Founded by 21 law students in 1925, WASU fought the colour bar, built its own home in Camden, and trained the generation that led West Africa to independence.
Between the two world wars, a small but growing number of young West Africans came to London to study law, medicine and engineering. They arrived as subjects of the British Empire, many of them from families who had been to mission schools and read English literature, and they found a city that would not rent them a room. Out of that humiliation they built one of the most important political organisations in modern African history.
The West African Students' Union, WASU, began in 1925 as a student society. It ran its own hostel, published its own journal, fought the government in public, and trained a whole generation of the men and women who would lead Ghana, Nigeria, Sierra Leone and the Gambia to independence. This page tells its story and shows you where in north London it happened.
The West Africans who came to Britain in the 1920s had grown up being told that Britain was the "mother country". In London they discovered the colour bar. Landlords put up signs refusing Black tenants. Hotels, dance halls and some restaurants turned them away. Newspapers printed caricatures of Africans as savages, and students were stared at, insulted and sometimes attacked in the street.
Finding a decent room was the most urgent problem of all. A law student from Lagos or Accra could spend weeks walking from door to door. That is why, from the very start, WASU's plans included a hostel of its own: a place where West Africans could live with dignity, eat their own food and organise without being watched.
The driving force was Ladipo Solanke, a Yoruba law student who had come to London in 1922. He had already shown his fighting spirit: he protested publicly against insulting newspaper articles about Africans, in 1924 he became the first person to broadcast on radio in Yoruba, and in the same year he founded the Nigeria Progress Union with the encouragement of the Jamaican Pan-Africanist Amy Ashwood Garvey.
In 1925 the Sierra Leonean doctor Herbert Bankole-Bright, a leader of the National Congress of British West Africa, brought the different student groups from Nigeria, the Gold Coast, Sierra Leone and the Gambia together. On 7 August 1925, 21 law students founded the West African Students' Union. Its first aims were to fight the colour bar, to support the nationalist movement in West Africa, to promote research into African history and culture, and to build a hostel.
Its journal, Wasu, written largely by Solanke, argued that West Africans had a history and civilisation of their own, and that they were entitled to govern themselves. The Jamaican leader Marcus Garvey was among its early supporters and donors.
To pay for a hostel, Solanke set off in 1929 on a fund-raising tour of West Africa that lasted three years. He travelled across British West Africa, met chiefs, lawyers and merchants, and founded more than twenty WASU branches on the way, collecting donations from traditional rulers and ordinary people alike.
In March 1933 he opened Africa House at 62 Camden Road, Camden Town. It had 18 rooms, a restaurant serving food shipped from West Africa, a library, a reading room and a games room. Solanke's wife, Opeolu Solanke, ran the house and became known to a generation of students as "Mama WASU". For many young Africans it was the first place in Britain where they felt at home, and it became the meeting point for African visitors of every kind, from chiefs on official visits to sailors on shore leave.
The Colonial Office did not like the idea of African students organising themselves in a house it could not control. Even as Africa House opened, officials planned a rival hostel of their own. Aggrey House, named after the Gold Coast educator J. E. K. Aggrey, opened in October 1934 in Doughty Street, near King's Cross, next door to what is now the Charles Dickens Museum.
WASU saw it as an attempt to keep African students under watch and away from politics. It published a pamphlet called The Truth About Aggrey House: An Exposure of the Government Plan to Control African Students in Great Britain and organised a boycott. George Padmore called the rival hostel a "little Jim-Crow hostel". In the end the government gave in and offered WASU official recognition and financial support. In 1938, with grants from West African governments and British firms, WASU opened a second hostel in Camden Square.
Through the 1930s WASU became steadily more political. It campaigned against the colour bar, protested when Italy invaded Ethiopia in 1935, and worked with Pan-Africanists such as Padmore and with British anti-colonial groups. During the Second World War, when Britain claimed to be fighting for freedom, WASU asked the obvious question: freedom for whom? It demanded self-government for the West African colonies, and the government took it seriously enough to send the junior colonial minister, Harold Macmillan, to Africa House to argue Britain's case.
By 1945 the union was openly nationalist. Kwame Nkrumah, who arrived in London that year, was elected its vice-president and used it as his first political base in Britain before the Pan-African Congress in Manchester. Students who lived and argued in its rooms went home to lead the independence movements, write constitutions and sit in the first African governments.
WASU's most famous vice-president and his years in Kentish Town.
As the colonies won their independence, WASU's reason for being faded. Its members went home, new national student unions took over, and in 1952 the union decided to close Africa House. Solanke refused to let it go and kept the hostel running himself until his death in 1958. WASU carried on in a smaller form into the 1960s, with later hostels elsewhere in London.
For decades WASU was almost forgotten in Britain. That is changing. In 2020 the Nubian Jak Community Trust put up a Black Plaque on Camden Road to honour Ladipo Solanke and the union, and historians and community projects have begun to tell its story again. It deserves a place in the history of both Britain and West Africa: a student society that helped to end an empire.
All are private buildings or streets; please look from outside. The trail fits easily into half a day on foot and by bus. The journal Wasu and other records can be seen by appointment at the National Archives in Kew and at SOAS Library, University of London.
Black history walks in London cover several of these places, and Camden itself is easy to combine with the market and canal. Entrance fees for the sights on a tour are always included in the price. Tips for your guide are not included, but they are welcome.
Where WASU's generation planned independence.
The communities that grew after independence.
From the Lagos Colony to independence in 1960.
From trading forts to the colony that became Ghana.
The ships that carried West Africans to Britain.
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