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Colonial Subjects: Black Intellectuals and the Development of Colonial Studies in Britain

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 December 2012

Marc Matera
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Journal of British Studies , Volume 49 , Issue 2 , April 2010 , pp. 388 - 418
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Copyright © North American Conference of British Studies 2010

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References

1 On representations of Africa in British cinema, see Bourne, Stephen, Black in British Frame: The Black Experience in British Film and Television (London, 2001).Google Scholar On the depiction of West Africa at the 1924 Empire Exhibition, see Stephen, Daniel Mark, “‘The White Man's Grave’: British West Africa and the British Empire Exhibition of 1924–1925,” Journal of British Studies 48, no. 1 (January 2009): 102–28.Google Scholar

2 See Rimmer, Douglas and Kirk-Greene, Anthony, eds., The British Intellectual Engagement with Africa in the Twentieth Century (London, 2000)Google Scholar; Bates, Robert H., Mudimbe, V. Y., and Barr, Jean O’, eds., Africa and the Disciplines: The Contributions of Research in Africa to the Social Sciences and Humanities (Chicago, 1993).Google Scholar On the centrality of Africa to the development of social anthropology in Britain, see especially Goody, Jack, The Expansive Moment: Anthropology in Britain and Africa, 1918–1970 (Cambridge, 1995)Google Scholar; and Moore, Sally Falk, Anthropology and Africa: Changing Perspectives on a Changing Scene (Charlottesville, VA, 1994)Google Scholar; on political science, Long, David and Schmidt, Brian C., Imperialism and Internationalism in the Discipline of International Relations (Albany, NY, 2005)Google Scholar.

3 For examples of recent critical studies of the development of anthropology, see Goody, The Expansive Moment; Clifford, James, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Cambridge, 1988)Google Scholar; and Asad, Talal, “The Concept of Cultural Translation in British Social Anthropology,” in Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, ed. Clifford, James and Marcus, George E. (Berkeley, CA, 1986), 141–64.Google Scholar For a rare exception to this tendency, see Ezeh, P.-J., “Anthropology in Post-colonial Africa: The Nigerian Case,” in African Anthropologies: History, Critique and Practice, ed. Ntarangwi, Mwenda, Mills, David, and Babiker, Mustafa (London, 2006).Google Scholar On Jomo Kenyatta, see especially Carolyn Shaw, Martin, Colonial Inscriptions: Race, Sex and Class in Kenya (Minneapolis, 1995)Google Scholar; and Desai, Gaurav, Subject to Colonialism: African Self-Fashioning and the Colonial Library (Durham, NC, 2001)Google Scholar.

4 James, C. L. R., Beyond a Boundary (1963; repr., Durham, NC, 1993), 18.Google Scholar

5 On West African and West Indian students and intellectuals in Britain, see especially Adi, Hakim, West Africans in Britain, 1900–1960: Nationalism, Pan-Africanism and Communism (London, 1998)Google Scholar; and Schwarz, Bill, ed., West Indian Intellectuals in Britain (Manchester, 2003)Google Scholar.

6 See, e.g., Armattoe, R. E. G., “Science, the State and the Citizen,” Africana 1, no. 2 (April 1949): 14–15.Google Scholar

7 Black organizations often composed joint memoranda on the foremost colonial issues of the day, which were submitted to various commissions of inquiry, the Colonial Office, and, in some instances, the League of Nations. Both the League of Coloured Peoples and West African Students Union maintained regular correspondence with the Colonial Office, to the chagrin of many in the latter, and used their contacts with MPs in the Labour Party, Independent Labour Party, and Communist Party to compel the Secretary of State for the Colonies to answer questions in the House of Commons on developments in the colonies. See the Colonial Office files related to both organizations. Zachernuk, Philip S., Colonial Subjects: An African Intelligentsia and Atlantic Ideas (Charlottesville, VA, 2000), 97–101.Google Scholar

8 See “This Business of Trusteeship,” West African Review 7 (August 1936): 13.Google Scholar

9 For example, Raymond Leslie Buell produced seminal works in the development of international relations and African studies—International Relations (New York, 1925) and Native Problem in Africa (New York, 1928)Google ScholarPubMed.

