In 1906, Cornelius May, the West African writer and political figure, reviewed a New York Times article on German eugenic thought. He wrote an essay on it in The Sierra Leone Weekly News (Weekly News), which he edited. His writing treated German theorists who propounded racial degeneration as principles applicable to Africans living in colonial Freetown, Sierra Leone. He addressed these ideas to his readership of a few thousand subscribers, a mostly anglophone literate minority including teachers, clerks, artisans, and traders across British colonies in West Africa.Footnote 1 May mobilized the New York Times article as evidence to argue that, much like Germany, Freetown was in “imminent danger of physical degeneration,” and even “complete extinction,” due to what he saw as widespread sexual relationships between white men and African women.Footnote 2
May returned to those concerns one month later, when his editorial excerpted (without attribution) an essay titled “A Remedy for the Social Evil,” published in The Review of Religions. This was an Ahmadiyya magazine printed in Punjab, India.Footnote 3 The Review of Religions piece that May cited was itself a commentary on a brochure called Race Suicide, penned by the white American Mormon intellectual Amos Milton Musser. In Race Suicide, Musser presented polygyny as an ethical system and a patriarchal safeguard against what eugenicists around the world called “race suicide.” Footnote 4 Proponents of this concept attributed what they saw as declining global birth rates among white populations to white women’s sexual independence, Black proximity, and interracial sex.Footnote 5 Despite the overt racist assumptions in Musser’s pamphlet, May endorsed what he called Musser’s “scientific” theory and found it “consistent with the leading American Journals.” May used Musser’s text to offer his own argument: “race suicide” beset Freetown. British-imposed monogamy, he contended, displaced precolonial polygynous marriage systems. In May’s opinion, the replacement of polygyny with monogamy under colonial laws had left African women without adequate paternal protections, leading to what he interpreted as race suicide.Footnote 6 What British imperialists styled as colonial paternalism was in fact, he implied, a mask for sexual perversion that undermined the very ideologies upon which the British Empire was predicated.
Cornelius May, who would in 1920 lead the Sierra Leone branch of the National Congress of British West Africa (NCBWA), frequently wrote about eugenic discourse in his editorials. He was not alone in doing so in the Weekly News. This independent newspaper boasted more subscribers than any other in British colonial West Africa during the period this article examines. A handful of African columnists, essayists, and poets joined him in producing eugenic narratives. It was through such reconstitution of eugenic discourse that African authors writing for local newspapers addressed the implicit tensions underlying British sexual paternalism. Under conditions of limited power these authors, including prominent political thinkers and early state builders, asserted their political legitimacy that the colonial state refused to grant them.
Scholars like Ann Laura Stoler have shown that the regulation of sexuality and family life was central to how empires exercised power. She and others have established a substantial, theoretically dense body of scholarship showing that imperial regimes often portrayed colonized peoples as sexually deviant and presented white men as rational protectors of so-called “primitive” subjects. Eugenic ideas attended and sharpened these views. Proponents of eugenic ideologies used science to decide who was “fit” or “unfit,” categories that were usually racialized, gendered, and classed. Wrapped in the language of paternal care and moral improvement, these ideas justified colonial rule by implying that the so-called sexual impulsivity of colonized subjects required intervention. Thus, race science was both an index of racial domination and a means of enacting this domination.Footnote 7
However, what Stoler and others correctly view as a sexualized regime of imperialist invocation, Carina Ray’s scholarship reconceives through reflection on the startling centrality of these narratives in African political thought in colonial British West Africa. Sexualized anxieties about this so-called problem were hardly the sole province of European intellectual traditions but formed core aspects of anticolonial nationalist movements. In the early twentieth century, this strategy unfolded during a period that historians have sometimes characterized as one of conservatism, primarily because early West African nationalists sought to reform the empire via petitions and legalistic arguments to achieve dominion status rather than pursuing total independence. As Jeanne-Marie Jackson articulates in her revisionist account of the era’s legal, political, and literary thought, this elite focus on the “letter of the law” represented a rigorous liberal anticolonial disposition that sought to expose the soft underbelly of imperial authority by pulling at the ideologies that gave it coherence. This article argues that eugenic discourse gave Freetown authors a way to make their political demands understandable and harder to dismiss within the language that British colonialists themselves used to justify empire. They reapplied race science to prove that they possessed the rational and “civilized” restraint required for political legitimacy that colonialists denied them.Footnote 8 My article reconstructs the finer dynamics through which these anxieties were mobilized in the Sierra Leone Weekly News, strikingly, through the language of eugenics.Footnote 9
