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African Miracle, African Mirage: Transnational Politics and the Paradox of Modernization in Ivory Coast
African Miracle, African Mirage: Transnational Politics and the Paradox of Modernization in Ivory Coast
African Miracle, African Mirage: Transnational Politics and the Paradox of Modernization in Ivory Coast
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African Miracle, African Mirage: Transnational Politics and the Paradox of Modernization in Ivory Coast

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Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, Ivory Coast was touted as an African miracle, a poster child for modernization and the ways that Western aid and multinational corporations would develop the continent. At the same time, Marxist scholars—most notably Samir Amin—described the capitalist activity in Ivory Coast as empty, unsustainable, and incapable of bringing real change to the lives of ordinary people. To some extent, Amin’s criticisms were validated when, in the 1980s, the Ivorian economy collapsed.

In African Miracle, African Mirage, Abou B. Bamba incorporates economics, political science, and history to craft a bold, transnational study of the development practices and intersecting colonial cultures that continue to shape Ivory Coast today. He considers French, American, and Ivorian development discourses in examining the roles of hydroelectric projects and the sugar, coffee, and cocoa industries in the country’s boom and bust. In so doing, he brings the agency of Ivorians themselves to the fore in a way not often seen in histories of development. Ultimately, he concludes that the “maldevelopment” evident by the mid-1970s had less to do with the Ivory Coast’s “insufficiently modern” citizens than with the conflicting missions of French and American interests within the context of an ever-globalizing world.

LanguageEnglish
Release dateNov 15, 2016
ISBN9780821445822
African Miracle, African Mirage: Transnational Politics and the Paradox of Modernization in Ivory Coast
Author

Abou B. Bamba

Abou B. Bamba is an associate professor of history and Africana studies at Gettysburg College.

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    African Miracle, African Mirage - Abou B. Bamba

    African Miracle, African Mirage

    NEW AFRICAN HISTORIES

    SERIES EDITORS: JEAN ALLMAN, ALLEN ISAACMAN, AND DEREK R. PETERSON

    Books in this series are published with support from the Ohio University Center for International Studies.

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    Sarah Van Beurden, Authentically African

    Giacomo Macola, The Gun in Central Africa

    Lynn Schler, Nation on Board

    Julie MacArthur, Cartography and the Political Imagination

    Abou B. Bamba, African Miracle, African Mirage

    Daniel Magaziner, The Art of Life in South Africa

    African Miracle, African Mirage

    Transnational Politics and the Paradox of Modernization in Ivory Coast

    Abou B. Bamba

    OHIO UNIVERSITY PRESS

    ATHENS

    Ohio University Press, Athens, Ohio 45701

    ohioswallow.com

    © 2016 by Ohio University Press

    All rights reserved

    To obtain permission to quote, reprint, or otherwise reproduce or distribute material from Ohio University Press publications, please contact our rights and permissions department at (740) 593-1154 or (740) 593-4536 (fax).

    Parts of chapters 2, 3, and 4 were published previously, though largely in different forms. I extend my thanks to the publishers and editors of the earlier pieces for permission to reuse them: Taylor & Francis Ltd. is acknowledged for permission to reuse sections of Mémoires épistémiques et pouvoir d’experts dans une postcolonie africaine: Le cas de l’usage des savoirs africanistes par l’ORSTOM en Côte d’Ivoire, Revue canadienne d’études africaines/Canadian Journal of African Studies 44, no. 1 (Summer 2010). C. H. Beck is appreciated for permission to reuse Triangulating a Modernization Experiment: The United States, France, and the Making of the Kossou Dam in Central Ivory Coast, Journal of Modern European History 8, no. 1 (April 2010). Finally, I thank Lorella Tosone for the permission to reuse Complicare una ‘Risposta Molto Semplice’: L’Assistenza allo sviluppo degli Stati Uniti e il ‘Miracolo Economico’ della Costa d’Avorio, 1960–1975, published in Gli auiti allo sviluppo nelle relazioni internazionali del secondo dopoguerre: Esperienze a confronto, ed. Luciano Tosi and Lorella Tosone (Padova: Cedam, 2006).

    Printed in the United States of America

    Ohio University Press books are printed on acid-free paper ™

    26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16      5 4 3 2 1

    Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

    Names: Bamba, Abou B., 1972– author.