10 On Margery Perham, see Smith, Alison and Bull, Mary, eds., Margery Perham and British Rule in Africa (London, 1991)Google Scholar; Rimmer and Kirk-Greene, The British Intellectual Engagement with Africa.

11 See Dimier, Véronique, “Three Universities and the British Elite: A Science of Colonial Administration in the UK,” Public Administration 84, no. 2 (2006): 337–66CrossRefGoogle Scholar; David Killingray, “Colonial Studies,” in Rimmer and Kirk-Greene, The British Intellectual Engagement with Africa, 42–43.

12 Azikiwe became the first governor-general of Nigeria in 1960 and the country's first president in 1963 under the new federal system.

13 McLeod, Malcolm, “Letters to Africa,” Africa 44, no. 3 (July 1974): 300Google Scholar. For works by A. A. Y. Kyerematen, see Regalia for an Ashanti Durbar (Kumase, 1961)Google Scholar, Panoply of Ghana: Ornamental Art in Ghanaian Tradition and Culture (London, 1964)Google Scholar, “The Royal Stools of Ashanti,” Africa 39, no. 1 (January 1969): 1–10Google Scholar, and Kingship and Ceremony in Ashanti (Kumase, 1970)Google Scholar.

14 Of course, individuals in the legal and medical professions also formed a significant portion of both the membership of black pressure groups in London and this cohort of postcolonial leaders. In Jamaica and Barbados, for example, the lawyers Norman Manley and Grantley Adams became the islands’ first premiers, the latter serving as the only prime minister of the short-lived West Indian Federation; the physician Hastings Banda was the first president and, ultimately, dictator of Malawi.

15 In 1947, Wãsù, the journal of the West African Students Union, published a table that showed the following distribution of West African students then studying in Britain and Ireland, according to data from the Welfare Department of the Colonial Office: accountancy-17; agriculture-5; architecture-4; art-4; bakery-8; book production-4; building trade-5; commerce-13; dentistry-20; domestic science-10; economics-15; education-50; engineering-40; law-150; liberal arts-71; linguistics-15; medicine-140; music-8; nursing-50; optics-5; pharmacy-6; printing-6; public administration-4; railway training-6; science-27; social science-9; tailoring-5; theology-3; miscellaneous-25. “Table of West African Student Interests in Britain and Ireland,” Wãsù 12, no. 3 (Summer 1947): 12.Google Scholar

16 On Africa and the evolution of British colonial development policy, see Constantine, Stephen, The Making of British Colonial Development Policy, 1914–1940 (London, 1984)Google Scholar.

17 See Carey, Alex T., Colonial Students: A Study of Social Adaptation of Colonial Students (London, 1956), 29Google Scholar; Patterson, Sheila, Dark Strangers: A Sociological Study of the Absorption of a Recent West Indian Migrant Group in Brixton, South London (London, 1963), 37–38.Google Scholar

18 The vast majority, some 170 students, were Nigerians, Sierra Leoneans, or Gold Coasters, while the remainder came from Gambia, East Africa, or Northern Rhodesia. The new scholarships were funded by public and private sources, including money provided under the Colonial Development and Welfare Act and contributions from some colonial governments, the British Council, and the United Africa Company. Keith, J. L., “African Students in Great Britain,” African Affairs 45, no. 176 (April 1946): 65–66.Google Scholar See also “National Scholarships in West Africa,” Wãsù 12, no. 1 (March 1945): 34.Google Scholar

19 de Graft, J. C. Johnson became a distinguished academic, publishing his African Glory: The Story of Vanished Negro Civilizations (New York, 1954)Google Scholar and An Introduction to the African Economy (New York, 1959)Google Scholar, and later serving as Ghana's ambassador to the EC. See League of Coloured Peoples Newsletter 12, no. 72 (September 1945): 113.Google Scholar

20 Davies, H. O., Memoirs (Ibadan, 1989), 67–68, 76–78Google Scholar; on tensions between the West African Students Union and League of Coloured Peoples, see Adi, West Africans in Britain.