In its conceptual undertaking, the article employs and adapts historian Britt Rusert’s idea of “fugitive science.” Rusert introduced the term in her 2017 monograph to theorize how marginalized African American communities in the United States during the late nineteenth century repurposed race science to challenge anti-Black racism. This included debates, plays, exhibits, pamphlets, and a wide range of other cultural forms.Footnote 10 The concept of fugitive science is useful here because it captures how these writers worked inside the limits of colonial thinking while turning its own tools against it. Fugitive science translates particularly well in the West African context, where, as scholar Stephanie Newell details, a prominent culture of pseudonymous newspaper writing emerged as contributors experimented with voice, authority, genre, and audience within the colonial public sphere in ways that cannot be dismissed as derivative or mimetic of European thought.Footnote 11 This article defines such commentaries as fugitive because by engaging in eugenic discourse, Freetonian authors maneuvered within the constraints of the British Empire while employing the very ideologies that justified it to challenge it from within.Footnote 12
The article first details a wide range of commentary around anxieties over high infant mortality rates recorded in the colonial hospital. This became an extremely common focus of printed commentary, as essayists linked this concern to sexual relationships between African women and the few hundred European men in Freetown. Many such texts located topics of social frustration in the domestic realm of monogamy, and often associated this marriage form, encouraged by missionaries and colonial administrators, with the encouragement of Freetonian women’s so-called promiscuity. It then shows how these debates crystallized in the form of “Syrian Peril” rhetoric. Essays and editorials pivoted around sexual panics about immigrant middle-class Lebanese merchants in colonial Freetown, whom various authors painted as displacing urban Freetown elites from the political and economic center. Such fantasies reflected a series of truths about African displacement, as I will outline, and grew increasingly politicized with the founding of the National Congress of British West Africa (NCBWA), formed in 1920, which incorporated “Syrian Peril” into its foundational agenda, as seen in its 1920 petition to the League of Nations. By adopting this language of sexualized anxiety, Freetown’s intellectuals forced colonialists to confront their demands for political change on the very same “scientific” grounds that often legitimized the British Empire.
Colonial Freetown
In Freetown, fugitive science did not emerge from marginal counter-publics as they did in the United States context. This was because in Freetown, Africans occupied central positions in the colony’s intellectual life, rather than subsisting on its outskirts.Footnote 13 Freetown was founded in 1792 as a Black settler colony of migrants from London, Nova Scotia, and the Caribbean. It started as an experiment in Britain’s shift from slavery to “legitimate commerce.” However, the British project of humanitarianism fostered the emergence of a hyper-patriarchal climate that eugenic commentaries would later articulate.Footnote 14 Over the nineteenth century, “Liberated Africans” became central to the city’s intellectual life. These communities comprised refugees who, after Britain abolished the transatlantic slave trade in 1807, were aboard slave ships intercepted by the Royal Navy, before being forcibly resettled in Freetown to provide cheap labor as part of the broader imperial shift from slavery to “legitimate commerce.”Footnote 15 They reached a cumulative population of 80,000–100,000 individuals over the nineteenth century, while the European population of Freetown rarely exceeded a few hundred. They were forced into regimes of “apprenticeships” for up to fourteen years and provided manual and agricultural work in villages surrounding the town.Footnote 16 The so-called “disposal” practices of the Liberated African Department, tasked with overseeing the resettlement of these forced migrants into Freetown, included domestic indenture for girls and young women, who experienced extreme vulnerability and widespread sexual abuse.Footnote 17
Liberated Africans and their descendants quickly adopted Christianity, literacy, and the English language. They entered mission schools set up and run by several institutions, predominantly the Wesleyan Methodist Missionary Society, the Church Missionary Society (CMS), and from the 1890s, the African Methodist Episcopal (AME).Footnote 18 The goal was to transform Liberated Africans into a settled, Christian peasantry that could provide the raw materials required by British industry, thereby proving that legitimate trade was more profitable than the slave trade.Footnote 19 Freetown’s soil was not conducive to such output, and it remained a small economy throughout the colonial period. Because the plantation model failed in Freetown, missions pivoted toward literacy and technical training.Footnote 20
From the 1850s until the 1880s, the British War Office and CMS granted scholarships to a handful of students from Freetown to study medicine and law at King’s College in the University of London, the University of Edinburgh, and elsewhere in Europe. Dozens of the most promising African students in Freetown earned scholarships, whereas others privately funded their education to become medical doctors, lawyers, and clerks.Footnote 21 From the mid nineteenth century, mission education transformed Freetown into a major hub for producing African personnel who staffed colonial administrations and technical services across British West Africa. As a result of these appointments, highly educated West Africans filled top-tier colonial roles that were later closed to them during the era of “New Imperialism” at the end of the nineteenth century.Footnote 22 Thus, Freetown’s fugitive science arose from a mission-educated male elite embedded in the colony’s heart.
While this period represented a professional zenith for West African men in the public sphere, it simultaneously restricted African women to the domestic arena. The era of African institutional ascendancy was built upon a strictly patriarchal Victorian ideological foundation. “Separate roles” Victorian gender ideology, practiced in mission schools, held that women’s proper roles lay in domesticity within the nuclear family, and as such, African girls who also attended mission schools received instruction in subjects such as cooking and embroidery.Footnote 23 Mission education schemes in Freetown sought less to prepare women for professional advancement than to anchor monogamous family units.