    Title: African miracle, African mirage : transnational politics and the paradox of modernization in Ivory Coast / Abou B. Bamba.

    Other titles: New African histories series.

    Description: Athens, Ohio : Ohio University Press, 2016. | Series: New African histories | Includes bibliographical references and index.

    Identifiers: LCCN 2016025560| ISBN 9780821422380 (hc : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780821422397 (pb : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780821445822 (pdf)

    Subjects: LCSH: Economic development—Côte d’Ivoire. | Côte d’Ivoire—Foreign economic relations—United States. | Côte d’Ivoire—Foreign economic relations—France. | United States—Foreign economic relations—Côte d’Ivoire. | France—Foreign economic relations—Côte d’Ivoire. | Côte d’Ivoire—Economic conditions—20th century. | Côte d’Ivoire—History—20th century.

    Classification: LCC HC1025 .B36 2016 | DDC 330.9666805—dc23

    LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016025560

    For Ian & for Grace Matchenie

    Contents

    List of Illustrations

    Preface and Acknowledgments

    Selected List of Abbreviations

    Introduction

    PART I: THE POSTWAR YEARS

    Chapter 1. Becoming an Attractive Colony

    Chapter 2. Triangulating Colonial Modernization

    PART II: THE DECADE OF DEVELOPMENT

    Chapter 3. (Re)Framing Postcolonial Development

    Chapter 4. Energizing the Economic Miracle

    Chapter 5. Tapping the Riches of a Backward Region

    PART III: THE FATE OF MODERNIZATION

    Chapter 6. Investing in Modernization’s Last Frontier

    Chapter 7. Crushing Dreams of Modernity

    Conclusion

    Notes

    Bibliography

    Index

    ILLUSTRATIONS

    MAPS

    I.1. Ivory Coast and French infrastructural development, circa 1930

    1.1. Key FIDES operations in colonial Ivory Coast

    1.2. ORSTOM’s global reach

    4.1. Kossou and the reconstruction of the built environment

    5.1. D&R plan for the Southwest

    5.2. Urban plan of San Pedro

    6.1. Locations of the Ivorian sugar complexes

    7.1. Lower Bandama and its estuary at Grand-Lahou

    FIGURES

    1.1. Value and relative importance of Ivorian cocoa, coffee, and wood exports, 1939–1956

    1.2. Ivorian share of the trade of French West Africa

    2.1. Kouamé Binzème, circa 1951

    2.2. Hôtel de ville, Abidjan, circa 1956

    4.1. Ivorian energy consumption, 1952–1965

    TABLE

    6.1. Economic diplomacy of Ivorian sugar complexes

    Preface and Acknowledgments

    This book is about the not-so-distant past of Ivory Coast. It is an attempt to shed light on the political economy that informed how the country became an African miracle of sorts in the three decades that preceded the 1980s. It opens a window onto those years when agricultural production went up, deep-sea ports were constructed, hydroelectric dams were built, and an apparent welfare state was instituted; all of which left an impressive paper trail. Thereafter, the phenomenal economic growth of the country seemingly came to a halt, a situation that comforted the predictions of those who had early on argued that the spectacular growth of the Ivorian economy was built on shaky ground. At the current conjuncture where talks on a new Ivorian economic miracle abound, I want to provide a historical analysis that interrogates the past and moves the country’s international history beyond the familiar terrain of the Françafrique. This is achieved through a transnational history approach that attends to both local and global forces to understand the making and remaking of the so-called Glorious Years of Ivory Coast.

    From the outset, I want to make it clear that this is not a work in economics. Rather, I reflect historically on the larger social life of some economic ideas. In fact, the project of this book began as a doctoral dissertation in history. Its primary goal in that first iteration was to provide a theoretically informed historical critique of US-led development efforts in late colonial and postcolonial Ivory Coast. My initial inclination was to offer a typical bilateral history of the foreign relations between the United States and Ivory Coast over the latter’s modernization. But a new and creative look at the legacy of France’s colonial past in Ivory Coast, the US Cold War crusades, and France’s neocolonial projects in Francophone Africa soon turned the notion of a bilateral relationship between Abidjan and Washington into a dynamic triad and more.

