George "Sam" Albert Shepperson CBE (7 January 1922 – 2 April 2020)[1] was a British historian and Africanist, noted particularly for his work on Malawian and African-American history.

He was educated at the King’s School, Peterborough, and read History and English at St John's College, Cambridge.

He was commissioned in the Northamptonshire Regiment in February 1943, with the service number of 264651,[2] and was on secondment to the King's African Rifles from 1943 to 1946 as an officer in the 13th (Nyasaland) Battalion, stationed in Kenya, Tanganyika, Ceylon, India and Burma.

Shepperson began work teaching Imperial and American History at the University of Edinburgh in 1948 and was appointed to the William Robertson Chair in 1963, and retired in 1986.

Shepperson provided an account of his life as an Africanist historian as a contribution to The Emergence of African History at British Universities: An Autobiographical Approach (1995, edited by Anthony Kirk-Greene).