Eugenic discourse emerged alongside and in response to how urbanization reshaped the sexual economy through migration, commerce, and British military presence. The nineteenth century saw the migration of tens of thousands from the interior and the city’s economy grew increasingly anchored to petty markets, dock work, and re-export commerce.Footnote 24 Women, often Temne- and Sherbro-speakers, migrated from the interior and built livelihoods through markets, including Big Market, King Jimmy, and one on Bombay Street.Footnote 25 Freetown’s role as a naval base and garrison town also brought hundreds of white sailors and soldiers into the city.Footnote 26 Within this environment, African women (and likely African men) turned to sex work as a life strategy. On a broader scale, this was part of larger patterns historians have noted in many African cities, where people developed new economic and emotional strategies to survive rapid urbanization.Footnote 27
These developments generated sustained moral concern about women’s sexuality among mission-educated Christian Africans and thus echoed tensions observed across other urbanizing African contexts, such as moral panics over the migration of “unattached” women in colonial Zimbabwe, the anxieties surrounding the so-called destruction of the African family in the urban townships of South Africa, or the debates in Lagos over how to distinguish “civilized” Christian domesticity from the “disorder” of the growing wage-labor class.Footnote 28 In Freetown, these tensions carried a particular historical weight, as the city had been founded as the premier laboratory for the British imperial project of humanitarianism. While antislavery had originally provided the moral scaffolding for the colony’s existence, by the 1870s, this humanitarian focus pivoted toward condemning African domestic and sexual practices. Central to this shift was the colonial reinterpretation of polygyny. Although it functioned as the long-standing indigenous social architecture of the West African interior, it was increasingly framed by British officials as a primitive relic. Colonialist narratives about African polygyny fueled justifications for imperial administration in African colonies by portraying African women in polygynous relationships as living in another state of slavery.Footnote 29
In the independent press that arose in the 1880s, these questions quickly formed topics of widespread discussion. These papers grew out of a history of missionary print cultures like the Sierra Leone Watchman but quickly became vehicles for secular political dissent and cultural nationalism.Footnote 30 Because colonialists framed polygyny as a marker of African primitivity, it became a hotly contested topic. Some writers sought to reject this premise by depicting polygyny as a rational social system indicating African capacity for patriarchal control.Footnote 31 Several anglophone newspapers appeared in Freetown, most notably The Sierra Leone Weekly News, founded in 1884 by Reverend Joseph Claudius May and edited by his brother Cornelius, who had studied journalism in Britain.Footnote 32 The periodical, which ceased running in 1952, sold around 1,500 copies per week in 1898 and by 1912 claimed around 6,000 weekly readers, from Freetown and Sierra Leone generally, the Gold Coast, Lagos, Britain, the United States, South Africa, and likely elsewhere.Footnote 33
Exposure to specialized curricula and medical texts fostered a local culture of subscribing to international periodicals such as Good Health, Illustrated Medical News, and The New York Times. This engagement mirrored broader trends across British West Africa, where regional papers like The Sierra Leone Guardian, the Lagos Weekly Record, and The Gold Coast Leader frequently spotlighted scientific and medical discourse. Given its status as the region’s most widely circulated independent periodical, the Sierra Leone Weekly News serves as the focal point of this investigation. As one of a few West African newspapers that regularly published columns and essays on scientific topics, ranging from naturalism and evolutionary theory to spiritualism and the occult, the Weekly News produced columns such as “Our Science Column” alongside dozens of essays. These writings reflected Freetown’s distinct intellectual milieu, shaped by missionary education and training in medicine, law, and other disciplines.