21 Quoted in Williams, Eric, Inward Hunger: The Education of a Prime Minister (London, 1969), 53–54.Google Scholar

22 Moore, Anthropology and Africa, 18–19, 21. See also Ward, W. E. F., “The International Institute of African Languages and Cultures: A Memory of Its Beginnings,” Africa 60, no. 1 (1990): 132–33.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

23 Anthony Kirk-Greene, “The Emergence of an Africanist Community in the UK,” in Rimmer and Kirk-Greene, The British Intellectual Engagement with Africa, 17–18.

24 Goody, The Expansive Moment, 73.

25 See “African Prince Awarded PhD. (Oxon),” League of Coloured Peoples’ News Notes, no. 8 (May 1940): 35.

26 Nyabongo returned to the United States in the 1940s, where he was a professor at the University of Alabama and later North Carolina A & T University. Busia joined the faculty at the University of the Gold Coast from 1949 to 1954, becoming the first lecturer in African studies and, then, the first African to hold an academic chair at the institution. In the late 1950s, he became Nkrumah's chief political rival as the leader of the Ghana Congress Party, which soon merged with the other opposition parties to form the United Party. In 1959, he fled the country out of fear for his safety and became professor of sociology and culture at the University of Leiden in the Hague, Netherlands. Busia was in England once again during the early 1960s, where he was a member of the faculty at St. Anthony's College, Oxford University, between 1961 and 1966, but returned to Ghana after the 1966 military coup. He was appointed chairman of the National Advisory Council by the military government (National Liberation Council) and, in 1967, the Centre for Civic Education. After his Progress Party's victory in the first elections following Nkrumah's fall from power, Busia became prime minister from 1969 until January 1972, when another military coup toppled his government. Kirk-Greene, “The Emergence of an Africanist Community in the UK,” 19; Goody, The Expansive Moment, 9–10, 27, 84–85, 87, 205. See also Busia, K. A., “The African World-View,” in African Heritage, ed. Drachler, Jacob (New York, 1963), 146–51.Google Scholar

27 Nkrumah subsequently enrolled at Gray's Inn to become a barrister and a PhD student in philosophy at University College London, where he proposed to write his dissertation on the topic of “Knowledge and Logical Positivism” but never completed either program of study. Sherwood, Marika, “Kwame Nkrumah: The London Years, 1945–47,” in Africans in Britain, ed. Killingray, David (Essex, 1996), 182.Google Scholar

28 Kenyatta, Jomo, “Kikuyu Religion, Ancestor-Worship, and Sacrificial Practices,” Africa 10, no. 3 (July 1937): 308–28CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and see also his “War and Peace in Old Kenya,” in Drachler, African Heritage, 85–90.

29 Turner studied Africanisms in the Gullah dialect of Georgia. See Drake, St. Clair, “Mbiyu Koinage and the Pan-African Movement,” in Pan-African Biography, ed. Hill, Robert A. (Los Angeles, 1987), 175.Google Scholar While the influence of Malinowski was paramount, Kenyatta also thanked Raymond Firth in the book's preface “for his careful reading of the manuscript and his technical advice on anthropological points.” Kenyatta, Jomo, Facing Mount Kenya, intro. Bronislaw Malinowski (1938; repr., New York, 1965), xvii.Google Scholar

30 For example, as Zachernuk notes, “Anthropologist Meyer Fortes concluded in 1945 that ‘the balance of scientific evidence and of practical experience proved the cultural insignificance of race.’” The ideas of Franz Boas, introduced to the WASU by Alain Locke, were also influential in this regard. Zachernuk, Colonial Subjects, 108; also Fortes, Meyer, “Anthropologist's Point of View,” in Fabian Colonial Essays, ed. Hinden, Rita (London, 1945), 219.Google Scholar For another example of black intellectuals’ use of the work of anthropologists in Britain, see “Social Problems and Research in British West Africa,” League of Coloured Peoples Newsletter 16, no. 93 (July 1947): 141–42Google Scholar, which reprints excerpts from a recent article by Raymond Firth in the Journal of the International African Institute. The LCP cited approvingly Firth's emphasis on the “asymmetrical relations between Europeans and educated Africans.”

