Professor Susanne Klausen’s lecture, “Policing the Desire of the Treacherous ‘Blood-Mixer’,” was a powerful examination of apartheid’s moral panic over interracial intimacy and the state’s brutal attempts to manage white masculinity in service of racial purity. Klausen’s talk, punctuated by a deeply engaged Q&A session, was not just a historical account, but a reflection on how the policing of sex became central to apartheid ideology, statecraft, and the psychological life of whiteness in South Africa.

Drawing from her forthcoming book, Klausen began by asserting what may seem obvious but has often been overlooked in South African historiography: sexuality was foundational to apartheid. “From constructing the self to ideological justifications for white minority rule, from policing desire to conducting international relations, sexuality was key to both the making and the unmaking of apartheid.” What set apartheid South Africa apart from other settler colonial regimes, Klausen argued, was the sheer intensity and legal extensiveness with which it criminalised interracial heterosexual intimacy. At the heart of this regime was the immorality legislation, particularly the 1950 Immorality Amendment Act and its later iterations, which targeted sexual relations across the colour line. Klausen presented a compelling narrative of how these laws disproportionately targeted white men and black women. While legal texts were technically gender-neutral, in practice, “the law was created with the intent, and importantly, the expectation, of stamping out heterosexual white men’s transgressive desire.” Indeed, as the apartheid state saw it, white men’s lust for black women was not just sinful, but treacherous, a betrayal of the volk.

Klausen detailed the harrowing realities faced by black women under this regime: vulnerability to rape, routine forced vaginal exams, and the reclassification of rape as “immorality” offences for which they, too, could be imprisoned. One of the most chilling examples she shared was of Dr Zareena Desai, whose medical report after her arrest will appear in Klausen’s book. These were not incidental abuses but the predictable outcomes of a state obsessed with racial purity and deeply invested in gendered punishment.

A central thread in Klausen’s lecture, and one taken up in depth by Dr Anell Stacey Daries in the conversation, was the public nature of this punishment. While some previous scholars, such as Professor Neil Roos, had shown how white male deviance was often hidden in rural work colonies, Klausen uncovered how thousands of white men were very deliberately shamed in public. “They urged newspapers to report as many details as they could about the white men arrested — not just their names, but the towns they lived in, their professions, whether they were married and or had children.” The state leveraged the press to broadcast disgrace, weaponising shame as a deterrent. Daries also reflected on the moral contradiction baked into the system. She reflected on how, on one newspaper page, one might find a white man fined R200 for sex with a black woman and, on the same page, lamentations about the decline of white morality. This contradiction between the moral hysteria about race-mixing and the ordinary banality of its occurrence exposed the fragility of apartheid’s claims to moral and racial superiority.

One of the most striking elements in Klausen’s presentation was her insistence that the apartheid regime’s project to regulate desire was ultimately doomed. “Desire is notoriously unruly,” she quipped, quoting Amia Srinivasan, “it can cut against what politics has chosen for us.” Despite increased policing powers, despite shaming and suicides, and despite extended legal definitions of “immoral acts,” thousands of white men continued to pursue black women. Some did so with violence and impunity; others, Klausen showed, did so in love. It was this complexity, the inability to reduce all white men to predators, or all relationships to abuse, that animated one of the most compelling audience exchanges.

As the discussion drew to a close, Dr Daries reminded the audience of the importance of such work, not just as a historical excavation, but as a mirror to our present. Even 30 years after democracy, interracial desire in South Africa remains fraught, as Dr Sishuwa Sishuwa noted when referencing the public reaction to the personal life of a well-known rugby player. “The lesson of race was learned very well,” Klausen concluded, “and internalised by all race groups.” This seminar left the audience with an intricate understanding of how desire, unruly, contradictory, and deeply political, functioned within and against the logics of apartheid. Through her meticulous research and humane analysis, Klausen offered not only a searing indictment of past violences, but also an invitation to think more carefully about the lingering legacies of desire, race, and shame in South Africa today.