“True Womanhood”: Death, Sex, and Pseudoscience
Such scientific and medical engagements often included discussions of eugenic discourse. This theme drew attention because it resonated with long-running issues of ill health, made legible in shocking official reports for the colonial hospital that treated well-to-do and middling families. In 1898, 34 percent of all deaths recorded by the hospital were children under five years old. This figure equated to 296 children in a city of around 30,000 people.Footnote 34 Moreover, the colonial hospital recorded high rates of infant mortality of around 40 percent.Footnote 35 Crucially, neither infant mortality nor childhood disease were uniquely African afflictions, despite colonial portrayals of them as endemic to the continent.Footnote 36 Such issues arose from the neglect and poor design of European-built sanitation systems, along with inadequate maintenance in meat markets and other spaces that fostered disease, potentially compounded by epigenetic trauma from historic experiences of capture and abuse.Footnote 37
Faced with the reality of high infant mortality rates and the emotional aftershocks these experiences engendered, Freetonians turned to medical perspectives circulating in books, essays, and science journals to make sense of these events. Often, they placed the blame on women who engaged in sex work with Europeans. Alafia’s 1888 Weekly News column, titled “Our Science Column,” reviewed studies published in the London Medical Recorder, Good Health, and Illustrated Medical News. One of Alafia’s essays cited the theories of Russian doctor Boris Kianovsky, American medical practitioner W. F. Neftel, and German physician F. Marchand, who all offered medical arguments that corset-wearing—which they connected with women’s sexual promiscuity—induced infant mortality by narrowing wombs.Footnote 38 Alafia championed their arguments because in Freetown, “for every child thus killed [through sex work], these fashionable mothers and wearers of corsets are responsible; the blood of their dead infants is continually crying from the earth.”Footnote 39 Similarly, the pseudonymous author “Race-Hope” in a July 1915 essay attributed the “killing off” of Freetonian children to local women “pleased to enslave themselves, unreasoning, to the fashions of Europe” in exchange for sex. The author concluded that women in Freetown must start to “sacrifice the pleasure of fashion and style, for the motherhood interest of your race.”Footnote 40
In 1894, Abdul Mortaleb, a recurring contributor, drew inspiration from American physician John Milton Scudder’s 1876 study The Reproductive Organs and Venereal Diseases. Scudder had warned that masturbation and “sexual excess” induced infant mortality.Footnote 41 Mortaleb applied Scudder’s views to Freetown and wrote “without fear of contradiction, that the children of Monogamists in Africa are morally, mentally, and physically weak,” due to what he saw as the adverse effects of monogamous domestic disorder imposed onto Africans by European colonizers. He used Scudder to reason that Freetonian children born “under monogamic influences,” “lost all virtue and life, [and] are running fast into imbecility and the grave.” His intention in writing fugitive science was to portray monogamy as an alien social structure that induced “1. Deceit 2. Prostitution 3. Offsprings morally, mentally, and physically weak 4. Diseases and 5. Premature Death.”Footnote 42
In 1898, Mortaleb quoted English physician William B. Carpenter, who theorized that hot climates induced sexual promiscuity. Men who endured Sierra Leone’s tropical monsoon climate, Mortaleb wrote, tended to suffer sexual urges, and turned “a prostitute of his single wife, and approaches her in all of her changes of womanhood [pregnancy], to satisfy his desires.” This influenced babies, who “by the laws of ‘impression’ is born into the world with sensual propensities and appetites,” based on their experiences in the womb. He suggested that polygyny would allow men to alternate sex between wives, giving women time to “rehabilitate” and thus rejuvenate reproductive health. Mortaleb further contended that babies born of polygynous arrangements tended to develop “appropriate” sexual instincts as adults, since in his view husbands with multiple wives could abstain from intercourse with pregnant wives while maintaining sexual relations with their other spouses, thereby preventing the fetus from acquiring the promiscuous instincts that he associated with prenatal exposure to sexual activity.Footnote 43
These widespread debates included figures whose writings scholars have often used to paint a singular picture of African intellectual thought. In his 1907–08 column “African Life and Customs,” Edward Wilmot Blyden, a key figure in the early days of Pan-Africanism, painted polygyny as a precolonial African tradition embodying “stirpiculture, or what Mr. Francis Galton calls Eugenics.” Blyden claimed that West African societies had practiced eugenics for centuries and had produced healthy children through what he deemed “customary” polygynous structures.Footnote 44 He wrote that arranged marriages could prevent racial degeneration. He argued that women who selected partners lost support networks: the “disappointed young wife pines and wastes away under privation—intellectual, social, and physical.” Infant mortality would persist, he insisted, “until all those brought up by the European system [of marriage] die out.”Footnote 45 As T. J. Thompson, African lawyer and editor of The Colonial and Provincial Reporter, based in Freetown, wrote, under systems of monogamy common “in the European system, a portion of the female population is wholly degraded,” yet in West Africa the colonialist still “condemns polygamy without stopping to consider its advantages to womanhood.” “In short, the Englishman won’t support more than one female, and he won’t help the others to support themselves.”Footnote 46
The pseudonymous Marillia Van’s six-essay-column, “True Womanhood,” published in 1917, further imagined a precolonial past when, Van claimed, women existed primarily to serve as reproductive vessels and dignified wives. This column suggested that before colonial rule, “the noble function of maternity was to [women] a duty of the highest order.” Van evoked how African women in the past usually birthed ten children. In contrast, Van doubted that at the time of writing there existed even fifty women “among the descendants of liberated Africans” who could produce eight children each. Van quipped,
“Do you take notice that the numerical strength of us descendants of liberated Africans are fastly diminishing? Do you take notice that ‘ere our women of 35 years, in most cases, they have ceased to breed? I suppose you all know that promiscuous sexual intimacy is a potent enemy to reproduction?”Footnote 47
Van employed these ideas to undermine the paternalist authority of European colonial rule, which “proved to be a force disadvantageous to the healthy growth of our morality,” because under that system of administration, “womanhood is practically under no protection which may have served as a sort of bridle on animalism.”Footnote 48 The appeal to chastity and domestic virtue drew heavily on Christian moral rhetoric inherited from mission education, which intertwined with eugenic ideals of degeneration in West Africa.Footnote 49
