Mau Mau is beaten in the field and wins the argument in London

In West Africa constitutional change had been shifting power toward African representatives. In Kenya the British treated white settlers as the territory's future and designed multiracial councils that guaranteed those settlers a majority. Rural violence began in the late 1940s and by the early 1950s included the killing of prosperous Kikuyu as well as white farmers. The fighters were mostly Kikuyu, with Embu and Meru among them, bound to each other by oaths, drawn from squatters pushed off land and from the urban poor, and operating in the forests and hills of southern-central Kenya. In 1952 Britain declared a state of emergency, arrested the leadership of the Kenya African Union including Jomo Kenyatta, and brought in the army. Villages were targeted and indiscriminate sweeps put thousands of Kikuyu into detention camps. The brutality drove more young men into the forest, while Kikuyu loyalists were armed as a home guard. The revolt was suppressed by 1956 and never built a base beyond the Kikuyu, and the world read it through British reporting as tribal savagery. By the middle of the decade officials were questioning whether the settlers belonged at the centre of Kenyan politics.

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.

Every morning at six, as the light reached the Caribbean, a young Haitian journalist named Raymond Alcide Joseph went on the air from a New York station with news of Haiti in Kreyol and sharp jokes at the expense of the president. Haitians called the programme six o'clock mass, and few people with a transistor missed it. Joseph spoke for the Coalition Haitienne, an exile group backed by Paul Magloire that stayed away from invasions, having watched the farce in the Florida Keys in 1966 where a landing party was stopped by federal agents while a television crew paid for the story and helped write the script. The Voice of America had dropped its Kreyol service on instructions from the White House, so for three years Joseph's Radio Vonvon was the only competition for the two hours a day Rene Depestre broadcast from Havana. Duvalier obtained jamming equipment licensed for export by the United States and used it against Vonvon. He left Havana alone.

Constitutions in 1942 and 1946 allowed direct elections to a legislative council in the Gold Coast, which made organised parties worth forming. The United Gold Coast Convention was founded in 1947 under J. B. Danquah, a lawyer from a small professional elite. It was moderate, it stayed inside the law, and it worked by persuading colonial officials that reform was reasonable. The British were content with it. Younger activists with no property and no patience found nothing there for them. Kwame Nkrumah came back from the United States in 1947 to work for the Convention, having spent years in pan-Africanist politics abroad, and the rioting and shortages of those months made Danquah's method look useless to him. He left in 1949 and founded the Convention People's Party. Its method, taken in part from Gandhi in India, was called positive action: strikes and boycotts, non-violent, and willing to break colonial law. The British ran out of patience and arrested Nkrumah in 1950 along with several other leaders, on the theory that jailing a man puts away his argument with him.