31 Solanke, Ladipo, “Editorial,” Wãsù 4, no. 5 (November 1935): 69–72Google Scholar; Azikiwe, Nnamdi, “Ethics of Colonial Imperialism,” Journal of Negro History 16, no. 3 (July 1931): 308Google Scholar, and Liberia in World Politics (1934; repr., Westport, CT, 1970), 217.Google Scholar For a list of other anthropologists whose work influenced Azikiwe's thinking during this period, see Azikiwe, Nnamdi, My Odyssey: An Autobiography (New York, 1970), 156.Google Scholar

32 Malinowski, Bronislaw, “Practical Anthropology,” Africa: Journal of the International Institute of African Languages and Cultures 2, no. 1 (January 1929): 24, 26, 36–37.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

33 Malinowski, Bronislaw, “The Rationalization of Anthropology and Administration,” Africa 3, no. 4 (October 1930): 407.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

34 Vivian Bickford-Smith, “The Betrayal of Creole Elites, 1880–1920,” 194–227; McCaskie, T. C., “Cultural Encounters: Britain and Africa in the Nineteenth Century,” 166–93, both in Black Experience and the Empire, Oxford History of the British Empire Companion Series, ed. Morgan, Philip D. and Hawkins, Sean (Oxford, 2004)Google Scholar.

35 Given their context, Malinowski may have had Kenyatta's essay “Kikuyu Religion, Ancestor-Worship, and Sacrificial Practices” in mind when he made these remarks. Malinowski, Bronislaw, The Dynamics of Culture Change: An Inquiry into Race Relations in Africa, ed. Kaberry, Phyllis M. (New Haven, CT, 1945), 58–59.Google Scholar

36 Solanke, Ladipo, United West Africa (or Africa) at the Bar of the Family of Nations (London, 1927), 50.Google Scholar

37 For example, Gluckman argued, “A Government unmoved by the sufferings of thousands of people is not likely to be moved by the pretty chart of an anthropologist. Knowledge alone cannot make a moral policy; it can as easily serve an immoral one.” He also accused Malinowski of failing to appreciate the role of colonial conflict in social change. “This unawareness,” Gluckman wrote, “flows from Malinowski's refusal to see conflict as a mode of integrating groups and to recognize that hostility between groups is a form of social balance.” Gluckman, Max, “Malinowski's ‘Functional’ Analysis of Social Change,” Africa 17, no. 2 (April 1947): 105, 111.Google Scholar For more recent critiques of Malinowski, see especially Asad, Talal, ed., Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter (Atlantic Heights, NJ, 1973)Google Scholar; Banaji, Jairus, “The Crisis of British Anthropology,” New Left Review 1, no. 64 (November–December 1970): 70–85.Google Scholar

38 Harold Laski in political science; in anthropology and sociology, Malinowski, Mair, Firth, and Charles Gabriel Seligman; in economics, Arnold Plant, Lionel Robbins, Friedrich Hayek, and John Coatman (professor of imperial economic relations); in colonial, world, and economic history, Arnold Toynbee, T. S. Ashton, and R. H. Tawney; and, by the end of the 1930s, specialists in African languages like Ida Ward, L. S. Ward, E. O. Ashton, and R. C. Abraham at the School of Oriental and African Studies.

