Looking backward from the 1960s, it is easy to see why the story of post-war politics is often told as if everything led to a single, inevitable outcome: national independence. It is more difficult to see what somebody in 1945 or 1947 – say, a young, politically-minded African returning from higher education abroad – aspired to and expected to attain. But what about a family who had just settled in a mining town after years of periodic separations, and who missed the familiar sociability of village life but perhaps not the constraints of their elders, and hoped that their children could obtain an education? Or a farmer, selling his cocoa in the booming world market, aware that colonial marketing boards were holding onto much of what his crops earned, and wondering if his children would continue to help with the harvest?

Africans faced the constraints and the humiliations of a colonial state, but they were, above all, human beings trying to survive, form relationships, find opportunities, and make sense of the world. They cannot be reduced to stick figures in a drama with two actors, colonizer and colonized, or a story with one plot line – the struggle for the nation. What is striking about the years after the war was how much seemed possible.