Florence Mahoney

Background and early life Florence Mahoney was born in 1929 in Bathurst, Gambia, to Lenrie Ernest Ingram Peters (1894–14 February 1968) and Kezia Rosemary. Lenrie was a Sierra Leone Creole, while Rosemary was a Gambian Creole or Aku. Because Gambian Creoles, or Akus, are descendants of Sierra Leonean Creoles who worked and settled in The Gambia, Mahoney has ties on both sides to Sierra Leone.

The Peters family was of West Indian or, more likely, Nova Scotian Settler descent (making them descendants of the original black American founders of the 1792 Freetown settlement and possibly direct descendants of Thomas Peters himself). The family was also related to the prominent Sierra Leonean Creole Maxwell family that produced Joseph Renner Maxwell, the first African graduate of the University of Oxford, and the son of a colonial chaplain. Florence was one of five children – including the late Dr Lenrie Peters and actor Dennis Alaba Peters – whose parents had met in the 1920s and married within the same decade. Her father, Lenrie Ingram Peters, was a graduate of Fourah Bay College and because of that institution's affiliation with Durham University in England was also a graduate of the latter university. Peters was the longest serving editor for the Gambian Echo and a staunch advocate for the rights of indigenous Gambians. He was a pan-Africanist and used to read poetry to Lenrie Jr. as a child.

Education Mahoney attended St. Mary's Anglican Primary (1935–39) and then the Methodist Girls' High School (now Gambia Senior Secondary School) (1939–44) Mahoney was the first Gambian woman ever to be awarded a PhD. and married Dr John Mahoney Jr (1919–2012). Dr John Mahoney was the son of Sir John Mahoney, a member of an influential and prominent Gambian Creole family that was active in colonial politics. Dr John Mahoney's sister, Hannah Augusta Darling Mahoney, married Sir Dawda Kairaba Jawara, the first leader of the Gambian Republic following independence on 18 February 1965.

In 1972, Florence Mahoney was made a "Fulbright Professor of African history" and she has lectured at Spelman College, Atlanta, Georgia.

Selected works Stories of Senegambia (1982) The Liberated Slaves and the Return to Africa (2001) Creole Saga: The Gambia's Liberated African Community in the Nineteenth Century (2007) Gambian Studies (2008)