Content warnings: sexual assault, racism
‘The much dreaded “black peril” has begun to raise its head… Our womenfolk… have up to the present been more or less immune from crimes of violence by the native, but who will say that their safety will continue to be secure unless the menace is tackled effectively, and at once?‘
East African Standard, March 1919
‘What I see happening is a destruction of Britain… with massive uncontrolled migration… a failure by the government to protect innocent people, including children who are getting gang raped… Whether you choose violence or not, violence is coming to you. You either fight back, or you die.‘
Elon Musk, ‘Unite the Kingdom’ rally, September 2025
In the summer of 2025, disturbing accounts emerged of dark, anonymous and sexually aggressive male migrants wandering the towns and cities of Great Britain. Anti-migration protestors became convinced of the need to ‘protect our women and children’. Politicians like Robert Jenrick and Nigel Farage cited frightening statistics: 40% of sexual offences in London were being committed by foreign nationals, and Afghans were twenty-two times more likely to commit sexual offences. Britain, they claimed, was imperilled.
Analysts subsequently discounted these claims, noting that foreign nationals already comprised 40.7% of London’s population. Jenrick and Farage, it transpired, had relied on data that undercounted the Afghan population in Britain, relative to total offences, by sixfold. Accounting for the gender and age of offenders, the Oxford Migration Observatory found that migrants are actually underrepresented in prison populations.
Contemporary explanations for anti-immigration sentiments often foreground economics. Deindustrialisation, austerity, and welfare retrenchment, they argue, have weakened solidarity and sharpened distinctions between citizens and ‘outsiders’. Populist politicians and media networks capitalise on the symbols of the family and nation. Short of confronting political and economic powerholders directly, the migrant stranger becomes a convenient proxy.
But this cannot explain the unmistakably sexual anxieties that are increasingly apparent. What we are witnessing is more than the spiralling outcomes of neoliberal disenchantment. Similar anxieties have long lain beneath the surface of the British nation, an inheritance from its colonial past.
To trace one source of these anxieties, we can follow history’s long shadow to British East Africa in 1920. In that summer too, sinister thoughts gripped Kenya’s small European settler community after reports prompted a colonial government committee to ‘inquire into the question of the apparent prevalence of assaults by natives on white children’. Letters to the East African Standard warned of marauding ‘black devils’, urging fathers to ‘take it into [their] own hands’. ‘Hang the devils’, one proposed.
Yet upon scrutiny, the committee found ‘no reason to think that [sexual assaults] are on the increase’. There had only been thirteen comparable cases since 1914, and four had ended in acquittal. As in Britain today, public consensus had rushed to a set conclusion based on little more than empty terror. This was the ‘Black Peril’.
The historian Charles van Onselen characterised Black Perils as ‘periodic waves of collective sexual hysteria’. First emerging from the rationalisation of plantation slavery, imperial conquest and rebellions, these panics were later transmitted across settler colonies. They occurred sporadically in South Africa (1890-1914), Southern Rhodesia (1902, 1912, and 1915), and Kenya (1907, 1920-22, and 1924-26), and coincided with lynchings, castrations, and ‘Yellow Perils’ in North America.
At the core of the ‘Black Peril’ lay the belief that African men were innately hypersexual and uncontrolled around white women, who were the measure of European colonial masculinities. The ‘average native’, the Kenyan committee of 1920 claimed, was ultimately ‘an unmoral creature’ corrupted by contact with ‘civilisation’. Elite white men were cast as guardians, responsible for discipline and protection, while ‘poor whites’, who threatened ‘white prestige’, were scorned. White women who transgressed these racial boundaries were institutionalised or deported. African men who did the same faced custodial or corporal punishment under ‘immorality’ laws.
When ‘Black Peril’ panics struck, settlers projected their darkest fears onto the Black African majority. Newspapers like Kenya’s East African Standard, the Rhodesia Herald, and South Africa’s Rand Daily Mail stoked tensions with chilling testimonies from ‘ordinary’ settlers, mass petitions for capital punishment, and incitements for mob justice. Black African men, rendered voiceless by the colonial press, were indiscriminately transformed into suspects.
Van Onselen observed that ‘Black Peril’ panics in South Africa coincided with periods of economic stress. Declining wages led working-class whites to define themselves against male, African domestic workers. Roger S. Levine has recently demonstrated how settlers reinforced racialised, hierarchical identities through acts of spectacular group protest.
All groups, by definition, require an outsider – including national groups. Following the Second World War, Britain radically redefined itself amid economic dislocation, imperial retreat, and migration from the Caribbean and South Asia under the British Nationality Act of 1948. Media and political groups, from the right wing of the Conservative Party to Oswald Mosley’s Union Movement, warned that outsiders were eroding a ‘British way of life’. The government, they alleged, was betraying Britain. National metaphors shifted from expansion to contraction, and from impregnability to invasion.
