Morocco and Tunisia are both free of France by 1956

French rule in North Africa ended in two places within a single year. In Morocco the nationalist protest was led by Sultan Sidi Muhammad, and fighting in the Spanish-held part of the territory added pressure the French could not absorb. They withdrew in 1956. Tunisia arrived at the same point in the same year. Its Neo-Destour party had spent the early 1950s pulling itself apart in a quarrel between Bourguiba, who wanted terms, and Ben Yusuf, who wanted more than terms. The French tried force against the protest and inducements to the politicians. Bourguiba's side won the internal fight and took the country to full independence. Richard Reid argues that these movements had advantages their neighbours to the south lacked. Islam supplied a long tradition of political argument. The territories had borders and identities centuries deep. A rising pan-Arabism connected them to the Middle East and to a world larger than the continent. Nationalists below the Sahara had to assemble all three of those things while they organised.

The Axis powers had cut American access to rubber coming out of the Philippines, and in 1941 Elie Lescot agreed to make Haiti the answer. The instrument was the Societe Haitiano-Americaine de Developpement Agricole, known as SHADA, a joint agricultural programme with the United States. Hevea rubber trees were to be brought from the Philippines and grown in Haiti. Alongside them the scheme planted cryptostegia vines, a second source of rubber, and took lumber out of the southeast of the country. All of that required land and it required labour. Both came from the Haitian peasantry, who held the ground the trees were to occupy and who would do the clearing and the planting. The structure should be recognisable. American capital directing Haitian land and Haitian work toward an American requirement is exactly the arrangement of the occupation that had ended six years earlier. The difference in 1941 was that the instructions came through a Haitian president rather than a Marine general.

Elie Lescot was inaugurated president of Haiti on 15 May 1941, after Stenio Vincent resigned. He was born on 3 December 1883 into a light-skinned family at Saint-Louis du Nord, and he reached the office through the diplomatic service, having represented Haiti in the Dominican Republic and in Washington. He admired Roosevelt and the Good Neighbor Policy, and after Pearl Harbor he declared war on Germany at once. Haiti's part in the war was raw materials and a base for the American Coast Guard. His government also signed on to an American agricultural programme that expropriated peasant land for rubber and sisal and produced food shortages in the countryside. A devout Catholic, he pressed the suppression of Vodou, setting himself against the religion of most of the population and extending a persecution the Catholic Church had run since the concordat of 1860. His sons made money out of property seized from Germans during the war. Trujillo finished him by publishing the size of the bribes he had paid him.

Elie Lescot's inauguration ran ten thousand gourdes over budget because the war had put up the price of French champagne. He was born in 1883 at St.-Louis-du-Nord into a respected Capois family; his grandfather had been magistrat communal of the Cap for life. The American Armour had marked him as a future president as early as 1934, noting that from Trujillo's point of view he was the perfect choice, a son of the North where the Christophe tradition of discipline held. Lescot governed to that description. On 6 June 1941 he took the title of Commander-in-Chief, putting the Garde Presidentielle and the capital's police under his own hand and leaving the chief of staff paperwork. Through that summer his government raided ounfo and smashed the drums and sacred objects inside them. In October he abolished the prefectures for six regional delegues holding sole local authority. Haiti declared war on Japan on 8 December, then on the European Axis, and on Christmas Eve on Hungary, Bulgaria and Romania. In January 1942 the legislature voted him extraordinary powers for the duration. On 23 February he suspended the constitution and told the Garde that saboteurs were to be tried, condemned and shot.