    From this perspective, then, one of the issues that this project aimed to address and still relates to is the triangulated conceptualizations of development in Ivory Coast, the United States, and France. While the US perspective on these conceptualizations will be of prime concern, a look at the way Ivorian elite and French colonial bureaucrats and later coopérants conceived of the modernization of Ivory Coast will also be explored. In effect, given the historical French (neo)colonial presence in Ivory Coast, it was important to inquire into how France perceived US involvement in Ivorian development. Were there attempts on the part of the French to collaborate with the Americans, or were they out to sabotage, as some US sources suggest, American efforts in Ivory Coast development projects? Moreover, how did the Ivorian elite react to both France and the United States as providers of developmental assistance and the ultimate example of modernity at work? Did they have their own alternative ways of undertaking development? What input (if any) did the people involved in the implementation of modernization projects bring to development as experienced in Ivory Coast? How did the Ivorian people who were supposed to receive the benefits of development negotiate its inherent regime of discipline?

    These are some of the issues that the book has set itself to address. In my attempt to provide answers to the questions posed above, I have adopted an approach that is informed not only by diplomatic/transnational history, historical geography, and the anthropology of knowledge production in its interaction with society and social change. My analysis also draws inspiration from the social and critical studies regarding the moral economy of developmentalism. Moreover, I have purposefully engaged Ivorian (and African) scholars and intellectuals whose voices, as a rule, rarely find their way into the mainstream debates on political economy and its transnational history. Much more could have been said, as I sketch out in the conclusion of this book. But it is my hope that what has been initiated here will inspire others and that we will pay a more critical attention to the very production of knowledge regarding the Ivorian miracle.

    .   .   .

    A work of this magnitude could not have been completed without the assistance of many people and institutions from Ivory Coast, France, and the United States. I would like to acknowledge the generosity of many of them: First, my heartfelt thanks to the University of Abidjan-Cocody, the US Department of State, the French Ministry of Culture, and Georgia State University for granting me fellowships that allowed me to initiate this project as a doctoral dissertation. Later, the Kennedy Library Foundation, the LBJ Library Foundation, Hobart and William Smith Colleges, and Gettysburg College offered short-term grants that covered expenses to conduct further research and deepen the findings of the project and ultimately turn the dissertation into a book. In tending to such work, I benefited from the assistance of many archivists and librarians across the Atlantic pond.

    For their diligence and help, I want to thank the librarians of the Humanities Library (Bibliothèque de la FLASH) at the University of Abidjan-Cocody (Ivory Coast). In the United States, where the manuscript took its current shape, I am grateful to Sharon Kelly (JFK Library), Jennifer Cuddback (LBJ Library), and Dwight Strandberg (Eisenhower Library), as well as to the many librarians at Georgia State University, at Hobart and William Smith Colleges, and at Gettysburg College who expedited many of my interlibrary loan requests for French books (or rather, books in French). In France, I benefited from the professionalism of many: Mme. Marie-Madeleine Burckle introduced me to the archive of the Office de la Recherche Scientifique et Technique Outre-Mer (ORSTOM), now Institut de Recherche pour le Développement (IRD). When she was on leave, Raphäelle Aviat processed my requests, and, going beyond the call of duty, she opened new hexagonal spaces for me. Her friendship and those of Estelle Mathieu and Marie-Aline Perreira at IRD are most appreciated. In Nantes, Audrey Loirat not only hosted me on my various trips to the Centre des Archives Diplomatiques but was also my guide in the picturesque terroir of Britanny and the Pays de la Loire. In Aix-en-Provence, I made a crash landing in Brima Samaké’s university dorm. I thank him for hosting me and making my sojourn most enjoyable. Appreciations are also extended to Evelyn Camara at Centre des Archives d’Outre-Mer (CAOM).

