Where the colonial power refused to talk, the wars began

Portugal did not negotiate. In Angola, Mozambique and Guinea-Bissau the administration hardened its racial policy through the 1950s and left nationalists no route except force. The MPLA was founded in Angola in 1956 and rode a peasant rising of the early 1960s against forced labour and compulsory cotton growing, practices the British and French colonies had given up years before. FRELIMO formed in Mozambique in 1962 and began a long war of its own. The worst of these wars was in Algeria, which French opinion counted as a province of the mother country. Reform schemes were half hearted and colonial officials sabotaged them. Younger nationalists set up the Organisation Secrete in 1948 to prepare armed struggle, and when it collapsed a handful of its members founded the Front de Liberation Nationale. The FLN went to war in November 1954 and fought on two fronts, guerrilla operations inside Algeria and diplomacy outside it at the United Nations and among the non aligned and pan Arab states.

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 Gold Coast was the colony British officials pointed to when they wanted to show that colonial rule worked. Between 1946 and 1950 it stopped cooperating. Cocoa farmers resented the West African Produce Marketing Board, which set the price they were paid for their crop. When the authorities ordered about two and a half million cocoa trees destroyed in 1946 and 1947 to halt an outbreak of swollen shoot disease, farmers read it as a government willing to ruin them without asking. In the towns the post-war slump brought shortages, high prices and restrictions that favoured Europeans, wages fell behind prices, and unemployment threw together two groups with the same grievance: young men leaving school with no work, and soldiers home from the war who found no reward for their service. A boycott of European trading companies in 1948 forced those firms to lower prices. Ex-servicemen marched on government buildings, rioting followed, and European commercial offices were attacked. The disturbances were small beside those in other territories. They were enough to make London start talking to nationalist politicians.