Marika Sherwood is Hungarian-born, and has researched and published on various aspects of Black British history, especially on Black political activists and on education issues. In 1992 Marika and her colleagues founded the Black & Asian Studies Association, to encourage research and disseminate information on this history. She edited BASA’s Newsletter until2007 and chaired BASA until c.2005.

• Introduction 1. From Childhood to Teaching 2. Somewhere in North America 1891 – 1896 3. The First Years in London, 1896 – 1899 4. The African Association 5. Preparations for the Pan-African Conference 6. The Pan-African Conference, July 1900 7. The Pan-African Association August 1900 – February 1901 8. Spreading the Word 9. London, September 1901 – September 1903 10. Struggles in South Africa 1903 – 1904 11. Back in London, 1905 – 1908 12. Williams the Elected Politician 1906 – 1908 13. Working for Africans and West Indians 14. Involved with Liberia, 1907 – 1908 15. Returning Home

'This book is a great improvement on the previous biographies of Williams, being a fuller and more thoroughly researched piece of work, and will no doubt stand for many years as a definitive work.' – David Killingray, Goldsmiths and ICS, London 'In Origins of Pan-Africanism, Marika Sherwood has provided the most complete inventory to date of Williams’s life. Her meticulously researched book enables us to look again at Williams’s life, and to situate it within the wider contexts of imperial politics and pan-Africanism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.' – Caribbean Review of Books