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Paul Robeson (second from right, seated), in traditional African dress with students at ‘Africa House’ |
Our house:
Africa in London
A Victorian villa became a refuge for radicalised overseas students and helped dismantle colonial rule, writes Angela Cobbinah
West Africans in Britain 1900-1960
Dr Hakim Adi
Published by Lawrence and Wishart £16.99
IT was built as the very image of Victorian respectability, a handsome four-storey villa for a well-to-do family in one of the leafier parts of Camden Town.
But in 1938, No 1 South Villas in Camden Square was taken over by the West African Students Union (WASU), the most important anti-colonial organisation for Africans in Britain at the time, and any hopes the neighbours had of continuing their splendid isolation were probably dashed.
Prominent African nationalists such as Kwame Nkrumah of the Gold Coast and Jomo Kenyatta of Kenya would regularly meet there, while the singer Paul Robeson was also a frequent visitor.
It was here, too, that future Conservative prime minister Harold Macmillan got an early blast of the “wind of change” blowing through Africa during wartime talks over WASU’s demands for self-government.
“Macmillan visited South Villas in 1942 as under-secretary of state for the colonies,” explains Dr Hakim Adi, reader in the history of Africa and the African diaspora at Middlesex University. “But he was not the only minister to visit during this period. Clement Attlee went along in 1941 as deputy prime minister.”
The organisation was co-founded in 1925 by the brilliant Nigerian lawyer, Ladipo Solanke. He had come to London a few years earlier to complete his legal studies at University College. Fed up with the colour bar that denied African students like himself university accommodation, he campaigned for the purchase of a house in Camden Town.
“Africa House” was opened in 1933 at 62 Camden Road with funds raised in West Africa, a substantial mid-Victorian property that today lies at the end of a jumble of shops facing Sainsbury’s supermarket.
Apart from providing a home from home for African students, it quickly became the main centre for anti-colonial activity in Britain.
“Camden was probably chosen because it was a lot cheaper to buy there than in Bloomsbury and Holborn, where most of the students studied,” says Dr Adi, author of West Africans in Britain 1900-1960. “These students were not necessarily young and many were already highly educated. A lot would have worked and were of independent means, while others were from affluent families.”
Many were to become radicalised by the racism they met in Britain. Others such as Nkrumah and Kenyatta, who would both go on to lead their countries into independence following momentous nationalist campaigns, were already involved in revolutionary politics.
Nkrumah had arrived in London from the US in 1945 aged 34 to take further studies at the London School for Economics and headed straight for the WASU hostel before renting rooms in Burghley Road, Kentish Town. Appointed WASU vice-president, he collaborated with Kenyatta – who lived in Cranleigh Street, Somers Town – to form the Pan African Federation.
By this time, WASU had grown in stature and moved its hostel to larger premises in South Villas. The new Africa House was opened by Lady Simon, wife of the Chancellor, John Simon.
It was here that Robeson, who 10 years earlier had been feted by the London critics for his performance in Showboat but was still refused a hotel room, would befriend the two leaders and develop a yearning to visit Africa. He was made an honorary member of WASU.
From the beginning the government attempted to work with WASU because of its influence. At the same time, it also hoped to exert some control over it.
“The Colonial Office wanted to monitor its activities, keep members away from communists and from English women,” says Dr Adi. “In the early 1930s, it tried to secretly set up its own hostel in Doughty Street [Bloomsbury], and this led to a major dispute.”
But WASU moved closer to communist thinking and became more radicalised as the struggle against colonial rule intensified, particularly in Nigeria and the Gold Coast, present-day Ghana, where anti-government protests after the war had been brutally suppressed.
The organisation’s international reach and ability to successfully lobby the government was enhanced by the West Africa Parliamentary Committee, which it set up in 1942. Among the five Labour MPs who sat on it was Arthur Creech Jones, future minister for the colonies under Attlee’s post-war Labour government.
Decolonisation was gathering pace and in 1957, the Gold Coast gained independence as Ghana. In 1960, Macmillan made the historic “wind of change” speech in which he signalled that most British colonies would soon be granted independence.
“Undoubtedly, WASU played an important role in all this,” says Dr Adi.
“The houses in Camden Road and South Villas should both be honoured with blue plaques so that the wider public know the remarkable history they represented.”
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