decline of torture and spectacle as forms of punishment in
nineteenth-century Europe. The views of Turnbull and Ridley suggest that attitudes towards
physical punishment that had prevailed in eighteenth-century Europe were at times still
articulated in the colonies in the nineteenth century. Such attitudes were most forcefully
expressed in India during and after the 1857 rebellion. See for example V. Lal ‘The Incident
of the “Crawling Lane”: Women in the Punjab Disturbances of 1919’, Genders, 16 (1993),
35–45.
32. Proceedings of Select Committee No.5, 1869, 10 June 1869, NPP 253, PAR.
33. Turnbull’s original bill was Bill No.1 of 1869: ‘For the Protection of women and female
children’. In committee it was renamed ‘Bill for the protection of women and female children
and punishment of idle and disorderly persons and vagrants within the Boroughs of the
Colony of Natal’. The measure passed was Law No.15 of 1869: ‘For the punishment of idle
and disorderly persons, and vagrants, within the Colony of Natal’. See Proceedings of Select
Committee No.5, 1869, NPP 253.
34. 5 George IV, c. 83, ‘An Act for the Punishment of idle and disorderly Persons, and Rogues
and Vagabonds, in that Part of Great Britain called England [21 June 1824]’.
35. Law No.15, 1869.
36. ‘Report of the Select Committee appointed to consider the Bill “For the protection of Women
and female children”’, 30 June 1869, NPP 254.
37. Bill No.34, 1869, in Natal Government Gazette, 6 July 1869.
38. ‘Statement on Law No.15, 1869’, GH 1017 (209–10).
39. Ibid., GH 1017 (211).
40. Report on ‘Prevention of Rape’ Bill, 7 Sept. 1869, AGO 1/10/2 (401–02).
41. Keate to Granville, 22 Oct. 1869, GH 1217 (112–15).
42. Etherington, ‘Natal’s Black Rape Scare’, 45, fn.47.
43. And not in 1872, as Etherington, ‘Natal’s Black Rape Scare’, 37, argues.
44. Revise Committee Minutes, 13 Jan. 1870, 3/PMB 7/1/1.
45. Natal Government Gazette, 13 June 1871.
46. Etherington, ‘Natal’s Black Rape Scare’, 51, fn.66.
47. K. Atkins, ‘“Kafir Time”: Preindustrial Temporal Concepts and Labour Discipline in
Nineteenth-Century Colonial Natal’, Journal of African History, 29, 2 (1988), 243.
48. M. Swanson, ‘The Urban Factor in Natal Native Policy, 1843–1873’, Journal of Natal and
Zulu History, 3 (1980), 12.
49. Cited in R. Posel, ‘“Continental Women” and Durban’s “Social Evil”, 1899–1905’, Journal
of Natal and Zulu History, 12 (1989), 13, fn.59.
50. Union of South Africa, Debates of the House of Assembly, Vol.70 (1950), 2166–67. The 1950
Immorality Act prohibited sexual intercourse between ‘Europeans’ and ‘non-Europeans’ and
was repealed only in 1986.
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51. J.S. Adler, ‘A Historical Analysis of the Law of Vagrancy’, Criminology, 27, 2 (1989).
52. Ibid., 213–15.
53. M.J.D. Roberts, ‘Public and private in early nineteenth-century London: the Vagrant Act of
1822 and its enforcement’, Social History, 13, 3 (1988), 282, 292.
54. Ibid., 286, 288–94.
55. A. McLaren, The Trials of Masculinity: Policing Sexual Boundaries, 1870–1930 (Chicago,
1997), 13–36; 192–93.
56. Ibid., 13, 192, 16.
57. Ibid., 16–36.
58. R. Ahuja, ‘The Origins of Colonial Labour Policy in Late Eighteenth-Century Madras’,
International Review of Social History, 44 (1999), 183–84, 191.
59. M.R. Anderson, Public Nuisance and Private Purpose: Policed Environments in British
India, 1860–1947, SOAS Law Department Working Papers (London, 1992), 21–24.