    While on the Chateaubriand Fellowship in Paris, my path crossed with those of many researchers whose assistance was most helpful: I extend my gratitude to Hyeonju Kim for introducing me to the various French schools of translation studies and sharing her own insights into (post) colonial cultural translation and the issues of traduction relais and dubbing; Elisée Coulibaly for helping me navigate the landscape of French Africanism; Mohamed Camara for the weekly chats on the sociology of development at the Maison Lucien Paye (Cité Internationale de Paris), and Desiré Médégnon for our stimulating debates on African philosophy; Iván Merino Horta for the thought-provoking discussions in the Parisian parks and cafés about anthropology, transnationalism, and postcolonial theory. I also appreciate all those former and still-active Orstomians as well as their colleagues at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) who shared their Ivorian experiences with me. In particular, I thank Jean-Pierre Dozon, Alfred Schwartz, Hélène Perrot, Ariane Deluz, Jean-Louis Boutillier, Marc Augé, Jean-Pierre Chauveau, Patrice Roederer, Georges Balandier, Chantal Blanc-Pamard, Philippe Couty, Jean-Loup Amselle, and Catherine Aubertin.

    In the United States, I equally benefited from the collaboration of many senior Africanists, all of whom I am indebted to: I thank William Zartman, Immanuel Wallerstein, and the late Aristide Zolberg for their acceptance to share with me their field-trip experiences to Ivory Coast. Along these lines, I extend my gratitude to Dénis Zunon and Amadou Koné, who shared their experience of the Ivorian intellectual milieu of the 1970s. While the book relies mainly on written records, my interviews with Ivorian intellectuals, France’s ORSTOM researchers, and US Africanists as research partners were very rewarding.

    In Atlanta, where I wrote the earlier iteration of this work, many people deserve a note of appreciation, including Mike Stevens and his wife, Debbie; Eric Kleist; Jennifer Dickey, Aubrey Underwood; Dana Wiggins; Dexter Blackman; Robert Woodrum and his wife, Amanda; Edie Riehm; John Farris; Charles Perrin; Laurel Koontz; Veronica Holmes; and Andy Riesinger. In particular, I thank Fakhri Haggani and Shannon Bontrager for their friendship, sharp comments, and critical engagement with my ideas; Heather Lucas for her camaraderie and for proofreading various parts of my earlier drafts; and Carrie Whitney for guiding my first steps in anthropological literature as well as keeping the light of poetry and providing prompt inputs whenever I was lost in translation. Appreciations are equally in order for Albert G. Ouattara, Siendou Konaté, Tim Stoneman, DjongaYomatété, Wonderful Dzimiri, Taka Ono, Ravi Ghadge, and Gail Powers for their timely cheer-ups.

    A tout seigneur tout honneur. I extend a heartfelt thank-you to the members of my dissertation committee: Dr. Mohammed H. Ali, Dr. Emanuela Guano, Dr. Christine Skwiot, and Dr. Ian C. Fletcher, without whom this work might not have reached fruition. A special appreciation goes to Ian, not only for the impeccable supervision of my doctoral experience, but also for his friendship and the provision of a model of integrity and a truly committed scholar-activist. While I know I cannot live up to his model, I truly hope that someday his selfless commitment to his students will be acknowledged by all. Thanks also to Professor Odile Goerg, Dr. Yael S. Fletcher, Dr. Larry Youngs, and Dr. Jeremy Crampton, whose insights, advice, and assistance helped me improve many a point. Along these lines, I extend my appreciation to Dr. Denise Davidson, Dr. Jared Poley, Dr. Duane Corpus, and Dr. Katie Harris for making me keep alive the European dimensions of my research; and to Dr. Michele Reid for her informal mentoring at GSU and beyond.

    In 2008, I left GSU and took up a teaching post at Hobart and William Smith Colleges. There, in upstate New York, I was fortunate to find colleagues who generously gave their time and friendship that helped me initiate the revision of the dissertation in view of turning it into a book. In particular, I thank Lisa Yoshikawa, Lowell Bloss, George Joseph, Thelma Pinto, Darren Magee, Suzanne McNally, Kanaté Daouda, Judy Mahoney, and the late Maureen Flynn. At Gettysburg College, which I joined in 2010, numerous people equally offered assistance that deserves mentioning. My appreciation to my colleagues in the Department of History: Bill Bowman, Michael Birkner, Tim Shannon, Magdalena Sánchez, Barbara Sommer, Dina Lowy, Pete Carmichael, Allen Guelzo, Karen Pinto, and Becca Barth. In the Africana Studies Program, I thank Jen Bloomquist, Scott Hancock, Paul Austerlitz, Linus Nyiwul, Hakim Williams, McKinley Melton, Florence Jurney, Thomas Jurney, and Suzanne Gockowski. Colleagues from other departments and programs provided additional support, including Emelio Betances; Verónica Calvillo; Kerr Thompson and his wife, Susan; Alvaro Kaempfer and his wife, Malinda; Ryan Dodd; Tsu-ting Tim Lin; Kerry Wallach; and Jess Firshein. A special blagodaria to Radost (Radi) Rangelova for not only reading searchingly the entire manuscript, but also for accepting to accompany me during so many research trips for this project, for offering constant moral support at home and abroad, and for teaching me so much more. . . . Radi: without your love, companionship, and bighearted encouragements, this book may have not seen the light of the day.

