ABSTRACT
‘After Uganda and Kenya it is a drop into an abysm of backwardness.’ 1 Margery Perham thus recorded her dominant impression of the southern Sudan during her first visit in February 1937. Like an Edwardian travelogue, her diary records her thoughts with unguarded candour and reveals a romantic and enquiring mind. To those accustomed to think of her as the wise and committed defender of African causes in the 1960s, some of her early reactions to black Africans in the Sudan might appear out of character. She wrote about the mountains of Jebel Mara in Darfur:
We are in a great wide basin, ringed by peaks of pointed or domed rock. It all seems so un-African that I was quite surprised, and perhaps almost disgusted, to meet negroes in this Paradise. For whatever I may feel about negroes, they are not romantic. Their appearance and their generally servile character must always from this point of view, put them in a category apart from Red Indians, Polynesians or Arabs. 2
Certainly her diary entries do demonstrate how far she travelled from the age of Lugard and Hailey to the time of Oliver and Fage when she was elected the first President of the African Studies Association a quarter of a century later in 1963. Yet it is also true that she never wholly lost the intense preoccupation with ‘racial’ differences, an interpretation that is a striking feature of her first encounters with Africa. There is also an irrepressible element of fun in her diaries of the 1930s, a sense of the absurd which must have confounded some of her more proper British hosts in the Sudan and elsewhere. There is, she once pronounced, ‘something difficult as well as unaesthetic about swimming in a helmet.’ 3