Some Beneficial Influence

William Ansah Sessarakoo’s​ father, John Corrantee of Annamaboe, on the Gold Coast, was a member of the Fante ruling family and a prominent merchant, well known in the interior and among European slave traders. In order to strengthen ties with his European business partners, and to give his heirs an advantage over their countrymen, Corrantee sent one of his sons to be educated in France and another – Sessarakoo – in England. Sessarakoo was about eleven when he left Africa in 1747. He had grown up surrounded by officers of the Royal African Company, who had taught him to speak and write English and to admire British culture.

Sessarakoo travelled aboard a slave ship, the Lady Carolina, heading to England via Barbados. In one version of the story, the captain’s sudden death – the result of dysentery, malnutrition or insurrection – left Sessarakoo unprotected. There was no one to confirm his identity as a Fante of royal birth or save him from the rapacious sailors, who sold him along with the rest of their cargo. Instead of conjugating Latin grammar at an English boarding school, Sessarakoo ended up enslaved in Barbados. In another version, it was the ship’s captain who sold him into slavery. Sessarakoo’s freedom came when his father, tipped off by a Fante trader who had recognised the prince in Barbados, demanded European officials investigate his son’s disappearance. Eventually a Royal African Company ship was sent to Barbados and the rescued Sessarakoo taken to England, where he could finally learn the ‘white man’s book’.

Sessarakoo was known not for his scholarly achievements but for his rapid ascent in London society. He became a minor celebrity, an African man about town. He was invited to dinner at Grosvenor Square with the earl of Halifax and presented to George II. His portrait was painted and a mezzotint of it widely distributed; the accompanying text details his royal parentage, enslavement and liberation. The Gentleman’s Magazine reported that Sessarakoo left a performance of Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko in tears after recognising his own story in Behn’s account of the wrongly enslaved African prince (I can’t help wondering if his tears were a response to the cartoonish representation of his own experience). Eighteen months later, Sessarakoo returned to Annamaboe, where he became a successful slave trader, as his father had intended.

Sessarakoo’s story is one of many described by Hakim Adi in African and Caribbean People in Britain. Although larger in scope than Adi’s earlier study, West Africans in Britain 1900-60, published almost three decades ago, it shares that book’s interest in the way education and student life shaped the politics of African-descended people studying in Britain. In African and Caribbean People in Britain, Adi notes that the practice began as early as 1610, when Prince Dederi Jaquoah arrived in London, having been ‘sent out of his cuntrye by his father’, as one contemporary reported, to be educated and baptised. His father, a minor king in what is today Liberia, wanted Dederi to learn English so he could negotiate better trade deals, but conversion to Christianity was another advantage that might benefit the family. More than a century later, in 1754, 13-year-old Philip Quaque, a Fante of royal birth, was sent to London for the same reasons: he became the first African to be ordained a priest in the Church of England. John Naimbanna, the son of a Temne ruler in what is now Sierra Leone, arrived in Britain in 1791. He became a favourite of Granville Sharp, who had a hand in the publication of a pamphlet, The African Prince, in praise of his virtues. Naimbanna’s father, King Naimbanna II, hedged his bets by sending one son to England, one to Portugal and one to Constantinople: the major trading powers and their respective religions were thus accounted for.

Adi argues that African rulers and merchants were united with British philanthropists, abolitionists and missionaries in their desire to see Africa’s aristocracies learn the white man’s ways. Men like Sharp believed that if students were given a ‘good Christian education’ they would ‘carry back to their own country minds considerably enlightened’ and ‘exert some beneficial influence on surrounding countries’. London was not the only centre of activity. By the late 18th century, the majority of British ships involved in the transatlantic slave trade came from Liverpool, and its population included free and enslaved people of African origin, as well as mariners, servants and students. In ‘An Essay on Colonisation’ (1794), the Swedish abolitionist Carl Wadström wrote that ‘the desire of the Africans to have their children educated in Europe appears from the voluntary sending them over for that purpose. There are generally from fifty to seventy of these children at school in Liverpool, besides those who come to London and Bristol.’