    Many more people helped in other capacities: Julien Brou Kouamé provided timely technical support for the numerous illustrations that dot this work. Ibra Sene and especially Cheick Kaling helped with the research at the Archives Nationales du Sénégal. Monica van Beusekom, Jeanne M. Toungara, Phil Muelhenberg, Greg Mann, Joe Downing, Emelio Betances, Bill Bowman, and Larry Grubbs read various chapters and provided insightful comments. When the manuscript landed at the desk of Ohio University Press, Gill Berchowitz and Jean Allman received it enthusiastically. I thank them, together with the other editors of the New African Histories Series, for the confidence they placed in the project. My appreciation is also extended to the reviewers and copyeditor of the manuscript for helping me clarify murky points and thus improve my overall argument. Last but not least, I thank my cousin Moussa Bamba for hosting me whenever I was doing research in the Greater Washington, DC, area. Along the same line, I acknowledge the generosity of Sindou Soumahoro, Moussa Coulibaly, Marc Papé, and Bertin Kouadio. My final thank-you goes to my family in Ivory Coast: my mom, Mayantié Chérif; and my siblings, Massiami, Amara, Mouandou, Adama, and Yahya. I am indeed grateful to you for the constant support and timely prop-ups you provided so that the project could be finished and not turn out to be a dereke deni kan bah.

    Selected Abbreviations

    Introduction

    So before we encounter what was or was not modern we are left with an initial problem of specifying what it is or was that could at any point be regarded traditional. If that is defined, as it has been by some, as involving continuity, repetition and relative lack of choice, we would have to conclude that there had never [. . .] been such a moment or such a place in that extensive West African History for which we have anything like substantiated evidence. That which might appear to be traditional to an uninformed stranger was and is firstly subject to incessant change and it was also the product of generations of imaginative cultural bricoleurs.

    —Richard Rathbone, West Africa (2002)

    WHAT COULD BE MORE FITTING in opening a book on (post)colonial modernization in Africa than the reflections of Richard Rathbone, one of the doyens of African studies of our times? Rightly as the British Africanist puts it, there is a rather long tradition of people’s engagement with modernity in the history of West Africa.¹ It would seem even more appropriate to flesh out such a claim in this introductory chapter and show, for instance, the many micropolitics of domestication of the modern in this part of the world that seemingly sits (and has always lived) outside the realm of modernity; to substantiate that Africans indeed are key agents in the transformation of their societies; to demonstrate that the people of the African continent were present at the birth of modernity. However, I have chosen to proceed with a different vignette—one that emphasizes not only the significance of the mid- to late twentieth century in the history of modernization worldwide but, more importantly, the pervasiveness of American factors and the frictions they raised in the unfolding of developmentalism in Francophone Africa. Perhaps a brief foray into the memoir of David E. Lilienthal, one of the omnipresent faces of the American modernization paradigm in the twentieth century and a character whom we shall meet episodically in this book, will highlight this point succinctly.²

    In March 1961, the American Lilienthal, a man whose name was intimately associated with the world-acclaimed Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), paid a visit to Abidjan—capital of the newly independent state of Ivory Coast. Unlike most Americans who had ventured to Africa before decolonization and immediately thereafter, Lilienthal was neither on a safari nor on a scholarly field-trip expedition. Rather, the man, then past his sixties, had come to the West African country to add the finishing touches to a contract that the Ivorian government was negotiating with Development and Resources Corporation (D&R), the transnational firm that he had set up when he retired from the public sector. Although consulting for the mineral development of the country, Lilienthal—as former director of the TVA—could not help but visit Ivory Coast’s first hydroelectric dam. And in the March 18 entry of his journal, the assiduous diary keeper noted:

    Visited the [Ayamé I] dam about noon—a medium-sized concrete gravity and earth fill, total capacity about 30,000 kw; only one of the two generators now being required. When we arrived the only person on duty was an intelligent young African, at the power-control board. The French technicians, quite a group, some of them students, were at the canteen having an apéritif. After lunch, with the engineer in charge, a Frenchman, we returned to the power station; again the only man around the place was a tall, friendly, handsome Ivorian.

