ABSTRACT
Solanke’s experiences of poverty and racism in London led him to join the existing Pan-African student organisation in Britain, the Union of Students of African Descent, and to campaign vigorously against various racist articles in the British press. He was then inspired to organise other Nigerian students in Britain. With the assistance of AMY ASHWOOD GARVEY (the estranged first wife of MARCUS GARVEY) he founded the Nigerian Progress Union (NPU) in 1924, the first Nigerian organisation in Britain’s history. The NPU was founded ‘to promote the general welfare of Nigerians from an educational not a political point of view’, but under Solanke’s leadership the NPU concerned itself with political matters not only in Nigeria but also throughout the diaspora, as is evident from Solanke’s ‘Open Letter to the Negroes of the World’, published in the African American paper The Spokesman in 1925.