39 “Editorial,” Wãsù 2, no. 2 (April–June 1933): 1–2.Google ScholarPubMed

40 “News and Views,” Wãsù 5, no. 1 (May 1936): 7.Google ScholarPubMed

41 Lewis, W. Arthur, “Europe's Impact on Africa,” Keys 4, no. 2 (October–December 1936): 23–25.Google Scholar

42 Kyerematen, A. A. Y., “West Africa in Transition,” Africana 1, no. 2 (April 1949): 3–4.Google Scholar

43 In addition to the Boasian concept of “diffusion,” Malinowski also adopted Don Fernando Ortiz's term “transculturation” as a synonym for “culture change” because it entailed “no implications of one standard dominating all the phases (of culture change), but a transition in which both sides are active, each contributing its quota, each merging into a new reality of civilization.” The bulk of the chapter from Dynamics quoted here appeared first in Malinowski's “Introductory Essay” to Methods. The latter included essays by the anthropologists referenced (Mair, Hunter, Fortes, and Schapera), as well as Audrey Richards, Gunter Wagner, Culwick, A. T., and Culwick, G. M.. Malinowski, Bronislaw, Methods of Study of Culture Contact in Africa (London, 1938)Google Scholar, reprinted from Africa vols. 7–9, The Dynamics of Culture Change, vii, 58–59, and see also “The Present State of Studies in Culture Contact: Some Comments on an American Approach,” Africa 12, no. 1 (January 1939): 27–47.Google Scholar

44 Kyerematen, “West Africa in Transition,” 3; see Nadel, S. F., “Experiments on Culture Psychology,” Africa 10, no. 4 (October 1937): 421–35.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

45 Kyerematen, “West Africa in Transition,” 3–4.

46 In many respects, the potential that Kyerematen and other African anthropologists saw for a more expansive anthropology to take up broader issues about Africa's place in the modern world prefigured the recent arguments of James Ferguson. See Ferguson, James, Global Shadows: Africa in the Neoliberal World Order (Durham, NC, 2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

47 Kyerematen, “West Africa in Transition,” 4.

48 Kenyatta, Facing Mount Kenya, xvii–xviii.

49 Fraser and Cole mentioned Kyerematen among a long list of “those who have also helped develop the ideas expressed here” in the book's preface, and Fraser included a note in his chapter stating that it “was compiled from information supplied by the Honourable A. A. Y. Kyerematen, Ph.D., Director, Ghana National Cultural Centre.” However, he did not cite the latter's PhD thesis or subsequent publications as sources of or otherwise influencing his analysis. Fraser does not appear to have responded publicly to McLeod's accusation. McLeod, Malcolm, “Letters to Africa,” Africa 44, no. 3 (July 1974): 300Google Scholar; Fraser, Douglas, “The Symbols of Ashanti Kingship,” in African Art and Leadership, ed. Fraser, Douglas and Cole, Herbert M. (Madison, WI, 1972), xvi, 137.Google Scholar

50 Between 1902 and 1951, the Journal of the Royal African Society included fifty-two articles or works of art by Africans, but more than half of them appeared after World War II. See “Fifty Years of a British African Society,” African Affairs 50, no. 200 (July 1951): 194–95.Google Scholar

51 Kirk-Greene, , “The Emergence of an Africanist Community in the UK,” 17–18; “La voix de l’Africain,” Africa 1, no. 1 (January 1928): 132–33.Google Scholar

