Colonial rule looks permanent in 1939 and is finished in twenty years

In September 1939, when Britain and France declared war on Germany, no European government imagined leaving Africa. There had been trouble. Political movements were forming that pointed toward later nationalism, the countryside protested, workers in the towns organised, Islamic and Christian movements rejected the assumptions colonial rule rested on, and African voices were getting louder. None of it threatened the structure, and no colonial power had given serious thought to retreat. Twenty years later Britain and France had begun programmes of withdrawal that could not be reversed, Belgium was about to lose the Congo, and only Portugal and the settler regimes of Southern Rhodesia and South Africa were digging in, at a cost paid out over the following decades. Europe left Africa in roughly the span of time it had taken to seize it. The change came from two directions, from what European governments needed at home and abroad, and from African movements altering the facts on the ground. Grievances accumulated through the Depression and the war hardened after 1945 into parties.

The Ligue Feminine d'Action Sociale and its allies spent years pressing the case that Haitian women should hold the same political and civil rights as men, and obtained that recognition from the constituent assembly of 1950. In a speech to the assembly on 15 November 1950, Dantes Bellegarde told the chamber that what was wanted was to bring into the direction and management of public affairs an element that had stayed sound, and that by politics he meant education, health, work, hygiene, housing, and help for the poor and the disabled. He then made the argument that carried. Haitians had won their independence in conditions unique in the history of nations, abolished slavery by their own strength with nobody's help, and forced men of every race to recognise them as equals in rights and dignity. Haitians who now denied women their claims, he said, had placed themselves exactly where the colonists stood who kept black people in servitude on grounds of inferiority.

The Gold Coast was the colony British officials pointed to when they wanted to show that colonial rule worked. Between 1946 and 1950 it stopped cooperating. Cocoa farmers resented the West African Produce Marketing Board, which set the price they were paid for their crop. When the authorities ordered about two and a half million cocoa trees destroyed in 1946 and 1947 to halt an outbreak of swollen shoot disease, farmers read it as a government willing to ruin them without asking. In the towns the post-war slump brought shortages, high prices and restrictions that favoured Europeans, wages fell behind prices, and unemployment threw together two groups with the same grievance: young men leaving school with no work, and soldiers home from the war who found no reward for their service. A boycott of European trading companies in 1948 forced those firms to lower prices. Ex-servicemen marched on government buildings, rioting followed, and European commercial offices were attacked. The disturbances were small beside those in other territories. They were enough to make London start talking to nationalist politicians.

Constitutions in 1942 and 1946 allowed direct elections to a legislative council in the Gold Coast, which made organised parties worth forming. The United Gold Coast Convention was founded in 1947 under J. B. Danquah, a lawyer from a small professional elite. It was moderate, it stayed inside the law, and it worked by persuading colonial officials that reform was reasonable. The British were content with it. Younger activists with no property and no patience found nothing there for them. Kwame Nkrumah came back from the United States in 1947 to work for the Convention, having spent years in pan-Africanist politics abroad, and the rioting and shortages of those months made Danquah's method look useless to him. He left in 1949 and founded the Convention People's Party. Its method, taken in part from Gandhi in India, was called positive action: strikes and boycotts, non-violent, and willing to break colonial law. The British ran out of patience and arrested Nkrumah in 1950 along with several other leaders, on the theory that jailing a man puts away his argument with him.