Africans fight in Italy and Burma and watch Europeans fail

African soldiers fought a long way from home. Troops raised in the French and British territories were in Italy from 1943 to 1945, and British commanders used African regiments heavily in Burma, the campaign that got called the forgotten war. By 1945 more than three hundred and seventy thousand Africans were serving in British forces alone. Many came out of it with a sharper sense of how the colonial system worked and where it sat in the world. Some professional soldiers were demobilised and settled quietly back into their villages. Others became organisers, agitators and party men in the years that followed. What the veterans brought back was firsthand. They had lived alongside Europeans of every class, had killed Europeans, and had watched European officers panic and retreat and fail. The claim that Europeans were a superior order of men did not survive that. Men who had been sent to defend empires that refused them citizenship came home knowing the thing could be broken, and knowing from four years of drill how to organise the men who would break it.

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.

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.

Under Francois Duvalier the Haitian state built a small number of large projects: an airport, a dam, and a model town called Duvalierville laid out in modernist architecture as a Haitian answer to Brasilia. The showpiece was meant to demonstrate that the regime could produce a modern country. It could not compensate for what was leaving. Capital and people went out of Haiti through the 1960s in numbers no state investment matched, and the private building that normally shapes a city had almost stopped, because middle income and elite Haitians would not put money into property in a country where the state might take it, or take them. A capital whose physical form is made by thousands of small private decisions stood still for a decade. What Port-au-Prince looked like in 2010 was therefore decided in the years after 1971 rather than before.