52 Leakey, L. S. B., Journal of the Royal African Society 34, no. 135 (April 1935): 218–19.Google Scholar

53 E. B. H., Man 36 (December 1936): 214–15.

54 Barlow, A. R., Africa 12, no. 1 (January 1939): 114–16.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

55 Bronislaw Malinowski, “Introduction,” in Kenyatta, Facing Mount Kenya, xiii.

56 Kenyatta, Facing Mount Kenya, xviii.

57 Mbanefo, Louis, “Africa Speaks for Herself,” Keys 4, no. 2 (October–December 1936): 25–26.Google Scholar

58 Azikiwe, My Odyssey, 156, 187. See also Ezeh, “Anthropology in Post-colonial Africa,” 207.

59 Azikiwe stayed with his old friend and “kinsman,” Louis Mbanefo, in London. Azikiwe, My Odyssey, 193.

60 Zachernuk, Colonial Subjects, 98.

61 Ibid., 98–99.

62 Although personally embittered by the color bar blocking him and other non-Europeans from entering the colonial service, Lewis served as an advisor to the Colonial Office during the 1940s, producing a series of astute, meticulously researched memoranda on issues related to colonial development. When he was a given a professorship at Manchester University in 1948, he became the first person of African descent to hold a named chair at a British university before leaving to serve briefly as the chief economic advisor to Nkrumah in a newly independent Ghana. Lewis later became the first black principal of the University College of the West Indies, the first vice-chancellor of the University of the West Indies, and, in 1979, he won the Nobel Prize for his seminal influence on the field of development economics, especially his essay, “Economic Development with Unlimited Supplies of Labour” (Manchester School 2, no. 22 [May 1954]: 139–91)Google Scholar, making him the first economist of African descent to receive the honor. See “Britain's First Negro Professor,” League of Coloured Peoples Newsletter 17, no. 99 (January–March 1948): 14.Google Scholar On Lewis, see Tignor, Robert, W. Arthur Lewis (Princeton, NJ, 2006)Google Scholar.

63 Tignor, W. Arthur Lewis, 37–38.

64 In her influential book, Native Administration in Nigeria, Perham rejected the notion of integrating educated Africans into the “scaffold” of colonial administration and suggested instead that an effort should be made “to find or create opportunities for them within the Native Administrations.” Perham, Margery, Native Administration in Nigeria (London, 1937), 361.Google Scholar

65 Davies, Memoirs, 85.

66 The same issue that contained Lewis's review of Perham's book also included reviews of Norman Leys's The Colour Bar in East Africa and Joyce Cary's The Case for African Freedom; see League of Coloured Peoples Newsletter, no. 24 (September 1941): 128–29, and no. 25 (October 1941): 7–10.

67 Elsa V. Goveia and F. R. Augier, “Colonialism from Within,” Times Literary Supplement, 28 July 1966.

68 On Elsa V. Goveia, see especially Chamberlain, Mary, “Elsa Goveia: History and Nation,” History Workshop Journal 58, no. 1 (Autumn 2004): 167–90.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

69 Madden claims that Coupland felt “bitterly” Williams's attack in Capitalism and Slavery (Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery, intro. Colin A. Palmer [1944; repr., Chapel Hill, NC, 1994]). Madden, Frederick, “The Commonwealth, Commonwealth History, and Oxford, 1905–1971,” in Oxford and the Idea of Commonwealth, ed. Madden, Frederick and Fieldhouse, D. K. (London, 1982), 13.Google Scholar

70 Madden, “The Commonwealth, Commonwealth History, and Oxford,” 11–14.

71 Williams, Inward Hunger, 49–50.

72 Williams, Eric, “The Abolition of the Slave System in Britain,” Keys 7, no. 1 (July–September 1939): 11–13.Google Scholar

73 Williams, Capitalism and Slavery, 45, 178, 188, 211, 253.

74 Williams, Inward Hunger, 45–46.

75 Coupland, Reginald, The British Anti-slavery Movement (London, 1933)Google Scholar, and The British Empire: An Outline Sketch of Its Growth and Character (London, 1933)Google Scholar.

76 Williams, Inward Hunger, 50.

77 Kenyatta, Facing Mount Kenya, xvii.

78 Leakey, L. S. B., By the Evidence: Memoirs, 1932–1951 (London, 1974), 74.Google Scholar

79 Kenyatta, Facing Mount Kenya, xvii.

80 Koinage, Drake writes, “mistrusted [Richards’s] motives and was dubious about his own ability to keep up in the classes on theory at the London School of Economics, because of the amount of time he had to spend on his political work” (Drake, “Mbiyu Koinange and the Pan-African Movement,” 174–77). See Goody, The Expansive Movement, esp. chaps. 4 and 5.

81 Leakey, By the Evidence, 77.

82 This trip yielded Goode Robeson's unjustifiably neglected travelogue/ethnography, African Journey, which included her own photographs. Eslanda Robeson, Goode, African Journey (New York, 1945), 14–15.Google Scholar On Goode Robeson's African Journey, see Mahon, Maureen, “Eslanda Goode Robeson's African Journey: The Politics of Identification and Representation in the African Diaspora,” in Transnational Blackness: Navigating the Global Color Line, ed. Marable, Manning and Agard-Jones, Vanesa (London, 2008), 115–34.Google Scholar

