The war on African soil is fought on one strip of coast

Fighting on African soil was confined to a narrow strip of Mediterranean coast. Italian forces crossed from Libya into Egypt in the late summer of 1940 and were driven back into Libya by a small British force. The arrival of the German Afrika Korps changed the position completely, and for a time the drive toward the Suez Canal looked impossible to stop. Egyptian nationalists grew restless and feeling against the British hardened. Then the British held the Germans at El Alamein in October 1942, and the canal was safe for the empire for the time being. The threat that lasted was the Egyptian one, which outlived Rommel by more than a decade. British and Australian troops pushed the Germans west toward Tunisia. At the far end of the Mediterranean an American army came ashore in Morocco and Algeria, which put an end to the ambiguous standing of the Vichy administration there. The two forces closed on Tunisia from both sides and put the last Axis soldiers off the continent in May 1943.

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.

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.