ABSTRACT
‘I have always seen myself’, Margery Perham reflected in a seminar she gave at Nuffield College on the eve of her retirement, ‘really as thinking of policy, standing as it were in Britain and trying to realize how policy was made, what influences went to bear upon it’, and throughout her career her major preoccupation was with colonial policy and administration. Nevertheless in the same talk she also acknowledged the strength of her attachment to Africa itself: ‘but of course I never was [detached]. Beginning with this extraordinary feeling about Africa, I have all the time had it growing so that in a way – I don’t know if “emotion” is the right word – there has been this immense as it were investment of myself in these African problems.’ 1 Moreover, her contribution to the colonial debate over forty years makes it clear that her concern was not simply with the rulers but also with the ruled, and with the relationship between the two. This paper explores the question of how her ideas about the ordering of that relationship were influenced by what she saw in and learned about Africa.