Such an argument evinced selective historical memory. It obscured the long-standing sexual and economic entanglements that had structured life along the West African coast for centuries. From the sixteenth century onward, European traders and officials entered “landlord–tenant” relationships with African merchant families—arrangements that combined commercial alliances with sexual partnerships and produced Afro-European intermediaries central to coastal economies. Yet early twentieth-century commentators, some of whom were themselves descended from such genealogies, recast these histories as proof of colonial disorder. In doing so, however, they constructed a very particular historical memory that disavowed the forms of intimacy, exchange, and sexual negotiation that had long structured coastal societies.Footnote 50
In the column, Van continued to argue that monogamy brought on by colonial rule encouraged wives to “connive with their daughters in abrogating paternal authority.” It was vital for wives to be tethered to their husbands, the column argued, since “one’s moral principles acquired in the home can only be subverted by external influences when the materials used in the home are weak,” which diminished patriarchal control. Independent women, left unchecked, pursued “frills and flounces of the most dainty kind,” “in some cases to the point of obsession.” This so-called emotively driven pursuit of glamor and “frills” came at the expense of domestic values and, they argued, led to the dissolution of “True Womanhood.”Footnote 51 Van did not coin the term. “True womanhood” was already a circulating prescriptive concept across the British Empire. The idiom positioned women’s obedience at the center of the normative household and cast women as delicate and submissive while condemning “career women” who abandoned household duties. This heuristic further mirrored language in Britain’s anti-suffragette movement, which cast women as emotionally unfit for political rights and sought to reserve civic authority for men.Footnote 52
In Freetown, such sexualized discourse occurred in a specific period in which educated Freetonian intellectuals were subjected to a two-pronged “pincer movement” of disenfranchisement that shuttered their influence in medical professional and political capacities. In 1902, the establishment of the West African Medical Staff (WAMS) codified a racial “color bar” that, as historian Ryan Johnson has documented, evicted highly qualified African doctors from the upper echelons of colonial service they had previously led and instituted a discriminatory salary ceiling that ensured African practitioners were paid substantially less than their European counterparts. This professional eviction was mirrored by a steady administrative marginalization beginning in the 1890s. As Christopher Fyfe notes, Governor Sir Francis Fleming revised the Standing Orders of the Legislative Council to ensure it was populated by individuals “the government preferred.” This culminated in an “unobtrusive but far-reaching change” in 1896, where government bills were approved in secret by the Executive Council before being introduced to the legislature. Barred from political and professional authority, authors like Van adopted anti-progressive gender arguments of the British metropole to prove they were “civilized” enough to deserve the political rights the British were currently taking away. In other words, the regulation of women became a surrogate for the regulation of the state.Footnote 53
These printed essays may also be read as critical responses to a small but prominent cohort of West African women intellectuals, most notably Adelaide Casely Hayford, who founded the Girls’ Vocational and Industrial Training School in 1923. She was indeed highly critical of what she in one speech called the relegation of women in Freetown to “a footstool in a little corner, eating whatever plums her liege-lord may give her…in the heart of nearly every African (man) is the idea that a woman is his inferior.”Footnote 54 Read alongside Ray’s critique that analyses of African nationalism tend to center on interracial intimacy—foregrounding white women and African men—and thereby produce a skewed gendered optic that sidelines African women, columns such as Van’s render that marginalization as a discursive effect.Footnote 55
This contested ideological ground found its practical counterpart in Freetown’s legal landscape, where marriage remained a disputed legal field. Sierra Leone’s legal system was characterized by legal plurality that incorporated British law, Muslim law, and customary laws of “tribal” groups. “Non-natives,” or descendants of Liberated Africans in Freetown, were subject to British law, which prohibited polygamy. However, the legal system allowed for the recognition of polygyny under Islamic law, primarily for those professing the Muslim faith. Native Courts operated under the leadership of chiefs who addressed civil matters for the “native” population, often immigrants from the interior and applied the customary laws of different tribal groups. The lack of uniformity across the courts ensured that marriage remained a disputed issue.Footnote 56
Meanwhile, European administrators in Sierra Leone’s Legislative Council did little to limit sex work in Freetown, which led to the spread of local discourse around their failure to secure the sexual order. Sierra Leone was exceptional within the British Empire because the colonial state did not implement the Contagious Diseases Acts or venereal disease regulations that existed elsewhere. The Police Ordinance of 1851 criminalized “every common prostitute or night-walker loitering or being in any thoroughfare, or public place, for the purposes of prostitution or solicitation.”Footnote 57 Freetown did not reach the export revenues of colonial Gold Coast or Nigeria, for example, and colonial administrators privileged the maintenance of the port infrastructure over the costly surveillance and medical policing required to regulate the city’s sexual economy.Footnote 58
When women did face legal prosecution for sex work, or when African landlords were prosecuted for leasing their properties as brothels, editors published the results of these trials in public condemnation. The Colonial and Provincial Reporter regularly published the outcomes of prostitution cases. Readers learned about how, on 16 February 1917, Judith Williams was accused of prostitution, and how the charge was dismissed.Footnote 59 The fact that Virtue Thomas was found guilty and fined for loitering with the intent of prostitution on 9 February 1918 was also made known. In 1917, the Reporter noted how Gbainyah had been convicted of “permitting his premises to be used as a brothel for habitual prostitution,” resulting in a £2 fine or two months of hard labor.Footnote 60 Such reportage offered a moral platform through which authors enacted a form of public vigilantism, compensating for what they perceived as the colonial state’s failure to regulate sexual disorder.