Within this nervous atmosphere, colonial fears returned home. During the Kenyan Emergency (1952–60), rebels known as the Mau Mau sought to reclaim land appropriated by European settlers. British propaganda portrayed the rebels as ritualistic murderers of the vulnerable and an existential threat to colonial society, despite minimal settler casualties. Administrators and commentators argued that the unstable mind of the Mau Mau was born from the tension between traditional culture and a supposed colonial modernity.
These fears migrated to Britain through anglophone networks: newspapers, soldiers’ private correspondence, and published memoirs. Resonating with domestic insecurities, these representations of colonial war embedded themselves in British political discourse. For the right wing, as Erik Linstrum argues, anti-colonial ‘emergencies’ and the ‘crisis’ of mass-migration were ‘two sides of the same coin’. The language of catastrophe legitimised moral and racial exceptionalism from Notting Hill to Nairobi. Britain, once imperial and muscular, was recast as fragile, effeminate and small.
From then until now, the British media has incubated ‘Black Perils’ of its own. Sophisticated digital platforms have intensified this function of capturing attention but not altered its nature: transforming otherwise banal stories into food for powerful emotions. Compare, for example, Southern Rhodesia’s Gwelo Times complaining in 1903 about ‘the furious riding by natives on bicycles’ with the Oxford Mail’s report in 2025 on an ‘Illegal migrant caught riding e-bike in the UK’s oldest town’.
Non-white men still dominate these narratives, likely because women and children offer less powerful fuel for argument. The conviction of Ethiopian asylum seeker Hadush Kebatu for sexual assault generated a disproportionate volume of media coverage. GB News reported that Hadush did ‘not know how to behave around our women and children’, reformulating the colonial idea that vaguely specified yet innate ‘cultural’ traits make certain races mutually incompatible. This euphemistic conflation of ‘culture’ with ‘race’ also enables the transfer of sexualised stereotypes onto suspected members of ‘undesirable’ religions such as Islam. This did not begin in the wake of the British grooming gangs scandals of the late 2000s. South Asia, the ancestral home of many British Muslims, has been no stranger to sexualised Orientalist tropes, most vividly evident in propagandistic media during the 1857 Indian Rebellion.
More conspiratorial aspects of the ‘Black Peril’ psyche also persist. Colonial settlers, always a demographic minority, feared being ‘swamped’ by their subjects. They were ‘an island of white in a sea of black’, as characterised by the Rhodesian Prime Minister Godfrey Huggins. Today, this anxiety resurfaces in ‘Great Replacement’ and ‘White Genocide’ theories, anticipating the extinction of the ‘white race’ via declining birth rates and migration. As Anthony Dirk Moses observes, this fear mimics settler colonial theories of ‘race suicide’.
It relies not on actual demographic realities, but rather on the belief of besiegement and an imminently postponed apocalypse by which today, tomorrow, or in a generation, ‘our’ borders will collapse and ‘we’ will all die. The South African billionaire Elon Musk’s preoccupation with reproduction is one response: he has reportedly fathered twelve children and urged others to do so in ‘a paranoid defence of specific European cultures’ that echoes the sex-obsessed anxieties of the colonial era.
While European colonists once imagined Africa as ‘virgin land’ to be ‘penetrated’, modern borders are similarly sexualised: migration as national penetration, permissive policy as promiscuity. Where the ‘Black Peril’ once conjured fears of sexual violation, borders, passports, and law now erect barriers, preserving physical and psychological distance in the name of security.
The connection between colonial ‘Black Perils’ and panics in modern Britain is therefore not just comparative but genealogical. It demonstrates the extent to which sexualised, racial exclusivity has long sustained post-imperial British national identity. ‘Black Perils’ are part of our emotional history, and ignoring this risks misdirecting the political energy required to repair the social fractures wrought by austerity.
Analysing British race-relations in 1959, Michael Banton observed that ‘to retain [Britain’s] pride… we must exclude some people at least, and who is more clearly a stranger than the coloured man?’ Tommy Robinson’s ‘Unite the Kingdom’ rally in September 2025 was marked by insecurity but also joyfulness, togetherness, and moral pride. Amidst stories of women and daughters ‘afraid to walk the streets’, Robinson urged the crowd to embrace. ‘This is your community’, he declared. But how long can an identity sustained by such tension endure?
Ideas, like organisms, reproduce. By breaking the ‘Black Peril’s’ reproductive cycle, we might render it extinct. This, however, requires withdrawing from the addictive ‘migration debate’ with its powerful proponents in politics and media, and advocating for an alternate, more morally inclusive politics. The history of ‘Black Peril’ shows that misinformation, especially when it caters so readily to our emotional demands, must have a willing recipient. Without one, it will wither away and die.