Europe invests harder in Africa exactly as Africans demand it leave

The war produced demands for independence, and it also produced stronger colonial states. For Britain, France, Portugal and Belgium the African territories mattered more after 1945 than they had before, and interventionist policy was pushed with new energy. Laissez-faire economics had governed until the early 1930s, the depression brought state management in its place, and the war settled the argument in favour of intervention. Africa's contribution to European recovery was judged essential, which meant European governments running colonial economies directly. In the British territories this is called the second colonial occupation, running from about 1945 into the early 1950s. The postwar lines were drawn accordingly. African nationalism became a serious force at the precise moment colonial administrations became most determined to invest in, develop and defend what they held. In many places colonial rule had lasted little more than two generations. The empires assembled in the 1890s were meant to last considerably longer than they did, and by the 1950s London and Paris had worked out that economic influence could outlive political administration.

On 11 January 1946 Elie Lescot was forced out of the presidency by a military coup in which Paul Magloire took the leading part. His removal closed the period, running from the start of the United States occupation in 1915, in which the light skinned elite governed Haiti without serious challenge. Several grievances arrived at once. Peasants had lost land to wartime agricultural schemes. Black intellectuals had not forgiven the campaign against Vodou carried out with the Catholic church. The dealings of the Lescot family were widely known. And a war fought against fascism made a president who ruled by decree hard to defend. Dumarsais Estime, a black politician associated with noirisme, was elected to a six year term and took office in August, the first black head of state since Vilbrun Guillaume Sam in 1915. A new constitution was promulgated. The argument Jean Price-Mars had put in a book in 1928, that Haiti should recognise itself as an African country, now held the government.

On 29 June 1950 the United States played England at Belo Horizonte in the World Cup. England had some of the best players in the world and the American side were part timers. The only goal of the match was a diving header by Joe Gaetjens, born in Port-au-Prince, who had moved to New York in 1947 and who turned out for the Americans under a rule admitting men who had declared an intention to become citizens. It is still the most famous upset the tournament has produced. Gaetjens went home to Haiti afterwards and ran a dry cleaning business. In July 1964 the Tonton Macoutes took him away and he was never seen again. His brothers had joined an exile movement against Francois Duvalier. No charge was laid and no body was recovered. The man who scored the goal Americans still talk about was killed by the secret police of the country he was born in.

A farmer at Ulster Spring in Trelawney Parish made brown sugar and drove it to the Brown's Town market in Jamaica in his own mule drawn dray, along with yams, bananas and breadfruit. Local women bought his wet sugar by the tin and sold it on by the pound, clearing ten to sixteen shillings a tin. They took the sugar on credit, dug and weighed it out through the day, and paid him at the close in proportion to what they had sold. Whatever was left went into the market storeroom at twopence a tin and was sold the following market day, when he collected the rest of his money. The price he received was fixed at the moment of sale and did not move with the next week's supply, so the retailer alone carried the risk of a fall. Demand for the sugar dropped when mangoes were plentiful. The arrangement worked for sugar because sugar keeps, which yams and breadfruit do not.