A few years before the establishment of the Sierra Leone colony in 1808, British abolitionists set up a school in South London for those young Africans who would ‘afford the best means of promoting the great ends of the settlement’. This meant the promotion of Christianity, the suppression of the slave trade and the growth of ‘legitimate’ trade. The idea came from the Clapham Sect of social reformers, whose members included Sharp and William Wilberforce, and from the Society for the Education of Africans, founded by the Scottish missionary John Campbell. The African Academy would give its students a Christian education, with a particular focus on ‘industrial habits’ such as boat-building or welding that might prove useful in the development of the colony. Twenty boys were educated at the academy and four girls at a nearby school. Adi tells us that most of the students were the sons of prominent West Africans, but the children of Nova Scotians and Maroons from Jamaica were also on the register.

The experiment was short-lived, but efforts to enlighten the minds of young Africans continued in their contradictory way, combining ‘slave trading with abolition, education with exploitation and the pursuit of profit with philanthropy’. The contradiction didn’t diminish with the passing of the Act of Emancipation and the opening of universities and the legal and medical professions to people of African descent (Glasgow and UCL in the 1830s, followed by Oxford, Cambridge and the Inns of Court in the 1860s and 1870s). Students such as James Africanus Horton of Sierra Leone, who graduated from Edinburgh University in 1859, exhibited both pro-British and pro-African sympathies. Horton ‘welcomed British civilisation and Christianity’, Adi writes, ‘especially for what were considered to be their modernising influences’, while at the same time rebutting claims of racial inferiority and agitating for self-government in West Africa. Respect and disdain for British society fostered a belief in national self-government, which would play out in the politics of the next generation of students. The rise of racism and national chauvinism in the second half of the 19th century served only to sharpen the conflict between the values promoted by a British education and the experiences of African students both in Britain and at home.

By the end of the 19th century, African students were arriving in modest numbers and had begun to organise around shared concerns. This generation is less well known than its 20th-century successors, but it included A.B.C. Merriman-Labor of Sierra Leone, who was called to the bar in 1909 and published Britons through Negro Spectacles the same year (it was reissued by Penguin in 2022); Bandele Omoniyi, a Lagosian who studied law at Edinburgh and contributed anti-imperialist articles to journals in Nigeria and Scotland; and J.E. Casely Hayford, born in the Cape Coast, who studied at Peterhouse College, Cambridge, and for the bar at the Inner Temple. His novel Ethiopia Unbound: Studies in Race Emancipation, one of the earliest works of fiction published by an African in English, makes the case for a unified African nation. Henry Sylvester Williams, though born in Trinidad, had an outsized influence as the organiser of the First Pan-African Conference (later Congress). He arrived in England in 1895 and studied for a time at King’s College London and at Gray’s Inn. In 1897 he founded the African Association and, with the support of W.E.B. Du Bois and others, held the First Pan-African Conference at Westminster Town Hall in 1900. Du Bois drafted the association’s Address to the Nations of the World, which was sent to the head of state in all countries where Africans or people of African descent were oppressed. One line became famous three years later when Du Bois repeated it in The Souls of Black Folk: ‘The problem of the 20th century is the problem of the colour line.’

In​ African and Caribbean People in Britain, Adi relates many individual stories and revives some forgotten historical figures – from the Tudor period, for example, we learn of Diego, an interpreter who accompanied Francis Drake on his circumnavigation of the globe, the enterprising silk weaver Reasonable Blackman and the trumpeters Anthonie Vause and John Blanke. But although he gives an overview of recent advances in scholarship concerning earlier periods, Adi’s focus is on the 20th century, and in particular on the ways in which political and educational experiences in Britain contributed to the rise of Pan-Africanism. In the interwar years, the emerging concern of this group of young students was Britain’s inconsistencies: the combination of racism and domination with a seeming commitment to enabling the student’s intellectual growth. Inspired by Omoniyi and others, and by the political momentum of the Balfour Declaration and Egyptian independence, students at the London universities began to form associations and political discussion groups. The ambition was no longer simply to return home a qualified lawyer, doctor or civil servant, bearing the ‘golden fleece’ of education, as Nnamdi Azikiwe (the first president of Nigeria) put it. There was work to be done in Britain itself: to establish better treatment of Black people in the face of racism and discrimination and to shape the nascent decolonial project. Opinions on the form this future should take differed, with some in favour of a unified continent rather than nation-states or territories administered according to ethnic group, but whatever the outcome, it would require a critique of British imperialism that only a British education could supply.

