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Cover of WASU's magazine, March 1945 (© British Library)In the northern hemisphere,autumn is heralding itself – and with it the start of the academic year. Whenthe Michaelmas term (autumn trimester) began in 1925 London, a new group setout to recruit student members among the many societies within the Universityof London: The West African Students Union. Two anti-colonial activists hadfounded it the previous summer: Amy Ashwood Garvey from Jamaica, wife of thePan-African politician Marcus Garvey, and the Nigerian law student LapidoSolanke.According to its officialstatutes, the union was a welfare organization for African students andemigrants in London. Its aim was to improve and facilitate their livingsituation in the city, for example by supporting newly arrived West Africans infinding accommodation. However, the organization quickly changed into aplatform to vividly discuss alternatives to the imperial world order. Solanke,himself a Pan-African thinker, saw the WASU as a training ground for practicalunity and effective cooperation between all West African students.In 1928, WASU was based atMarcus Garvey´s flat, but when his lease expired two years later, it had tolook for new location. The Colonial Office offered to provide a house, on thecondition that the Union would be under the control of the British government.This offer was an attempt to bring West African students closer to thepositions of the British government in order to train them as future elites andmiddlemen in the colonial project. WASU, which was already critical of theColonial Office's efforts to monitor all colonial students, rejected theproposal because they felt that the government was pursuing a "plan,whereby it might exercise the same control over those studying in England"as over those living in the colonies. Instead, they called for, "allAfricans, students or otherwise, to wash their hands of this scheme ... whichwould destroy their individuality."[1]Fuelled by events such as theItalian attack on Ethiopia, WASU, previously only considering a reform of theBritish Empire, continued to move in the direction of anti-imperialism. Duringthe Second World War, with the help of the Fabian Society´s Colonial Bureau,WASU formed a Parliamentary Committee with WASU friendly parliamentarians, atotal of five, who met twice a month. Thus, during the war years, WASUdeveloped into a „channel for bringing African grievances before Parliament.“[2] In August 1942, at itsannual congress, WASU finally adopted a petition to demand immediateself-government of the colonies and independence within five years of the endof the war and played an influential role in the fifth Pan-African Congress inManchester in October 1945.During the Second World War,London served students and intellectuals - often from well-off classes of colonialsocieties, which formed the core of anti-colonial resistance - as a place ofeducation and training.  Via WASU, theyequipped themselves with intellectual and ideological tools from which theanti-colonial movements in the peripheral regions later benefited. WASU alsoprovided essential exchange with other activists, be they from colonial regionsor critics of imperialism from Europe itself as, for example, the BritishFabian Society.The history of WASU is richlydocumented through archival sources of the organization itself and the privatepapers of some of its members. WASU's own journal, entitled “Wasu” (Wãsù alsomeaning "to preach" in Yoruba), can be found in the archives of theBritish Library in London for the years 1926-1947. The newspaper appearedirregularly between one and four times a year.The case of the West AfricanStudents Union fits well into my PhD-thesis “Crossroads of Empires. ColonialPowers, and Anticolonial Movements during the London Moment 1940-1945” whichwill explore how the colonial question was discussed during the London moment,with one focus being anticolonial activists.Therefore, another collectionof archive material that will be explored for this project is the personallegacy of Robert Wellesley Cole, a physician from Sierra Leone who came toEngland in 1923 to study, presided over WASU and advised the Colonial Bureau ofthe Fabian Society on colonial issues in addition to his work as a physicianfrom 1943-1950. His papers are accessible in the archives of the School ofAfrican and Oriental Studies (SOAS) in London.The example of WASU shows that livingin London had a transformative influence on the intellectual and politicaldevelopment of the people from the colonies. Some of these individuals returnedhome from London and became leaders or important participants of independencemovements and post-colonial states such as Jomo Kenyatta, Hastings Kamuzu Bandaor Kwame Nkrumah, who would later become the first presidents of Kenya, Malawiand Ghana. London as the administrative centre and capital of the BritishEmpire was also a place of resistance against the imperial world order, asMatera put it: „The city acted as both facilitator and provocateur, providingthe context and resources for the creation of a rich array of subalternnetworks of the colonized and an effervescently hybrid political culture.“[3]LiteratureFryer, Peter, The History of Black People inBritain, London, 2018, 3rd edition.Matera, Marc, Black London:The Imperial Metropolis and Decolonization in the twentieth century, Berkeley,2015.Adi, Hakim, Panafricanism: A History, London,2018.Eckert, Andreas: AfrikanischeIntellektuelle und Aktivisten in Europa und die Dekolonisation Afrikas, in:History and Society 37 (2) (2011), p. 244-274.Primary sourcesWasu:Journal of the West African Students´Union of Great Britain, Oxford, years1926-1947, held at the British Library, London. (Link to the British LibraryArchives: https://bit.ly/2qiigrU).Papers ofDr. Benjamin Ageh Wellesley Cole, 1928-1991, held at the School of Oriental andAfrican Studies (SOAS) Archives, London, Signatur PP MS 35. (Link to theSOAS Archive: https://bit.ly/2PYeH5s).[1] WASU, The TruthAbout Aggrey House: An Exposure of the Government Plan for the Control ofAfrican Students in Great Britain, 1934, p. 6-7, cited after Fryer, Peter,Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain, London, 2018, 3rdedition, p. 328.[2] Ibid., p. 325.[3] Matera, Marc,Black London: The Imperial Metropolis and Decolonization in the twentiethcentury, Berkeley, 2015, p. 2.