[2] Florence Mahoney was born in 1929 in Bathurst, Gambia, to Lenrie Ernest Ingram Peters (1894–14 February 1968) and Kezia Rosemary.
After finishing, she attended Westfield College (now Queen Mary, University of London) and received a bachelor's degree with honours in History in 1951.
Mahoney went on to attend the University of Oxford's St Hilda's College, where she obtained a postgraduate degree in Education in 1952.
In 1972, Florence Mahoney was made a "Fulbright Professor of African history" and she has lectured at Spelman College, Atlanta, Georgia.
[3] In 1973, she returned to the Gambia but shortly thereafter she went back to the United States, in March 1974, to lecture at the Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley, California.