Adi’s​ account of African student organisations and politics (his focus is students from Nigeria and Sierra Leone, who made up the majority) is structured around the search for a ‘Black united front’, a notion that gained traction in the decade before the Second World War. A number of new groups emerged in this period, including the West African National Association (WANA), founded by A.K. Kpapka-Quartey, and intended to aid the creation of a residential club for Africans in London; though this never happened, the group became a lively space for political discussion. The League of Africans held its first meeting in the early 1930s, presided over by Alex Ansah Koi, a medical student from the Gold Coast, and Jomo Kenyatta, a young Kenyan student of social anthropology (and the future president of Kenya). The League of Coloured Peoples and Negro Welfare Association were both founded at around the same time. These groups were international in outlook, forming networks across the colonial world and the US.

By 1930 possibly as many as thirty thousand people of African descent were living in Britain. Only a few hundred of them were students, but those students were well placed to influence the burgeoning independence movements. Kwame Nkrumah, the future president of Ghana, failed the entrance exams for the University of London but visited the city in 1935 on his way to study in America; a decade later he began a PhD at UCL under A.J. Ayer and enrolled at Gray’s Inn. With George Padmore, Nkrumah organised the Fifth Pan-African Congress in Manchester in 1945, which was attended by several future African leaders, including Kenyatta (who had studied at UCL and the LSE), Awolowo (University of London) and Hastings Banda, the first president of Malawi (Edinburgh).

Other less famous names associated with student activism, a number of them women, played an essential role in political 0rganising. Constance Cummings-John was born in Freetown, Sierra Leone and came to Britain in 1935 to study as a teacher, and took part in the activities of the West African Students’ Union, known as WASU (wãsù means ‘preach’ in Yoruba) and the League of Coloured Peoples. Amy Ashwood Garvey, a Jamaican pan-Africanist and ‘tireless organiser’ of varied talents, wrote plays while living in New York in the 1920s and published the newspaper Negro World with her then husband, Marcus Garvey. After moving to Britain in the 1930s, she opened the International Afro Restaurant and then the Florence Mills Social Parlour, an important meeting space for students and activists including Ladipo Solanke, founder of WASU. She was also closely involved in the creation of the International African Friends of Abyssinia, the London Afro-Women’s Centre and the International African Service Bureau.

What was it like to be an African student in Britain? In 1932 O.A. Alakija, a West African law graduate, went in search of accommodation at the New Mansion hotel in Lancaster Gate, and was refused for being a ‘man of colour’. Alakija, unusually, sued and was paid £55 in damages. Padmore wrote of the struggle to find decent housing: ‘Few Negroes in England, I imagine, have not passed through the bitter experience of looking for apartments and being told constantly: “We do not take coloured people.”’ Although many came from bourgeois families, in London they were often broke, moving from one hostel to the next, cold and a little hungry, while attempting to write and study. While in some respects Britain offered freedoms and possibilities not available at home, the colour bar presented many practical difficulties. The experience of racism in Britain, and proximity to the rise of fascism in Europe, sharpened their critique of the hypocrisies of the imperial project, not least where the connection between colonial rule and fascist violence was plain, as in Mussolini’s grab for Ethiopia. Europe could no longer claim to be the superior civilisation. As an article in the WASU journal after the invasion said, ‘politically and religiously the West has been weighed in the balance and found wanting.’

The social spaces created or occupied by African student organisations provided opportunities for practical support and political discussion, but also for friendship and relaxation. At the Florence Mills Social Parlour, connections were made between writers and editors involved with a growing number of Afro-centred journals, such as West Africa and the WASU journal, where students recorded their impressions of British society and commented on global politics. ‘It was very important to me,’ C.L.R. James wrote of the parlour, ‘because from those early days to this day, I find English food uneatable.’ The International Afro Restaurant was ‘the centre of a good deal of West Indian agitation’, the pan-Africanist Ras Makonnen recalled. But you could also ‘get a meal, dance and enjoy yourself’. Makonnen remembered Florence Mills as the place you would go ‘after you’d been slugging it out for two or three hours at Hyde Park or some other meeting, and get a lovely meal’. Food and conversation, pleasure and dissent, were the background to protests over the case of the Scottsboro Boys in 1931, trips to set up branches of WASU across West Africa, and expressions of solidarity with cocoa workers in the Gold Coast. On one occasion, as the historian Marc Matera relates, a group of women students decided to ‘pay respect to their African culture’ by walking around London in gele and wrapper. Afterwards, according to Titilola Folarin, one of the students, ‘we discovered in some of the shop windows a certain number of ladies’ hats, almost exactly in the same style and shape of how we tied up our gele on the day we passed through a week before.’

