On the Edges of Whiteness by Jochen Lingelbach;

Author:Jochen Lingelbach; [Lingelbach, Jochen]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Published: 2020-05-14T23:00:00+00:00

Prostitution

In the eyes of some colonial officials, one of the most dangerous groups among the Polish refugees were women who worked as prostitutes with African customers. In 1944 there was a series of incidents in Northern Rhodesia that finally led to the establishment of an isolated ‘segregation camp’ in Katambora. As shown earlier, the camp did not work out as expected, but the argumentation for its establishment is revealing.146 Northern Rhodesia’s governor Waddington explained the reason for setting up the camp in a confidential telegram to the Colonial Office in London.147 He described a series of incidents in the refugee camp Bwana Mkubwa that made it necessary to isolate some of the ‘unruly elements’ among the Poles. He reported an ‘affray’ in the camp, in the course of which several people were stabbed, some criminals arrested, and four of them were sent to Kenya. But the most serious problem Waddington singled out was that some women who were practising prostitution with African men: ‘One of the chief problems at the moment is the control of a number of prostitutes who were included among the evacuees. The suspicion that they were plying their trade among Africans has recently been confirmed. This is a very serious matter and might have most unpleasant repercussions.’148

The emphasis and dramatization of the sexual contact with Africans shows that it was considered as not only an issue of sexual morality, but as a threat to the race-based colonial order of society. This was not the only incident of prostitution among the Polish refugees. In Tanganyika another woman, described as a ‘known prostitute’, was ‘associating with Italians, Asians and Africans’ around Tengeru.149 She was fined and imprisoned in the camp before being moved to another camp in Ifunda. In Kenya, some Polish women from Mombasa transit camp were reportedly active in prostitution with African men in the town.150 Their behaviour led one Czech resident of Mombasa to send a complaint about five Polish women to the camp administration, arguing: ‘As I am also a foreigner I feel it to be my duty to stop such degradation of European women freely prostituting themselves to Arabs, Indians and even natives, and destroying the last reputation of the Polish and foreign element in this country’.151 Especially the public form of their prostitution concerned the writer.

Women classified as prostitutes were placed under the category of ‘undesirables’ in a report on the last remaining refugees and their migration prospects.152 In a similar list from Southern Rhodesia, seven out of twelve ‘undesirable’ refugees were described as prostitutes.153 Although their numbers were tiny in relation to the overall group of refugees, their activities were seen as problematic from the authorities’ point of view. Prostitution of white women with black men in a colonial setting can be understood as a ‘double transgression of gender as well as racial norms’.154 These women were transgressing not only the boundaries of race, but of accepted gender roles as well. They did not stay in the domestic sphere, but acted against the standards of respectability.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.