West African Students' Union

The West African Students' Union (WASU), founded in London in 1925 and active into the 1960s, was an association of students from various West African countries who were studying in the United Kingdom.

WASU was founded on 7 August 1925 by twenty-one law students, led by Ladipo Solanke and Herbert Bankole-Bright. Solanke had founded the Nigerian Progress Union (NPU), for London-based students with a Nigerian background, the previous year. With the support of Amy Ashwood Garvey, it had begun to campaign for improved welfare for all African students in London, and for assorted measures for progress in Britain's African colonies.

As early as 1923, Solanke had proposed that the Union of Students of African Descent (USAD), a Christian social organisation dominated by students from the West Indies (and which had grown out of the earlier West African and West Indian Christian Union, founded in 1917), should incorporate itself into the National Congress of British West Africa (NCBWA). In 1925, Bankole-Bright of the NCBWA called on USAD, the NPU, the African Progress Union and the Gold Coast Students Association to join together to form a single organisation for West African students, inspired by the Indian Students' Union. Many students joined together to form WASU, and Solanke became the new organisation's secretary-general, while J. B. Danquah became its first president. J. E. Casely Hayford was the new grouping's first patron, which post he used to promote African nationalism.

The new organisation made opposition to the colour bar its first priority, while also including the promotion of political research, support for the NCBWA and the provision of a student hostel in its founding aims.

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