WASU and other African student organisations ran into difficulties in the years before and after the Second World War. Some of the problems were practical, to do with housing and funding. The Colonial Office was tasked with helping students find accommodation but refused to give money to organisations seen as sympathetic to communists and other radicals. There were also ideological divisions within the organisations themselves. Moderates argued for a commonwealth of equals, while others promoted a decisive break from the colonial government and pushed for closer relations with the Soviet Union. In March 1950, Lord Milverton, a former governor of Nigeria, accused WASU of being ‘a medium for the contact of communists with West Africans when they come to this country’ and called for an inquiry into its activities. In response, WASU’s president, Okoi Arikpo, and its honorary secretary, A.M. Akinloye, wrote in a press statement that WASU was not affiliated to any political organisation but encouraged students to engage with ‘all current world problems’: ‘Our stand, repeatedly expressed in all our public activities, is that of nationalists who desire complete independence for the West African territories at the earliest possible date. This desire, in our opinion, does not require the bait of any foreign political ideology to spur us to our declared goal.’

In a letter to Lord Milverton, the Labour MP Reginald Sorensen, who sat on the WASU board, emphasised its role as a welfare organisation, though he acknowledged that its members held diverse political views. His intervention had a calming effect, and WASU was left to its own devices. Communism was also responsible for internal strife: Solanke, a vocal critic of what he saw as the communist faction within WASU, attempted to oust its ringleaders by establishing an anti-communist slate during the 1951 annual election, but was unsuccessful.

WASU’s finances were also a cause for concern: it accumulated annual debts exceeding £3000 despite continued support from the Colonial Office. It was feared that WASU hostels might have to close. As Adi notes, this would not only have exposed officials to criticism for failing to provide adequate student accommodation, but would also have undermined their strategy of countering communism by addressing these needs. Amid these pressures, WASU and other student organisations reorganised themselves into a new federal organisation, also called WASU. As decolonisation progressed, West African governments began taking direct responsibility for their students, making WASU less important to their daily welfare. The union remained an important ideological hub where students could debate African affairs, the colour bar and the new African governments and politicians – just as they had once debated colonial rule and the Colonial Office.

WASU members were critical of the decolonisation process in Africa, and felt a ‘need to struggle more energetically for freedom’. In one dispatch, WASU stated that as ‘a student organisation not tied to any political party, we reserve our rights to criticise any West African organisation’. Through its publication News Service, it urged the Convention People’s Party of the former WASU member Kwame Nkrumah to maintain the policies that had ‘built its reputation and followership’. Events in Nigeria also captured WASU’s attention: it saw the 1951 MacPherson constitution, which gave regional governments limited powers, as a means of setting ‘region against region’ and delaying self-government. WASU argued that ‘nothing but a unitary government can bind Nigeria into a homogenous and a powerful country.’ Particular ire was reserved for the colonial secretary, Oliver Lyttelton, whose ‘dastardly policies in Kenya, British Guiana and Central Africa have recalled to mind the worst aspects of Hitler’s policy in Europe’.

African students in Britain continue to face discrimination and difficulties in navigating the system. Most of them still come from the elite in their home countries: who else can pay fees of as much as £21,000 a year? Successive governments have sought simultaneously to attract and penalise international students, promoting British degrees while limiting the right to bring family, the right to work and access to the NHS. Both Conservative and Labour governments would prefer them to leave rather than stay and contribute to the economy. Commonwealth students are eligible for special scholarships, but there is no special arrangement or body comparable with the Colonial Office. West Africans in Britain didn’t deal with the period after 1960; African and Caribbean People in Britain brings us up to the present, but Adi has more to say about the people of African heritage who settled in Britain during the years of mass emigration than those arriving today. The student politics that informed the pan-African movement, shaped the ideas of future presidents and created an intellectual powerhouse in the first half of the 20th century was superseded by larger movements for liberation abroad and equality at home. In 2023 there were almost seventy thousand African students in the UK, almost twice as many as from the Middle East; the majority are still West African. I wonder how many feel anything like the sense of political possibility their predecessors had.