“For Dear Fatherland”: Motor Girls and Syrian Peril Panics
In August 1907, the Weekly News carried “For Young Girls and Women,” an evocative fictional dialogue starring two impoverished Freetonian girls named Jane and Sissie. The dialogue, written in a poor imitation of the Krio language and thus aimed at working-class women, involved Jane asking Sissie why Freetown society disparaged “sojer wef” (African women who entered sexual relationships with white foreigners, often soldiers), and why such women were so stigmatized. Sissie, recognizing Jane’s improper curiosity, cautions Jane against becoming a sojer wef, since “public opinion is always and everywhere against it.” Sissie urges Jane to find employment in the local market:
“for God sake run from Barrick (for God’s sake run from the barracks)
Barrick life nar pur ruing (Barracks life is complete ruin)
Ruin perfect, ruin clean
You go surely turn to yooba (You will surely turn to prostitution)
You go surely turn rum-puncheon (You will surely turn into a rum cask/turn to alcohol)”
Jane, swayed by those remarks, thanks God for Sissie, “who is a good woman, though she is poor.” Jane vows to avoid sex work and to sell goods in the local market.Footnote 61
Six weeks earlier, the poem “For Dear Fatherland,” penned by “Amen,” a pseudonym revealing the author’s Christian moral posture that structured much of Freetown’s mission-educated intellectual discourse, had revisited similar concerns from a distinctly jingoistic angle. Its title echoed a patriotic idiom common across Europe, where the nationalist rhetoric of “the fatherland” evoked patriotic obligations to safeguard “the nation” during a period of intensifying rivalry across Europe. The poem, written in broken Krio (like “For Young Girls and Women”), applied this ideology to colonial Freetown, and lamented the sodomization of African girls at the hands of “de wait man - ah the aliens.” In the context of urban sex work, the author urged African men to “Stand up — wake up — things day bad…Save de little girls from death,” in the face of women having sex with foreigners in exchange for “Coverslot and Silk Hankerchief, Body all day go for nothing. Jarbone all day sink nar face (her face wastes away/she seems to become sick).” The poet acknowledged that “Money sweet and free life sweet” yet urged local girls to choose “honest labor,” “simple bread,” and “simple clothing,” rather than engage in sex work with foreigners who sought “to spoil my dearest country; Thus to tread upon our daughters; Thus to sodomize our land.”Footnote 62
Poetic sexual panic emerged against the backdrop of economic change. The early twentieth century saw the erosion of African women’s roles in Freetown’s petty markets, due to the immigration of Maronite Christian communities from Mount Lebanon (then part of the Ottoman province of Syria), driven out by the collapse of Lebanon’s silkworm industry.Footnote 63 They established trading communities in Freetown, Lagos, and other cities.Footnote 64 By the early twentieth century, they numbered several hundred in Freetown and occupied a social and economic position between Europeans and Africans in a racialized economic hierarchy. This disruption of Freetown’s markets also unsettled African men’s economic status.Footnote 65 Lebanese migration and European mercantile growth eroded African men’s intermediary roles. Large European firms dominated the import–export economy and relied increasingly on Lebanese traders who accepted unfavorable credit terms and thin profit margins.Footnote 66
Faced with such pressures, essayists channeled public discourse toward Lebanese merchants as seducers of African women and complicit actors in the seemingly crumbling sexual order. References to “Motor Girls” embodied this shift. Contributors invoked this term to chastise African women who rode with Lebanese immigrants in cars symbolizing wealth and predation. “Motor Girls and Syrian Girls,” the title of a March 1919 The Colonial and Provincial Reporter essay, branded women who drove with Lebanese traders as “swines” who were “not likely to restore their characters because of indelibility,” a euphemism for venereal disease.Footnote 67 As Musakae conveyed, it was in African men’s interests to stand up and save the “‘flower of Freetown,’ the future mothers of our children,” given the prevalence of “daughters of respectable citizens of this community prosecuting [sic] their womanhood to alien Syrians,” to obtain “Syrian gold.” Such sexual exchange was a “contagion,” Musakae concluded, mirroring themes on death, sex, and race already engrained in local newspaper cultures.Footnote 68
