Colin Legum was born on 3 January 1919 in the rural settlement of Kestell in the Orange Free State, South Africa.

[2] Legum left South Africa for the United Kingdom in 1949 as the newly ascendant National Party of F. S. Malan began to construct the Apartheid system of racial segregation.

[2] Legum became one of the first British journalists specifically focusing on African issues and remained with The Observer for most of his career, eventually becoming the paper's associate editor.

[2] He subsequently wrote numerous popular works on contemporary African subjects during the era of decolonisation, including Congo Disaster (1961) and Pan-Africanism: A Brief History (1962).

He became friends with several leading African nationalist leaders, notably Julius Nyerere, Seretse Khama, and Oliver Tambo.