The Rape of Africa II
How the Subjugation of Black Bodies Set the Tone for the Colonisation of a Continent
In memory of Gloria Steinem (1934–2026)
A woman on an auction block does not need a doctrine to be raped. She needs a buyer, a whip, and enforced silence from every direction that might otherwise speak.
The silence was not accidental.
It was built, and it was not built in America. She stood on American soil, but the mind that put her there had crossed an ocean to get there. It had been forming since 1452, when a pope in Rome granted a Portuguese king the right to subdue and enslave the people of the African coast, and to call it a Christianising mercy while he did so.
What she met on that block was not a new theology improvised by Southern preachers. It was the oldest permission Europe had, worn down to its final, most explicit sentence.
Southern ministers wrote that sentence, but they did not invent it. They took one New Testament instruction, wives obey your husbands, and set it beside another, slaves obey your masters, and found in the pairing what they called order. The master became a kind of husband to everyone he owned. The wife, the child, and the enslaved woman in the kitchen or the field were all positioned beneath a single authority and defined by their incapacity to govern themselves.
It was a marriage of hierarchies, blessed from the pulpit on Sunday and enforced in the quarters every other night. By the time it reached America, it was already a very old marriage. Rome had already blessed something like it nearly four centuries earlier, when it declared African people fit subjects for perpetual servitude and called that servitude a kindness to their souls.
By the mid-nineteenth century, Southern Baptist, Methodist, and Presbyterian churches had written the overwhelming majority of published defences of slavery in America. These were not fringe tracts. They were mainstream theology, articulated from established pulpits by educated men, and they rested on a single structural claim: that the household was a chain of legitimate authorities, father over child, husband over wife, master over slave, each link modelled on the one above it. The Southern Methodist General Convention would still be defending this position after emancipation had already ended it in law.
No minister, as far as I have found, wrote that sentence in those words. I am drawing an inference from the structure, not quoting a claim any preacher made outright. The inference is this: once a woman is doctrinally incapable of self-governance, her body ceases to be something she can withhold. Whether any single sermon said so plainly or not, this is what the structure permitted. It is what ownership was built to mean.
The theology did not stop at the household. It sought further justification, a spiritual one, more insidious for its generosity of tone, and here too it merely repeated an older lesson.
Bishop Stephen Elliott could argue that Africans had learned the way to Heaven through slavery, so that a lifetime of bondage became a fair exchange for eternal salvation. A pope had made the same trade nearly four centuries earlier, calling servitude a mercy for the unbeliever's soul.
The slaveholder was no longer a man extracting labour and taking what he wished from the bodies around him. He was a benefactor. He was saving souls even as he broke them, in a language Europe had been speaking about African people since before the first slave ship crossed the Atlantic.
It travelled easily because the underlying assumption had never been dismantled. Catholic Rome and Protestant Georgia never shared an institution, and no Southern minister needed to read a papal bull to inherit its logic. What they shared was older and less visible than any single document: a civilisation that had already decided, centuries before either of them spoke, that a Christian man's ownership of a non-Christian body could be called a mercy. That assumption did not need to be passed down like a title deed. It only needed to go undisturbed.
This is the manoeuvre the missionaries would carry into Africa's interior a few centuries later, dressed in the clothes of a later empire. There, too, the confiscation of land and the erasure of belief were framed as a kindness, the gift of civilisation to those the missionaries had already decided could not know their own good.
Here, the confiscation was of the body itself, and the kindness was salvation offered in exchange for a lifetime and a woman's consent, neither of which was ever the slaveholder's to take. Two different theatres, two different churches, one assumption that neither ever had to relearn.
The hierarchy did not stop at enslaved women. It reached white women too, though in a smaller and less violent way. The same instruction operated in both directions at once. Sophia Auld, a young slaveholder's wife in Baltimore, began teaching a boy in her household his letters in the eighteen-twenties, without any sense that she was breaking a rule, since she had not yet been trained into the posture expected of a slaveholding wife.
The boy was Frederick Douglass, enslaved from birth, and only through his account does Sophia Auld survive in the historical record. When her husband discovered what she was doing, he corrected her, laying out, in the boy's hearing, what Douglass called the true philosophy of the slave system.
What he told her, in words Douglass later set down exactly as he heard them, was blunt about what was at stake. "If you give a nigger an inch, he will take an ell," Auld told his wife. "Learning would spoil the best nigger in the world." A slave, he said, should know nothing but his master's will and learn to obey it, "for," as he put it plainly, "if he learns to read the Bible, it will forever unfit him to be a slave."
Sophia Auld absorbed the lesson and changed. Douglass records that she grew harsher towards him afterwards than her husband had ever been. She was not corrected because she had broken a law. She was corrected because a wife's judgement, in that household, was not hers to exercise against her husband's instruction, any more than an enslaved child's future was his own to shape. The same sentence disciplined them both, aimed at two different bodies in the same room on the same afternoon.
Elsewhere in the same century, the law was already making an almost identical argument about every white wife's body, and it did not need a household scene to do so. English common law, articulated by the jurist Matthew Hale and published after his death in 1736, held that a husband could not be guilty of raping his wife because, by the act of marriage, she had given herself to him in a way she could never afterwards retract. American law inherited the doctrine whole.
A wife's consent was presumed once, on her wedding day, and never had to be asked again. The rule did not vanish with the nineteenth century. Some version of it remained in force in American states into the nineteen-seventies, and North Carolina did not fully repeal it until July 1993.
This is not the same erasure Harriet Jacobs endured as a slave, and it would be dishonest to treat them as one story. Jacobs's body was owned outright by law and could be sold, worked, and violated, with no one recognising her right to refuse. A white wife was not property in that sense, and the violence she faced, when it came, was not sanctioned by an entire economic system built on her body's labour.