This discourse found sharp expression in the idiom of the “Syrian Peril.” Such idiomatic depiction purposefully inverted the rhetoric of “Black Peril” that circulated through South Africa, Europe, and the United States.Footnote 69 Black Peril narratives invoked sexuality to express white fears of Black men’s proximity to white women and women’s presumed complicity. Yet the racist tenets of Black Peril informed what May, in “Nil Desperandum,” described as a “coercive, destructive” fallacy.Footnote 70 Even as May rejected Black Peril as an imperial fabrication, the nomenclature of Syrian Peril coincided with and often explicitly fueled racial degeneration claims in the Weekly News. As May articulated in “Back to the Soil,” a 1914 editorial, Freetown had “witnessed the removal of the Sierra Leonean from the position he once occupied; his place is now occupied by the Syrian trader.” This replacement, May reasoned, would lead to “a time when the native trader will become as extinct as the dodo.” In a 1919 editorial titled “the Syrian Peril,” May again posited sexual exploitation in which “our daughters be daily ruined.”Footnote 71 Such rhetoric condensed earlier racial degeneration anxieties: as the contributor “Fairplay” in 1918 bewailed, “their [Syrians’] surplus cash, the morals of our girls are being daily ruined,” which “could be fatal to our community.”Footnote 72
Even in mundane texts, including printed notices on local deaths, births, and unclaimed letters in the post office, editors of multiple Freetonian newspapers went out of their way to identify when individuals on such lists were “Syrian.” Through their editorial roles, they helped concretize the racialized Syrian epithet into a distinct social category, which in turn influenced essayistic cultures. In a July 1908 list indicating recent local deaths, editor May informed readers about the death of “Abibu (Syrian).”Footnote 73 In 1909, readers were made aware that “David Yaouche (Syrian)” had unclaimed letters at the post office.Footnote 74 Editorials worked alongside routine print publications to form modes of racial rendering.Footnote 75
During the First World War, discussants affirmed their fitness for political recognition against the foil of the Syrian Peril epithet. “Fairplay” positioned West Africans as loyal imperial subjects and used recognizable imperial taxonomies of colonial belonging by writing that Lebanese merchants were in fact “Turkish subjects, full of Turkish sympathies, therefore aliens” who were “pro-Turk, everlastingly.”Footnote 76 Likewise, Musakae warned that they would eventually gain representation in the Colony’s Legislature and Municipal Council, meaning they would “gradually become rulers in the land of their sojourn,” even though Lebanese traders, as Turkish subjects, could not hold office in Sierra Leone.Footnote 77 In a 1918 essay, May thus bewailed how the market-filled “Kissy Road has become a Syrian Quarter; we have looked on while the Syrians have become our masters; we have looked on while our land - strangers have devoured in our presence.” May concluded that their rise meant “perishment, absolute, utter perishment” for Africans in Freetown—another reference to racial degeneration pervasive in his writings.Footnote 78 As a result of this threat, May claimed in another essay, “This peril must be fought down and fought out;” “The Sierra Leonean can bite as every living, active creature can bite - bite even to the bone, bite even if he has to be imprisoned and to die unjustly for biting under provocation.”Footnote 79
During this period of rising antagonism, a connected thread of discourse emphasized, as contributor “Eugene” put it, the “hoarding of rice—a principal foodstuff of the community—by the Syrian Merchants and traders for profiteering purposes.” The piece, called “The Foodstuffs Problem and the Government” accused Lebanese traders, through “the cornering of rice,” of “draw[ing] blood from their fellow creatures,” because of “the famine price at which rice and foofoo are being sold.” The colonial state had “affected to go to sleep on the matter…Is it not time for our local Government to seriously consider the case of the Syrian amongst us?” “We will thank the Government for their continued interference,” Eugene concluded somewhat sarcastically.Footnote 80 As Marillia Van further complained, “the people complain to the authorities.” Yet, Van noted, “all such complaints have been treated with the utmost and most contemptible sangfroid [i.e. cold indifference]” on the part of colonial administrators.Footnote 81
Conclusions
As “True Womanhood” and “Syrian Peril” nomenclatures incubated through the press, the situation reached a violent crescendo on the streets of Freetown. On 18–19 July 1919, riots broke out, resulting in the looting of stores and the death of a Lebanese trader. According to residents, “One Syrian was shot dead by one of his compatriots, presumably by accident; the Military had to be recalled; the Proclamation in the Riot Act was read; and the City put under Military control.” In the thick of the action, European military officers gathered members of the Lebanese community into the Wilberforce Memorial Hall, and two other buildings placed under guard. Two hundred and forty-five Africans were arrested. Fifty-four were sentenced to imprisonment for terms ranging from one-and-a-half to four-and-a-half years. Freetonian taxpayers were tasked with paying £36,000 to cover the cost of the damages—reinforcing, in the minds of many, the impression of preferential treatment.Footnote 82
