ABSTRACT
Margery Perham’s associates in African affairs in the 1930s were for the most part distinguished, a good deal older than she was, enlightened and established. Her earliest lectures reflect her interest in Buell’s ‘exciting’ notion that Africa was one of the few regions of the world where the course of developments might be influenced by human reason. London teemed with groups studying Africa: the International Institute of African Languages and Cultures, Chatham House, the Royal Empire Society, the Royal African Society, the Conference of British Missionary Societies at Edinburgh House, the Colonial Empire Union section of the Overseas League, the London Group on African Affairs, the Imperial Institute’s Africa Circle among others. She was in touch with many of them, with every opportunity to discuss the application of research to policy. Miss Perham moved between Oxford and Whitehall, Chatham House and Fleet Street. She was to become famous for taking the African standpoint against the settler view in East, Central and South Africa, and as the advocate of the form of African policy and development summed up in indirect native administration and economic development through African peasant production. She first studied this on the ground in East Africa: her ideas were most fully expounded after her visit to West Africa, which became the subject of her first major work. Yet South Africa and its problems shaped her outlook more than she was later prepared to acknowledge. One of the interesting features of her work in the 1930s is to see how she attempted to square the South and West African circles.