83 Warburg, Fredric, An Occupation for Gentlemen (London, 1959), 185, 206, 211, 213–15, 251–54, 270.Google Scholar

84 Williams, Inward Hunger, 52–53.

85 Williams, “The Abolition of the Slave System in Britain,” 11–13.

86 Founded by Robert Wellesley Cole, the West African Society's journal, Africana, claimed to represent “the spontaneous expression of national consciousness among West Africans, in the sphere of social and cultural activity.” Eschewing political affiliations, the journal more closely approximated a scholarly publication than the other black publications of the time and aspired to serve as “a common forum where we can all exchange ideas.” Quoted in clipping from “Africana: A Quarterly Magazine; Vol. 1, No. 1,” Venture (February 1949), in Dr. Robert Wellesley Cole Papers, School of Oriental and African Studies Archives, London, PP MS 35, file 149.

87 James, C. L. R., “The Voice of Africa,” International African Opinion 1, no. 2 (August 1938): 3.Google Scholar

88 See, e.g., “Towards West African Nationhood,” Wãsù 1, nos. 6–7 (August 1928): 1–2. Although the author was unnamed, both the style and title of the piece, which was the same as a larger text by J. W. de Graft Johnson published the same year, suggests that he penned this editorial as well. Moreover, de Graft Johnson also served as a subeditor of the journal at this time.

89 See Kessie, Cobina, “Pen Portrait of Kobina Sekyi, Esq.,” Wãsù 1, no. 9 (December 1932): 25–27Google Scholar; and Alakija, Olu, “A Short Pen Portrait of Herbert Macauley, Esq., C.E.,” Wãsù 2, no. 1 (January 1933): 10–11.Google Scholar

90 “A Short History of W.A.S.U. and Its Organ ‘Wasu,’” Wãsù 1, no. 9 (December 1932): 1–3.Google Scholar

91 See “‘Economic Problems of To-day,’ by W. Arthur Lewis,” League of Coloured Peoples Newsletter, no. 9 (June 1940): 42.

92 K. A., “Black Jacobins by C. L. R. James,” Keys 6, no. 2 (October–December 1938): 12–13.Google Scholar

93 “Outstanding Student Success,” Keys 5, no. 1 (July–September 1937): 6.Google Scholar

94 “Our Responsibilities,” Wãsù 12, no. 1 (March 1945): 3–5.Google ScholarPubMed

95 “Activities in West African Political Economic, Etc., [sic] Problems,” Wãsù 9, no. 1 (May 1942): 3.Google Scholar

96 “Annual Conference and Other Conferences,” Wãsù 12, no. 2 (March 1946): 5.Google Scholar

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98 Early members of the West Indian Student Union included politicians such as Michael Manley, Errol Barrow, Linden Forbes Burnham, Maurice Bishop, and Lee Llewellyn Moore; the sociologist Lloyd Braithwaite; and the historians Elsa V. Goveia, F. R. Augier, and Lucille Mathurin Mair. Errol Barrow and Linden Forbes Burnham later became the first prime ministers of Barbados and Guyana, respectively, and Maurice Bishop served as the prime minister of Grenada from 1979 to 1983. Lee Llewellyn Moore was a prominent figure within the Labour Party in Saint Kitts and premier in 1979.

99 Clover, David, “Dispersed and Destroyed: Archives, The West Indian Students’ Union, and Public Memory,” Society for Caribbean Studies Annual Conference Papers 6 (2005): 6–7.Google Scholar See also Braithwaite, Lloyd, Colonial West Indian Students in Britain (Kingston, 2001)Google Scholar.

100 Quoted in Walmsley, Anne, The Caribbean Artists Movement, 1966–1972: A Literary and Cultural History (London, 1991), 5.Google Scholar

101 See, e.g., a letter from Irene Cole to her brother, Dr. Robert Wellesley Cole, 29 January 1946, School of Oriental and African Studies Archives, Robert Wellesley Cole Papers, file 7.

102 Quoted in Fabian Bureau, Colonial, Domination or Co-operation? (London, 1946), 5–6.Google Scholar

103 See Cooper, Frederick, Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History (Berkeley, CA, 2005), 43.Google Scholar