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'Sex tourism for the white male is a way of escaping to the past. To recover that sense of male authority you have to go abroad' David Dabydeen, Forbidden Fruit
Spas and watering places in the 18th century used to offer the wealthy and well-to-do the opportunity to take the waters. But there was also a range of other more worldly pleaures. The Grand Tour, for example, was a means of encountering not merely the artistic heritage of Europe, but the sexual temptations of distant societies.
The modern age of travel – ushered in by trains and steamboats – enabled the prosperous to sample even more distant delights. North Africa and the eastern Mediterranean offered Europeans a range of sexual pleasures unobtainable at home. The tradition set by sailors and the thousands of men serving in distant postings was now shared by growing numbers of adventurous tourists. Women for hire flattered white visitors with sexual delights, sometimes laced with drugs, unimaginable in Europe. White men, dark-skinned women – the traffic was all one way.
New shipping routes and modern communications opened up exotic regions to the outside gaze and visits. The Suez Canal brought Egypt within reach and the early 20th century saw the arrival of tour ships from North America to the Caribbean and South America – driven by sexual as much as social curiosity. From the days of slavery, the Caribbean had been associated in the white imagination with sexual excess and pleasure.
The net widened again with the development of modern tourism – but especially in the 1960s with the advance of jet and charter travel. Europeans and North Americans were able to fly huge distances cheaply, for sun, sea – and sex.
In the West Indies, in Africa and South East Asia, poor local people offered wealthy visitors from the north anything they wanted. Thus, from Thailand to Mombassa, from Montego Bay to Bali, tourists could take whatever sexual pleasure in whatever colour they fancied.
Now, however, it was not simply a male industry. Women too joined the sex tourists. In part this was because of the rise of female prosperity and independence. But for them too was the added spice of the widely-held belief in black sexual potency: that black men could provide sexual pleasure unobtainable elsewhere. And though not always approved of, sex between white women and black men had lost the bitter hostility so common in the past.
The growth of post-1945 black communities in northern Europe and familiarity of living side by side as neighbours has done nothing to abate the armies of white tourists. Still they flock in their thousands to distant locations to indulge their fantasies of sexual pleasure with dark skin.
'With the growth of new migrant communities black musical life and popular culture took root in new settings'
Black music has established itself as a dominant theme in Western culture – live, on record and in film. It is music, more than any other factor, that has broken loose the taboos of interracial mingling.
From first encounters with exotic, far-flung lands, Europeans' reactions to local habits and cultures ranged from the amazed to the uncomprehending. The 'discovery' of the wider world invoked a natural curiosity to alien cultures, sometimes instilled by explorers' and merchants' tales, described in sometimes imagined detail. Family and sexual life, social arrangements, cultural habits, all and more regularly dominated the accounts of visitors to Africa and the Caribbean islands.
At first, white people resisted the idea that black society had cultures comparable to Europeans. In time, however, they came to accept the distinctiveness and attractiveness of the African aesthetic.
Music played a central role in slave and post-slave society. It provided a release from back-breaking work and family life. Holidays and high days were organised around music-making and dance. Whites liked to join in their slaves' musical fun, and hired black musicians for their own festivities.
Indeed, blacks came to be thought of as especially musical. John Wesley seized upon this musical zeal in his Methodist cause, believing evangelical hymns would offer the same attraction. In some ways this belief became a caricature encouraged by whites. Blacks figured large, for example, as musicians in military regiments on both sides of the Atlantic.
The interest and contribution of black music increased dramatically in the 20th century, especially jazz. This brought white visitors to local black communities like New York's Harlem and from there black musicians found a place in white theatres and clubs. In the US, however, the integration was superficial for many years; the musicians had their own entrances and could not stay in the same hotels as white musicians and singers.
Nonetheless, with the growth of new migrant communities – in all the major North American cities, and in Europe – black musical life and popular culture took root in new settings. West Indians transplanted their cultural forms from the islands to Western Europe, most notably carnival and reggae. Black musicians and singers established themselves as major international figures – few more important or global than Jamaica's Bob Marley. And for a new generation of white teenagers, black rap music provides a new raw language, the height of cool.
Africa has entered the cultural bloodstream of the world at large.