Margery Perham and Africans and British Rule

Margery Perham was a student of empire whose writings, from the 1930s onwards, often appeared in British newspapers. She was also a keen supporter of the British Empire. On both counts she was therefore extremely annoyed when she heard from her publisher, Oxford University Press, in June 1942 that her little book on Africans and British Rule had been banned by the British colonial authorities in Kenya. She promptly kicked up a fuss and the book was soon unbanned. This paper is mainly about that fuss; about this little book and its successive banning and unbanning; and about the way in which the incident illuminates different wartime attitudes to British rule in Africa. It is based principally upon information about these matters preserved in the Perham archive, now superbly catalogued and housed in Rhodes House Library. Use has been made also of confidential correspondence on the same subject in the Kenya National Archives, which came to light by chance when scanning censorship files in Nairobi for quite another purpose. ¹ Though not one of her major publications, this short work does provide further evidence of the aptness of Thucydides’s ancient remark about war being a forcible schoolmaster, as well as minor additional evidence for that socio-biological history of Nuffield College, Oxford, which must surely also one day be written.