60. R. Singha, ‘“Providential” Circumstances: The Thuggee Campaign of the 1830s and Legal
Innovation’, Modern Asian Studies, 27, 1 (1993), 102–06, 115.
61. Ibid., 135.
62. M. Radhakrishna, ‘The Criminal Tribes Act in Madras Presidency: Implications for itinerant
trading communities’, Indian Economic and Social History Review, 26, 3 (1989), 269–71.
63. M. Fairburn, ‘Vagrants, “Folk Devils” and Nineteenth-Century New Zealand as a Bondless
Society’, Historical Studies, 21, 85 (1985), 503–05.
64. S. Davies, ‘“Ragged, Dirty Infamous and Obscene”: The “Vagrant” in Late-Nineteenth-
Century Melbourne’, in D. Philips and S. Davies (eds.), A Nation of Rogues? Crime, Law
and Punishment in Colonial Australia (Melbourne, 1994), 143–44.
65. Ibid., 145–46.
66. R. Evans, K. Saunders and K. Cronin, Exclusion, Exploitation and Extermination: Race
Relations in Colonial Queensland (Sydney, 1975), 70–72.
67. Ibid., 211, 354.
68. Swanson, ‘The Urban Factor in Natal Native Policy, 1.
69. Ibid., 2–8.
70. Ibid.
71. Etherington, ‘Natal’s Black Rape Scare’, 37.
72. Ibid., 50.
73. J. Parle, ‘The Impact of the Depression upon Pietermaritzburg during the 1860s’,
unpublished M.A. thesis, University of Natal, Pietermaritzburg, 1988.
74. Natal Witness, 7 Feb. 1868.
75. Ibid., 17 March 1868.
76. ‘The Memorial of the undersigned Inhabitants ’, 5 March 1868, CSO 298 (696/1868).
77. Snell to Colonial Secretary, 22 April 1868, CSO 302 (1011/1868).
78. Natal Witness, 21 May 1869.
79. Ibid., 21 May 1869; Etherington, ‘Natal’s Black Rape Scare’, 45.
80. Natal Witness, 21 May 1869.
81. Ibid., 11 and 21 May 1869.
82. Ibid., 14 May 1869.
83. Cited in Etherington, ‘Natal’s Black Rape Scare’, 46.
84. Natal Witness, 5 March 1869.
85. Ibid., 21 May 1869.
86. Snell to Colonial Secretary, 22 April 1868, CSO 302 (1011/1868).
87. Natal Witness, 7 May 1869.
88. Cited in Etherington, ‘Natal’s Black Rape Scare’, 48.
89. M.H. Gallwey, ‘Statement on Law No.15, 1869’, 11 Oct. 1869, GH 1017 (209–10).
90. Cited in Etherington, ‘Natal’s Black Rape Scare’, 49.
91. Ibid., 50–51
92. Natal Witness, 7 Feb. 1868.
93. Etherington, ‘Natal’s Black Rape Scare’, 53.
94. Natal Witness, 28 Sept. 1869.
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95. However, given that it was African men alone who were the focus of white concern in the
late 1860s, it is puzzling to note that Law 15 defined ‘coloured person’ as ‘any Hottentot,
Coolie, Bushman, Lascar, or any of the people commonly called Kafirs’. While Natal
legislators left no record of their reasons for selecting this broad racial definition, one might
surmise that all of the people designated were believed to offend civilised domesticity in
some respect. The clue is the law’s separation of ‘Coolie’ and ‘Lascar’. Indian immigrants to
Natal were labelled as ‘coolies’ or ‘Arabs’ by whites, the former being indentured labourers
and the latter financially independent ‘passengers’ who had chosen to settle in the colony.
The vagrancy law did not target ‘Arabs’; rather it was single male Indian sailors on shore
leave, indentured labourers off the estates, itinerant ‘Bushmen’ and ‘Hottentot’ prostitutes
who walked the streets who were netted by the curfew. In common with urban African men,
all of these persons failed to conform to settlers’ understanding of civilised behaviour.