ABSTRACT
Margery Perham had in the course of her career covered an immense span of writing upon the affairs of colonial Africa, of its nationalist leaders and of its decolonization. She had, in a special sense, been the enlightened conscience of British colonial rule. But with the coming of independence to so many countries, including Nigeria in 1960, she may have felt that her role had ended, for she was, at this time, sixty-six years’ old. She was not so much at home with the politics of independent African states and saw their acute dilemmas through the spectacles of British colonial history. She was respected in much of Africa, as well as in Britain, as a distinguished historian and commentator of the colonial period, but somehow lacked the empathy and driving interest to concern herself with attempts to advise on the problems of post-colonial African states. She wrote, for instance, with sadness of the abrupt end of British rule in the Sudan, but failed to play any part in attempting to halt the civil war between the South and the North of the Sudan, which followed so tragically after independence.