    Said the homesick French engineer: We can’t trust the Africans with so complicated a thing as a dam and powerhouse; they must always have someone watching over them.

    Nuts.

    While he was saying this he and his quite beautiful bride of three months (from Nancy in Lorraine) were giving us an elaborate and delicious luncheon, served with elegance in the heart of the forest. Down in the powerhouse the men who couldn’t be trusted and had to be watched every minute were tending to the production of electricity. A sense of indispensability and superiority is an essential of being a good colonialist.³

    Few readers of Lilienthal’s memoirs would have missed his invective against the French. In the United States, where he published his multivolume opus, France was indeed increasingly seen as an anachronistic colonial power that refused to abide by the principles of a postcolonial new world order. With the war in Algeria still raging, public opinion in America was ripe for French bashing and mudslinging. In this particular context, and despite its hyperbolic tone, Lilienthal’s critical observation on Franco-Ivorian relations struck an important chord with the American reading public.

    Even without the history and legacy of French bashing in the United States, not many scholars would question the claim that French-style decolonization was like a drama without an epilogue: while the collapse of the empire had forced the French authorities to redirect their disciplinary gaze toward the colonization of everyday life in the metropole, France designed its departure from many of its overseas possessions so as to perpetuate their dependency.⁵ In the case of sub-Saharan Africa, this was all the more possible since historically and epistemologically the makers of French foreign policy remained convinced that black Africans were inherently inferior. More specifically, they considered that their former colonial subjects characteristically and permanently needed to be dependent on France for their survival.

    It was in this orientalist context that various bilateral defense agreements (accords de défense) were signed with countries like Senegal, Mauritania, Madagascar, Togo, Central African Republic, Gabon, Ivory Coast, Congo, Chad, and Dahomey. The neocolonial design of the French state in Africa was further entrenched when its Fonds d’Investissement pour le Développement Economique et Social (FIDES) and the Caisse Centrale de la France d’Outre-Mer (CCFOM) were transformed into the Fonds d’Aide et de Coopération (FAC) and the Caisse Centrale de Coopération Economique (CCCE). With largely cosmetic legal changes, these institutions emerged as France’s prime channels for assistance to its former colonies. In fact, while the French government resorted to other conduits for its cooperation with Africa, the FAC and CCCE remained by far the most effective means to perpetuate a French colonial type of developmentalist governmentality.

    In light of perceived Franco-African geopolitical intimacy that smacked of paternalism and neocolonialism, Lilienthal’s critique thus hit right on target—especially with reference to Ivory Coast and President Félix Houphouët-Boigny, whom the Martinique-born scholar and activist Frantz Fanon had dismissed as early as 1958 as the traveling salesman of French colonialism.⁸ Other observers pinpointed the same issue, including French artist-scholar Michel Leiris, who visited Ivory Coast in 1962. He, too, highlighted how the country had remained French, despite the formal proclamation of independence: In Abidjan, the surrealist poet/ethnographer noted, no street has been renamed, adding deploringly, One can still read on numerous plates the names of [French] governors.⁹ In regard to the denunciation of France’s relations to the Ivorian people, then, Lilienthal was in good company.

    The lingering hegemony of the French in postcolonial Ivory Coast did not appall only the former TVA executive or the French surrealist poet. From US career diplomats to American investors and journalists posted in Abidjan, most American visitors seemed to be agreed on the view that Houphouët-Boigny’s country was indeed in French hands.¹⁰ And there was much truth in these perceptions. Yet it is part of my argument that French control in postcolonial Ivory Coast was not all-encompassing. Beginning in the postwar period, the United States and other global forces had begun appearing in unoccupied interstices. Consequently, they were transforming what had been a largely bilateral Franco-Ivorian relationship into something akin to a multilateral encounter. While colonialism had been replaced by a ‘neocolonial’ postcolonial world, especially in the aftermath of French-style decolonization, I suggest that such a world was increasingly a globalized ecumene where the allure of American-inflected modernity loomed large, and accordingly it attracted many enthusiastic modernizers in extant or soon-to-be postcolonial nations in the Global South.¹¹

