Duvalier leaves for Ann Arbor as the Griot movement disperses

The quarterly shut down in 1940 for lack of funds and its founders scattered. Duvalier went to the School of Public Health at the University of Michigan for a two year course. Denis, who had published several articles on vodou with him between 1941 and 1944, turned to research and teaching. Carl Brouard, the most radical poet of the group, had converted to vodou in the late thirties and lived a bohemian life outside the capital, writing almost nothing, and by 1942 he publicly renounced both vodou and the Griot movement and became a devout Catholic until his death in 1965. The book notes that no member of the group was ever arrested or exiled, unlike the Marxists, because the elite never regarded them as a threat, and argues that the movement's relevance in the following decade guaranteed its growth regardless.

Colonial governments began organising local elections, and the elections built the movements that ended the colonies. In Cote d'Ivoire in 1944 cocoa and coffee growers set up the Syndicat Agricole Africain, whose first aim was the abolition of forced labour. The union put its weight behind its leader Felix Houphouet-Boigny, who won a seat in the Assembly in Paris and got the corvee abolished. In Paris he joined with other West African deputies to build the Rassemblement Democratique Africain, the main bloc pressing for reform across French Africa. In Senegal a wider franchise let Leopold Senghor found a party rooted in the countryside, breaking the towns' hold on politics. Between the mid 1940s and the mid 1950s voters in French West Africa went to the polls repeatedly, for the National Assembly in Paris, the Assembly of the French Union, the Grand Councils at Brazzaville and Dakar, territorial assemblies, referenda and constitutions. Belgium did the reverse in the Congo and Ruanda-Urundi, sealing them off from every one of these developments, and their transitions were the worst on the continent.

In October 1943 Élie Lescot toured Montreal, Ottawa, Washington, New York and Havana, and stayed at the White House, where Franklin Roosevelt called him a very old friend and talked about turning the Môle into a free port. Edward Stettinius put American spending on Haiti between 1938 and 1946 at forty million dollars. On 19 April 1944 the National Assembly rewrote the constitution: no elections until peace had been signed with every enemy power down to Bulgaria, the presidential term lengthened from five years to seven, and Lescot continued in office until 15 May 1951. His decrees began to open with the royal plural, Nous, Élie Lescot. In his address of 15 May 1945 he said his people were naive and poor, that they wanted the Four Freedoms Roosevelt had proclaimed, and that they would receive them once they had learned how to use them. A plot in the Garde was broken up in July, and seven enlisted men were shot at Fort Dimanche.

Herbert Macauley founded the Nigerian National Democratic Party and put anticolonial argument on a territorial footing, addressing Nigeria as a country rather than a set of localities. In 1936 younger men who found Macauley too cautious broke away and formed the Nigerian Youth Movement. Their demand was complete autonomy within the British empire, with a united Nigerian nation to follow. They drew wide support for a few years. In 1941 the movement tore itself apart over rivalry between Yoruba and Igbo members, each side convinced the other meant to dominate whatever state emerged. The same problem showed elsewhere. In Uganda much of the protest was aimed at the dominant position of the Ganda rather than at the British, and the standing quarrel over Buganda and its kabaka promised trouble for any future national settlement. What these movements shared was youth. Educated, mobile, often both, young Africans were forging the new political identities, and they carried their fathers' quarrels into them.