African 20th century history: two biographies
Books on the lives two individuals who played significant roles in the 20th century history of Africa – Margery Perham (1895-1982) and Hakim Warqenah (Dr. Charles Martin) (1864/65 – 1952) – have recently been reviewed in the Institute of Historical Research’s Reviews in History .
Margery Perham was “a towering authority on colonial Africa, a pioneer of the subfield of imperial history, and a central figure in the reform of the British colonial administration in the mid-20th century” according to Helen McCarthy in her review of C. Brad Faught’s biography Into Africa: the imperial life of Margery Pelham (I.B. Tauris, 2011).
Click here to read the full review
You can find Into Africa in SOAS Library at U923.5 / 735552.
Click here to go to the catalogue entry
Hakim Warqenah (also known as Dr. Charles Martin) was born into the Ethiopian aristocracy in the mid-19th century. As a boy, he was apparently abandoned on the field of battle, and, discovered by a British officer, he was raised in imperial India and eventually given a new name by the Church Missionary Society. He served as an adviser to the future Haile Selassie in the 1920s and ambassador to Britain in the 1930s and had a “not unproblematic” relationship with his homeland, as Richard Reid (Professor of the History of Africa at SOAS) explains in his review of Peter Garretson’s biography A Victorian gentleman and Ethiopian Nationalist: the life and times of Hakim Warqenah, Dr. Charles Martin (James Currey, 2012)
Click here to read the IHR Review
SOAS Library has a copy at VE923.2 / 736306
Click here to go to the catalogue entry