    African Miracle, African Mirage is an attempt to substantiate this point as it focuses on the transnational struggle to turn Ivory Coast into a showcase of capitalist modernization. The narrative strategically immerses readers in the euphoric years that, in the words of one scholar, raised Ivory Coast to the semiperiphery of the world system.¹² Such a relatively privileged position attracted many footloose historical actors, including development experts, social scientists, and foreign job-seekers anxious to tap into the exceptional wealth of the country. In this book, I explore the making and ultimate unmaking of Ivory Coast’s Thirty Glorious Years, the country’s postwar economic boom that spanned the period of the 1950s to the early 1980s.¹³

    Unlike much of the recent scholarly work on Third World development in the post-1945 era, the book underscores that the struggle to provide Ivory Coast with foreign aid and developmental assistance was not between American and Soviet ideologues. Although the global Cold War was never off the radar of some of the historical actors, I argue that the main struggle in the arena of late colonial and postcolonial development in this particular African setting was, in many ways, among French development workers, American modernizers, and Ivorian enthusiasts for rapid social change. In numerous chapters of this book, I elaborate on the contours of this struggle and other related issues in the entangled geographies of Ivorian modernization.

    For now, I want to offer some contextual background, beginning with a discussion of the establishment of Ivory Coast and the early history of capitalist development in the colony before the Second World War. I follow this overview with an analysis of the triangulated nature of the politics of development in the late colonial and postcolonial periods, in a section that reviews and problematizes the rise and eventual crisis of the Ivorian economic miracle. Then I define what emerged in the 1950s as a French policy of dubbing American-inflected modernization practices, tracing the origin of dubbing as a sociocultural practice to contain the rise of the American Century—defined here as the informal US empire of the twentieth century. Next, I provide an epistemological discussion of the method and sources that I used to write a transnational history of the Ivorian modernization drive from the end of the Second World War until the late 1970s. In the last section, I outline the main articulations of the book as a whole.

    FOUNDING A MODERN IVORY COAST

    Ivory Coast officially became a French colony in March 1893. In anticipation of this development and hoping to outcompete their British rivals already present in the nearby Gold Coast, the French had gradually signed protectorate treaties with a number of chiefs in the coastal communities from Assinie (East) to Grand-Bereby (West).¹⁴ As in many parts of Africa before the Berlin Conference of 1884–1885, these treaties meant little to the local societies. Regardless, the French military and navy officers used them to extend France’s influence in the region. As a result, their offensive provided France with a number of forts and outposts in Ivory Coast. In a process that echoed historical development in other parts of Africa, however, it was only after the Berlin Conference that the French would consolidate their control over the territory. By the end of the First World War, the pacification of the last remaining resisters to a French imperial takeover had been achieved under the iron fist of Governor Gabriel Angoulvant. Thereafter, the colonial state began the policy of mise en valeur (development/exploitation) under the doctrine of the pacte colonial (neo-mercantilism).¹⁵

    While France carved up Ivory Coast’s administrative space that eventually became enshrined in international law, modernity (and the logics of cosmopolitanism that came in its wake) did not come with the French. During the early modern period when the world became encompassed through global trade and the movement of people, the communities of numerous coastal zones of the future Ivory Coast were active in Atlantic exchanges. In providing food, manual labor, and occasional slaves to transatlantic ships plying the Gulf of Guinea, many of these polities acquired in return foreign commodities and ways of doing that they ultimately domesticated. As a consequence, their cultures were already a dynamic mix of foreign and domestic elements before the French presence became hegemonic.¹⁶ Thus, at the time of the creation of the colony, for instance, the area extending from Assinie to Tabou was far from a tabula rasa where the French came to inscribe the first modernist signs. Such precolonial modernity also existed in other parts of the territory. In the northern and midwestern regions, for instance, many polities had been involved in long-distance trading activities that connected the forest zones to the savanna, the Sahelian corners of West Africa, and even to the Mediterranean world. In the Southwest, there had equally existed numerous transregional exchanges that resulted in innovative cultural changes and technological advances.¹⁷