In the aftermath of these events, during March 1920, delegates of the NCBWA met in London with the League of Nations. The organization was spearheaded by Joseph Ephraim Casely Hayford, editor of the Gold Coast Leader and Adelaide’s husband. Cornelius May, and other prominent African editors, doctors, lawyers, and various professionals, joined Casely Hayford as leaders in the organization, which sought dominion status in a restructured empire. This was a commonly held position among African elites in that period. During the meeting, delegates expressed concern over what they deemed to be the threat of Syrians who targeted daughters of respectable citizens. Expressing these opinions in the aftermath of the riots, Congress delegates handed in a petition expressing deep concerns over “(a) The throttling of the Native Trader by his Syrian rival, (b) The arrogant demeanor of Syrians generally towards Sierra Leoneans, [and] (c) Improper sexual relationships” between “Syrian shop keepers and young girls attending the higher seminaries.” Furthermore, the NCBWA in their petition detailed rumors of “nauseating detail that in an appreciable number of cases they [Syrians] have succeeded in compassing the ruin of very young girls,” by “decoying them with gifts of fineries or larger sums of money” during economic decline within the Empire. One unnamed Syrian was even mentioned “who kept a record of the names of girls whom he had ruined and boasted of it.”Footnote 83
The meeting produced little in the way of immediate political change. As a historical moment, it nonetheless demonstrates a broader pattern identified in scholarship on colonial Africa, which shows that control over female sexuality functioned as a key idiom through which claims to political authority were made by colonial officials and African elites alike, though often under unequal conditions. Nancy Rose Hunt and Jean Allman show how colonial archives render women as objects of recurring “moral panic” and regulation, particularly around prostitution, polygamy, adultery, and reproductive capacity. Abosede George’s work on colonial Lagos shows how anxieties about young women’s sexuality, mobility, and labor drove efforts to regulate girls through “rescue” and training programs. In Lagos, the figure of the “ruined girl” entrenched discourse about those fit to claim authority and those cast as threats to it. Read along these comparative throughlines, the NCBWA’s fixation on Syrian men and “young girls of respectability” staged a struggle over who could claim the right to regulate the household and the state, with women’s sexuality the medium through which that argument was made.Footnote 84
These struggles took on a specific form within Freetown’s mission-educated and print-oriented public, where the circulation of transatlantic scientific texts offered local authors a useful grammar for making claims to political authority through eugenic discourse. This story does not fit neatly into most existing scholarship on colonial eugenics and race science in Africa. That scholarship has usually focused on how Europeans used these ideas and practices to justify and maintain imperial rule.Footnote 85 Recent research on the history of colonial science has started to fill this gap by examining how Africans worked as assistants, collaborators, and informants for European anthropologists. While such accounts contain important truths, they have paid less attention to how these currents of scientific thought shaped early African political thought. Meanwhile, Carina Ray’s work has demonstrated the importance of taking African engagements with race and racial discourse seriously as subjects of intellectual history.Footnote 86 The commentaries in the Sierra Leone Weekly News extend this emerging line of inquiry by showing how the scientific knowledge that underwrote racial thought across the empire also became an object of African intellectual and political reinterpretation.Footnote 87
In the decades after the 1920s, explicit references to eugenics seem to have gradually faded from West African political discourse, as the 1930s and 1940s witnessed the rise of youth movements, trade unions, and more explicit anticolonial resistance.Footnote 88 These developments displaced the constitutionalist and petitionary politics that had characterized earlier generations of educated elites. In this sense, the fugitive science practiced by Freetown intellectuals in the early decades of the twentieth century was very much a product of its specific historical moment. Yet the disappearance of eugenics as an intellectual framework did not necessarily resolve the fundamental anxieties that animated those debates, as issues surrounding sexuality, reproduction, and social order continued to surface in new political and intellectual forms throughout the late colonial and postcolonial periods, informing visions of African nationhood across the region.Footnote 89 Future research could potentially explore the longer historical trajectories of these concerns as they evolved across the twentieth century, in ways that were neither straightforward continuations of, nor entirely disconnected from, eugenic discourse outlined in this article.
Acknowledgements
Several individuals read early iterations of this article and provided invaluable feedback: Pier Larson, Elizabeth Thornberry, Todd Shepard, Didier Gondola, Stephanie Newell, Jeanne-Marie Jackson, Julia Cummiskey, and Jeremy A. Greene. I also thank Marie Grace Brown, Andrew Denning, Glenn Adams, and Shawn Leigh Alexander for their suggestions following a presented version of this article. My further thanks go to the editors and reviewers at The Journal of African History.
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