‘The White Wife Problem’: Sex, Race and the Contested Politics of Repatriation to Interwar British West Africa

Abstract

Return is as much about the world to which you no longer belong as it is about the one in which you have yet to make a home. 1 Saidiya HartmanAs the First World War came to a close, 'black' men from Britain's overseas colonies and their white wives and lovers came to embody the fears and anxieties that gripped Britain's economically depressed port cities. 2 Black men were accused of taking jobs from white British men and stealing 'their' women. White women who partnered with black men were cast as depraved and immoral traitors, who selfishly prioritised their own sexual and material desires above the good of the nation. Working-class interracial couples became targets of abuse on the increasingly tense streets of Britain's port cities and, when a series of violent race riots swept through the ports in the summer of 1919, they were largely blamed for their outbreak. White mobs, ranging in size from a few hundred to several thousand, indiscriminately attacked black men, harassed and assaulted their white partners, and destroyed the multiracial settlements they called home. 3 In the wake of the riots, some of these couples attempted to leave their hostile environs for the British colonies, especially in West Africa and the West Indies, where many of the men in question came from. Their desire to take up residency overseas, however, led to the immediate implementation of a policy which I call the 'policy of prevention', designed to keep European women married to working-class black men out of the colonies. This was especially the case for British West Africa and marked an important shift from the prewar period, when colonial social conventions and their attendant racial taboos were the primary mechanisms that, at the very least, kept European women and black men from openly liaising with one another. 4 During the interwar period, state power was also used to ensure that the West African colonies were kept free of such couples. While the origins of the policy of prevention are to be found in the immediate aftermath of the 1919 race riots, it continued to guide colonial authorities' decisionmaking processes throughout the interwar years. By and large, it was West African men who were domiciled in Britain and married to white British women that sought C

‘In His Passionate Way’: Emotion, Race and Gender in Cases of Partner Murder in England and Wales, 1900–39

“…White women in sexual relationships with men of colour were seen as having provoked the violence. The evidence for this being the most important reason for the riots is not strong, but it is significant that it was represented as such (Ray, 2009).…”

“Internal Frontiers”: Whiteness, Intimacy, and the Expatriate Home in Britain's African Colonies during the Postwar Period

“…89 This in keeping with Carina Ray's study on "the white wife problem" in British West Africa, in which she cites cases where wealthy West African men were permitted to live with their European wives in the colonies only after proving that they would provide them with a standard of living befitting their race. 90 Whereas working-class interracial couples were denied entry for fear that their poor living conditions would destabilise race relations. Therefore racial anxieties surrounding interracial sex and intimacy during the late colonial period in Britain's African colonies were not only to do with fears of miscegenation and racial degeneration, but were also related to bourgeois domestic conventions.…”

A Certain Class of Undesirables

“…Carina Ray and John Belchem, however, connect repatriation to interracialised intimacies. Ray discusses the British government's refusal to assist in the repatriation of the White wives of West African colonial citizens (Ray, 2009). Belchem addresses the repatriation of Chinese men who were married to White British women (Belchem, 2014).…”