Criminal Desire

Under apartheid, the government of South Africa rigorously enforced the Immorality Act of 1950, which prohibited “illicit carnal intercourse” (extramarital sex) between heterosexual whites and Blacks. Seven years later, in 1957, the government also criminalized indications of interracial desire and attempts to have sex across the white-Black colour line. Doing so directly affected an astounding number of South Africans. Between 1950 and 1985, the year the government decriminalized interracial sex and desire, the police arrested tens of thousands of people, mainly white men and Black women, for transgressing the injunction to avoid interracial intimacy. The criminalization of interracial desire was widely discussed, debated, and condemned at the time, yet after the transition to liberal democracy in 1994 this tragic and sordid dimension of apartheid was largely forgotten by the post-apartheid government and public, and overlooked by historians.Criminal Desire counters the official, scholarly, and popular forgetting of this vicious history by offering the first historical monograph about the policing of illicit interracial sex between heterosexual whites and Blacks in twentieth-century South Africa. Author Susanne M. Klausen argues that sexuality was at the heart of the apartheid project, from its beginnings in 1948 when the Afrikaner National Party government sought to protect whites' mythical purity, to its unravelling in the 1980s when it tried to maintain power. Klausen demonstrates how the apartheid regime used laws about sex to simultaneously teach race and police heterosexual desire and examines the impact of sexual policing on South African individuals, society, and international relations. Based on a wide range of primary sources including interviews, diaries, novels, autobiographies, records of parliamentary debates, newspapers, court records, and documents in South African and British archives, Criminal Desire offers a significant contribution to the historiography of racialized sexuality, gender, intimacy, and punishment in Africa, and to our understanding of the profound and long-lasting harms of apartheid.