    To argue the existence of this precolonial modernity does not mean that the arrival of the French in the area was inconsequential. In fact, the extension of France’s imperial control went hand in hand with a vast program of infrastructural development that expanded the zone of interactions among groups as it made the movement of people and ideas within the borders of French West Africa much easier.¹⁸ No sooner did effective occupation and colonization become the option for the imperial state than the French began constructing wharves, roads, and a south-north rail line.¹⁹ In 1900, planning began to equip the colony with a reliable seaport. In the meantime, the building of the railroad (see map I.1), which had started in 1904, reached such localities as Agboville (1906), Dimbokro (1910), Bouaké (1912), Katiola (1923), and Ferkessédougou (1928). Finally, the Assagny Canal was dug in 1929, to link the Ebrié Lagoon to the estuary of the Bandama River and the Grand-Lahou lagoon network, in an effort to make coastal trading more efficient.²⁰

    As in other parts of the empire, French concerns for the development of the natural resources of Ivory Coast were almost coeval with the project of imperial expansion. While the systematic exploitation of woods, ivory, and wild rubber began as early as the late nineteenth century, the limitations of such an extractive economic approach soon became evident and a need for a remedy emerged. Thus, in the early twentieth century, through trial and error, French colonial authorities experimented with European plantation agriculture and later embarked on the promotion of native-run commercial agriculture. These experiments had initially mixed results. The end of the First World War, however, marked a turning point in this new approach. In the aftermath of the war, the new agricultural policy that centered on the natives became articulated as a legitimate governmental policy when the minister for the colonies, Albert Sarraut, conceived the doctrine of mise en valeur.²¹

    In a bid to make colonialism pay for itself, but also in an explicit effort to curb perceived communist-led agitation in France’s colonial possessions, Sarraut indeed argued that economic development was essential to limit the popular appeal of leftist ideas to colonized peoples.²² Equally premised on the interwar ideas of developmentalism and politique indigène—the conceit that a new policy that paternalistically respected indigenous culture(s) was essential to lead the natives into progress—Sarraut’s doctrine envisioned a renovated colonial governmentality as the surest road to secure the welfare of the colonial subjects.²³ More critically, however, mise en valeur was designed to help France revive its economy after the First World War. This was all the more necessary since the war had left metropolitan France crippled and its citizens demoralized.²⁴

    MAP I.1. Ivory Coast and French infrastructural development, ca. 1930. Cartography by author.

    The implementation of mise en valeur echoed the practices that the British were deploying in their own empire. Thus, in the French colonies as much as in the British ones, the gradual accumulation of practical knowledge on the colonial subjects, on their mores, their lands, and their agronomic practices, proved essential.²⁵ Minister Sarraut made such doctrine clear when he suggested that science, a systematic imperial division of labor (between metropole and colonies), and the notion of comparative advantage should guide France in a rational development of its empire.²⁶ Although the trend had started in an early decade of the twentieth century, the ministerial sanction of rational exploitation did accelerate the transformation of the various botanical and trial gardens (jardins d’essais) into science-backed experimentation centers geared toward finding and creating improved seeds and plant breeds for colonial agriculture.²⁷ In addition to merging the Ecole Nationale Supérieure d’Agriculture Coloniale and the Jardin Colonial into an Institut National d’Agronomie Tropicale (INAC) in the metropole in 1921, the imperial decision makers worked to change agronomic institutions in the colonies. In this drive, the Dabou and Bingerville botanical gardens in Ivory Coast that had been created at the beginning of French rule were upgraded to become experimental stations charged with studying cocoa, coffee, cola nuts, and other tropical crops. New agronomic stations were also set up in the colony after 1920, including the Bouaké station, which was charged with studying cotton; a station at La Mé meant to focus on oil palm tree research; and the Man station, which specialized in both coffee and cinchona.²⁸

    While these early investments in applied research and infrastructural development boosted the local economy, it was ultimately the actions of the colonial subjects in Ivory Coast that set the stage for what would become an agricultural revolution in the territory. Well before the incorporation of the Ivorian territory into the expanding French West African Empire, some people in the southwestern regions of Ivory Coast had developed coffee and later cocoa plantations. However, the coming of the French and their focus on the southeastern seaboard

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