African Miracle, African Mirage. Abou B. Bamba
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as their work might have been, the importance of ORSTOM experts should not be overstated. First, the Orstomians shared the dissemination of agrarian knowledge in Ivory Coast with the technicians and earth scientists of the Bureau of Agriculture and the researchers of Bingerville’s agronomic research center.44 Moreover, as in many development encounters, there existed a time lag between agronomic research in the controlled environment of the experimentation station and its application in the “wild” field of the farm.45 There is also the fact that the farmers likely to have directly benefited from ORSTOM’s science of agriculture in colonial Ivory Coast were primarily the white colons with much larger plantations. Given that it was not the white planters who were at the forefront of cash cropping or food farming, and that the European agronomic experts had only a marginal direct impact on the farming practices of the Africans, other factors, including the agency of the Africans, must be taken into account in understanding the boom in agricultural production in late colonial Ivory Coast.46 The unsuccessful bid for a top-down policy of mechanization of farming clearly illustrated this point. As we shall see, it also puts into relief one of the paradoxes of postwar developmentalism in French West Africa.
MACHINES, PEASANTS, AND ECONOMIC REVIVAL
As they stepped up their developmentalist efforts through bigger funding for agronomic research, FIDES bureaucrats also bet on mechanization as the ultimate tool for modernizing colonial agriculture. In fact, impressed as they were by the output of American and Soviet agricultural models that relied heavily on machine technology, colonial rulers in France and Britain “sought to increase African agricultural production with the help of mechanical modes of production to cope with the postwar foreign-exchange crisis.”47 The labor shortage in the fields caused by the suppression of the institution of forced labor in the French Empire in 1946 made mechanization even more pressing in Ivory Coast. In this context, Raphaël Saller, in his capacity as director of planning at the Ministry of Overseas France, observed that the introduction of machines would help improve productivity while cutting down the cost of production.48
The Martinican-born colonial administrator was not alone in thinking in these terms. As early as 1946, the Ivorian Chamber of Agriculture had set up the Experimental Committee for the Mechanization of Cropping to investigate ways of modernizing the agricultural sector, especially cocoa and coffee production.49 As in other corners of the empire, this imperial interest in mechanization continued through the late 1950s, sustained by periodic scientific missions abroad, by conferences and agriculture fairs, and by the launching of promotional media campaigns to proselytize the idea.50
The dream to mechanize agriculture might have been big, but its realization was doomed—at least in the immediate aftermath of the war. First, mechanization required an enormous start-up capital investment in machines and other sophisticated equipment that only a handful of wealthier white planters could afford. The financial sacrifice was all the more difficult to contemplate because most of the commercial farming was done on smallholder plantations whose owners could hardly capitalize on a hypothetic economy of scale. Moreover, the suppression of forced labor in 1946 had meant that most African farmers could now mobilize a relatively abundant free supply of hands, which made the need for machines less pressing for them. Even more damaging for the plan of launching mechanized agriculture was the stubborn reality of the unregimented nature of the extant crop fields. Unlike in scientific agriculture, of which mechanization was a brainchild, most of the farms that existed in colonial Ivory Coast did not have their crop stands arranged in regular and linear alleys. The original spacing between tree stands was neither long enough nor standardized. Such an ungridded planting design ultimately prevented the use of machines. By the early 1950s, it was clear that the idea of mechanization would be hard to sell to both white and African farmers. Consequently, the experimental committee set up to promote the mechanization of agriculture was disbanded.51
Although the idea of mechanized agriculture did not jell, the postwar period did witness an expansion of agriculture in colonial Ivory Coast, the roots of which went back to the interwar period when African farmers took up commercial farming. In the forest region of the Southeast, and after the relative failure of forced cultivation policy, native farmers took advantage of the new network of roads and railways and bought seedlings from either planters in the Gold Coast or the white colonists to develop hundreds of tree-crop farms on which they labored with family members. In the savanna regions of the territory, peasants increased their agricultural production, even if sometimes this was achieved under duress.52 With the liberalization of labor recruitment in the mid-1940s, an ever-increasing number of Africans set up their own plantations of cash crops. These factors, along with the rise in the price of crops like cocoa and coffee, set in place the conditions for a tree planting revolution in colonial Ivory Coast.53
As in other parts of West Africa, smallholder farming was the backbone of such an agrarian revolution. In the early twentieth century, in its effort to promote cash-crop agriculture, the colonial state had favored collective farming, which it reasoned was the closest approximation of the traditional agronomic practice of the indigenous people in the territory. This approach ended in abysmal failure. Unlike the promoted collectivist scheme, it was individual families who rose to operate small farms and produce cocoa, coffee, cotton, and food crops. These smallholder farmers shunned the use of agricultural machinery and increasingly made use of wage labor to run their plantations. In the process, they dramatically improved the Ivorian output of agricultural commodities (see fig. 1.1). Thus, it was grassroots modernization in the form of free access to agricultural labor that informed the cash-crop revolution in Ivory Coast—a scenario that would be repeated again and again in the history of postwar Ivorian capitalism. Mobilizing what might be called an early, if nonclassical, manifestation of “rational choice” strategy, African farmers not only appropriated and domesticated the cultivation of cash crops, but, adding another layer to the meaning of agricultural modernity, they also pushed the white planters to adopt the principle of free labor.54
Of course, there is no denying that by providing funds for agricultural services such as the Caisse Centrale de Credit Agricole (agricultural bank) to help a few planters get loans, the Comptes Café-Cacao to maintain and improve feeder roads and bridges, and by generously distributing seedlings and subsidized fertilizers, the colonial state created a favorable agronomic environment.55 Yet, it was the shift from lineage production of cash crops and the passage to small-scale capitalist farming that gave the decisive boost. In his cultural ecology of the lineage system among the Dida in South-Central Ivory Coast—a region that witnessed a dramatic increase in its output of both cocoa and coffee in the 1950s—Robert Hecht has shown that the “social reproduction hinged upon the recruitment of labor into the kin group, mainly though not exclusively through marriage.” However, under the pressure of global and local forces, marriage exchange had increasingly become “dependent during 1930–45 upon production of cocoa, and later coffee, which were sold and converted into the prevailing bridewealth media: manillas and cash.” At this juncture, “internally-generated pressure on the lineage to expand its cocoa and coffee production could not [. . .] be satisfied by the relatively limited and inflexible quality of labor available from the kin group.” Under these conditions, the “solution for the lineage in the post-War years was to resort to various non-kin types of labor. Over time, wage labor gradually emerged as the dominant form.”56
FIGURE 1.1. Value and relative importance of Ivorian cocoa, coffee, and wood exports, 1939–1956. Note that the combined share is relative to the overall agricultural export. Data sources: Territoire de Côte d’Ivoire, Inventaire économique de la Côte d’Ivoire, 165–66; Kipré, Côte d’Ivoire, 156; Gbagbo, La Côte d’Ivoire: Economie et société, 112, 124, 132; Peterec, The Port of Abidjan, 43a.
Such reality, which pointed to the flexibility and agency of the Africans in the agricultural transformation of the territory, would come to play a key role in Ivorian (rural) cosmopolitanism and agrarian modernity.57 It was not limited to South-Central