Ghana becomes the first independent state in sub-Saharan Africa

After the disturbances in the Gold Coast, the British appointed the Coussey Commission to find out what had gone wrong in their model colony. It recommended more African representation and constitutional reform, and officials hoped this would strengthen the moderate elite of the United Gold Coast Convention. They presented Kwame Nkrumah as a dangerous radical and J. B. Danquah as the safe alternative. In the 1951 elections Nkrumah's Convention People's Party won heavily, and the British released him from prison and worked with him because there was nothing else to do. He became leader of government business and pushed decolonisation along steadily, arguing in private that a settlement was the only guard against disorder while speaking in public as a radical. Internal self-government came in 1954 and full independence in 1957, the first anywhere in sub-Saharan Africa. Two things produced it: mass protest that forced constitutional concessions, and a campaign of strikes and boycotts that made governing expensive while giving the troops nobody to shoot at. The habit of one commanding figure standing for a whole movement shaped what these new states became.

The Ligue Feminine d'Action Sociale and its allies spent years pressing the case that Haitian women should hold the same political and civil rights as men, and obtained that recognition from the constituent assembly of 1950. In a speech to the assembly on 15 November 1950, Dantes Bellegarde told the chamber that what was wanted was to bring into the direction and management of public affairs an element that had stayed sound, and that by politics he meant education, health, work, hygiene, housing, and help for the poor and the disabled. He then made the argument that carried. Haitians had won their independence in conditions unique in the history of nations, abolished slavery by their own strength with nobody's help, and forced men of every race to recognise them as equals in rights and dignity. Haitians who now denied women their claims, he said, had placed themselves exactly where the colonists stood who kept black people in servitude on grounds of inferiority.

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.

The best reconstruction available puts the arrival of the human immunodeficiency virus in Haiti at about 1966, carried by one infected traveller from central Africa. Nobody knew. It spread quietly for fifteen years, and Haiti became one of the first countries outside Africa with a substantial epidemic. In 1981 the United States Centers for Disease Control listed Haitians as a risk group beside homosexuals, haemophiliacs and heroin users, which is how a whole nationality came to be classified as a disease. The listing was withdrawn in 1985. By then Haitian immigrants in the United States had lost jobs and housing over it, blood banks turned them away, and what remained of Haitian tourism collapsed. In the same year the virus arrived, Graham Greene published The Comedians, a novel set in Duvalier's Port-au-Prince that told readers abroad what the regime was, filmed the following year. Haiti became known to the world through a book about its dictator and a diagnosis.