Africa is drafted into a European war for the second time

African colonies were pulled into a European war for the second time in twenty five years, and supplied it with men and material. Britain leaned hardest on its territories, recruiting soldiers in west and east Africa and drawing on African farms and factories. Egypt mattered above all because of the Suez Canal, and Egyptian nationalism worried London without a break. In 1942, with German armour moving through the Western Desert, British armoured vehicles took up positions around the government buildings in Cairo, posted there to watch the ministers inside rather than to protect them. South Africa was under no obligation to join, since the Statute of Westminster of 1931 had removed it, and a large Afrikaner minority pressed for neutrality with some quiet sympathy for the Nazis. The government of Jan Smuts carried a declaration of war through parliament by the narrowest of margins. After the French armistice of June 1940 the governors of French Africa gave their loyalty to Vichy and later declared for de Gaulle. Italy, the one Axis power holding African ground, raised troops in Eritrea and looked at Sudan and Kenya, and its armies were beaten inside two years.

Lorimer Denis and Francois Duvalier published their findings on racial determinism in Les Griots in 1939. Their argument was that the political history of Haiti could be understood only through a scientific analysis of racial characteristics, which meant that the country's coups, constitutions and civil wars were expressions of biology. Two groups were held to be at work: the black majority carrying the African inheritance, and the light skinned elite descended in part from Europeans. Everything since 1804 was read as friction between them. The word scientific is doing heavy lifting there. Denis and Duvalier were borrowing the apparatus of European racial anthropology, the same apparatus that had been used for a century to explain why Haiti should never have existed, and turning it to the advantage of the majority. It handed a small circle of writers a complete theory of the nation and a rule for deciding who belonged inside it.

Europe in 1945 was exhausted and no longer the centre of anything, squeezed between the United States and the Soviet Union after four centuries of preeminence. That made African colonies more valuable in strictly economic terms. Britain leaned on its African possessions harder than it ever had, opening fresh areas to trade, investment and production. Eastern and central Africa became important sources of raw materials for a country short of everything, and those materials sat outside the dollar zone, so Britain could rebuild without depending wholly on American credit. A pattern follows. Portugal, the weakest of the colonial economies, kept its empire until the 1970s precisely because it could not manage without the commercial crutch. Britain, the strongest by the 1950s, gave up political administration soonest, because its economic recovery and its influence let it keep the substance while shedding the cost. In Lisbon economic control required political control. In London and Paris it did not. The two visions belonged to different centuries.

Nation and nationalism sit awkwardly on postwar Africa. Territories had to turn themselves into nation-states out of administrative units in a very short time, and in some cases the work is still unfinished. Movements that called themselves nationalist were frequently defending a region or a group, as concerned with who would hold the territory after the Europeans left as with getting them out. Searching for a shared consciousness inside colonial boundaries usually misleads, because those boundaries were drawn for European convenience and carried no ethnic, linguistic or historical logic. In practice nationalism in Africa often meant sharper competition between ethnic, religious, regional and economic groups, some of those rivalries manufactured by colonial rule and some far older. Polities that had been dominant in the nineteenth century pursued their own aims inside the anti-colonial struggle and sometimes sought to leave it. The task facing postwar leaders was to gather political associations, trade unions, militant Christianity and Islam, negritude and pan-Africanism into something that could force a departure and then govern.