She inhabited the far end of the same doctrine. A single sentence of legal fiction, a consent presumed once and never revisited, was enough to remove her right to refuse her husband, just as Sophia Auld's right to refuse her husband's instruction had already been removed at their kitchen table. The hierarchy that ran from master to slave and husband to wife did not produce two separate injuries operating by coincidence. It produced one doctrine, calibrated differently by race and by law, that decided in every direction how completely a woman's no could be made not to count.
Harriet Jacobs is the subject of this essay, whose account is written from within the mechanism rather than from outside it. Born enslaved, she came under the ownership of the man who would pursue her sexually for years, and she spent years fending off that pursuit, eventually entering into a relationship with another white man in a desperate attempt to place herself beyond her master's reach, a strategy that cost her a reputation she could never fully recover in the eyes of respectable readers, Black or white.
She published her account under a pseudonym in 1861 and said plainly that she was not telling her story to win sympathy for herself but to move her readers towards compassion for the sisters still in bondage. She named the specific cruelty of her position: forced to give herself to one man to escape being taken by another, with no arrangement that returned the choice to her.
What the doctrine offered, in the end, was not protection for women's bodies. It protected the men who took them. A master who violated an enslaved woman was not, in the theological architecture of his own church, committing an act that required the absence of a victim's consent, because the woman in question had never been granted the legal or spiritual standing to refuse him.
The word rape requires a person capable of refusing. That capacity was the one thing the doctrine had already stripped away, and Jacobs's seven years in hiding, folded into a garret three feet high, were the price of trying to assert a refusal the law and the church had already told her she did not possess.
Emancipation ended the legal status of chattel in America. It did not touch the assumption underlying it, and that assumption did not remain confined to one country. The same civilisational logic that allowed a pope to call servitude a mercy, and that allowed a Southern pulpit to call ownership a marriage, would surface again within a generation or two, running from missionary to convert, from empire to colony, from one people's god to another's. The chains changed material. The mind that forged them did not change its address.
I do not know what it would take to fully dismantle a permission this old, this adept at disguising itself as care, this practised at moving from a single body to an entire continent without ever having to explain itself twice. It is clear it has not been dismantled, and it has continued to travel.
What I know is that the silence enforced on that auction block was not only an American silence. It was the sound of the European mind, arrived at last in the country it had sent ahead of itself, doing on one woman's body what it had already begun and would continue to do for a long time yet to a continent's soul.
It would be comfortable to end there. A reader can close a history like this feeling certain they would have seen it, refused it, and never knelt at that altar. That certainty is worth distrusting.
The doctrine never announced itself as cruelty to the men enacting it. It announced itself as care, as salvation, as the right side of a settled question, which is exactly how a doctrine must present itself if it wants to be followed all the way to a woman's body without ever being recognised for what it is.
I do not know what my own version of this looks like. I doubt I would recognise it from the inside, since recognising it from the inside is precisely what this kind of certainty is designed to prevent.
I only know that righteousness has never, in any century, proved a defence against cruelty. Often, righteousness is the environment in which cruelty is permitted to flourish.
Gloria Steinem died as this essay was being finished. She spent much of her life saying plainly what this essay has tried to show, namely that racism and sexism have never been separate systems and that a race has never been controlled without controlling the reproduction of the women within it.
Asked in 2017 what was driving the new anti-abortion laws, she said: "It doesn't surprise me that the most virulent anti-abortion measures are coming from Alabama and other southern states, because racism and sexism are always intertwined. You can't perpetuate racism without controlling women and reproduction."
The doctrine this essay has been tracing did not end at emancipation, nor did it end in the missions. It kept finding new rooms to stand in. It now stands in a legislature.
Further Reading
Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself (1861), published under the pseudonym Linda Brent. The primary account this essay draws on directly.
Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845). The source for the material on Sophia and Hugh Auld.
Jill Elaine Hasday, "Contest and Consent: A Legal History of Marital Rape," California Law Review, vol. 88, no. 5 (2000). On the history of the marital rape exemption from Matthew Hale's 1736 treatise through its repeal in every American state by 1993.
Elizabeth L. Jemison, Christian Citizens: Reading the Bible in Black and White in the Post-Emancipation South (University of North Carolina Press, 2020). The source for the material on Southern ministers, biblical hierarchy, and the 1874 Southern Methodist General Convention.
Katharine Gerbner, Christian Slavery: Conversion and Race in the Protestant Atlantic World (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018). On how Protestant missionaries in the Atlantic world developed a theology of slave conversion that hardened over time into a language of race.
Willie James Jennings, The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race (Yale University Press, 2010). Traces the theological roots of racial thought to the earliest encounters between European Christianity and Africa and the Americas, including the same Portuguese material with which this essay opens.
Robert J. Miller, "The Doctrine of Discovery: The International Law of Colonialism," The Indigenous Peoples' Journal of Law, Culture & Resistance, vol. 5, no. 1 (2019). A legal historian's account of how the papal bulls of the 1450s became the founding doctrine for European colonial claims worldwide.
Steven T. Newcomb, Pagans in the Promised Land: Decolonizing the Doctrine of Discovery (Fulcrum Publishing, 2008). A foundational study linking the papal bulls directly to the legal architecture later used against Indigenous peoples.
Gloria Steinem, quoted in Zahra Hankir, "Gloria Steinem on Patriarchy, Abortion and Economic Independence," Al Jazeera (2019), delivers the 2017 remarks quoted in this essay's closing lines.
Rory Singer
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