African Miracle, African Mirage. Abou B. Bamba
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to provide full financial backing to the African-supported credit institution pointed to the limits of a grandiose vision that saw only a heavily bureaucratic administration and centralized state as the sole provider of modernity.60 The dream of providing affordable accommodations to the many was so constricted that by 1955, that is, ten years after launching the program, mass low-cost housing was still lacking in Ivory Coast as much as in the rest of the French colonies in sub-Saharan Africa.61
FIGURE 2.2. Hôtel de Ville, Abidjan, circa 1956. Source: http://www.postalesinventadas.com. Courtesy of Rafael Cazorla.
Under these historical circumstances, African accommodation seekers took matters into their own hands. In the relatively wealthy rural areas where the prices of cash crops were on the rise, for instance, rich planters—in the coffee and especially the cocoa belts of southeastern and South-Central Ivory Coast—began improving their homes. Sometimes with no external financial support, individual planters tapped the experiential knowledge of Togolese masons and other hired construction laborers to build their own versions of the modern house and, in this way, partook of the conspicuous treasure economy (économie du trésor) that Jean-Marc Gastellu has so well studied. In other instances, they formed mutual aid associations to promote the construction of affordable housing units in their villages.62
In the cities, the proactive stances of the Africans were equally at play, particularly since the efforts of the various colonial states in the field of housing were focused on “constructing housing estates and subsidizing and regularizing housing for the more stable and compact working class [whom] officials hoped to shape.”63 In Abidjan, however, such efforts were not sufficient, especially since migration to the port city was reaching unmanageable proportions. Pushed to the margins of the colonial urban world, the African residents of Treichville and other “native” quarters empowered themselves by establishing voluntary associations with the ultimate goal of improving their daily lives and living conditions.64 As early embodiments of civil society, these civic associations emerged as “countervailing powers” that disputed the hegemony of the colonial state and its minimalist take on social reproduction in the city. The proliferation of the cours communes (shared compounds) and other slums in and around Abidjan’s legal districts provided an early hint that the African residents of the city were determined to be full agents in the production of Abidjan and the definition of its modernity.65
If dubbing modernization and accelerating infrastructural development were meant to appease and moderate the nationalist demands of the colonial subjects, they met with poor results. For the coming of American modernity in the dependencies, even mediated through the paternalism of the colonial administrators and experts, was like the opening of Pandora’s box, with the nationalist leaders and social activists mobilizing the late colonial development policies to request more concessions from Paris. As Frederick Cooper has persuasively demonstrated, the colonial subjects effectively argued—not without subaltern wit—that what the French authorities portrayed as the benefits of France’s benevolent development efforts were, in fact, long-overdue entitlements.66 Moreover, with Marshall Plan (and later MSA) administrators’ dissatisfaction with French management of American credits, French authorities were forced to mount a public relations campaign to brand their amended version of mise en valeur as something novel and daring.67
Regardless of these propaganda ploys, decolonization appeared irresistible, as evidenced by the election of Félix Houphouët-Boigny as the first black mayor of Abidjan in 1956 on the platform that African elected officials would be better suited to manage the municipality of the port city.68 Similarly, the signs that the politics of dubbing was not the appropriate response to the nationalist calls for more African control over decision making were also demonstrated in the struggle that shook some of the tenets of the French grip over agronomic research in late colonial Ivory Coast.
REFASHIONING DEVELOPMENT COOPERATION
Even as French colonial bureaucrats and experts crisscrossed the United States as fellows of the productivity missions program in search of recipes for the overseas territories, the political landscape in Ivory Coast was changing. After its disaffiliation from the French Communist Party in 1951, the Ivorian branch of the Rassemblement Démocratique Africain (RDA) had moved even closer to the colonial government in Abidjan, ushering in an era of cohabitation in the late colonial period that a contemporary scholar aptly dubbed as dyarchic rule.69 In addition, Houphouët-Boigny entered the government of Guy-Mollet in 1956 as a minister without portfolio. Subsequently, RDA’s leader became actively involved in drafting and ultimately sponsoring the passage of the Loi-cadre (framework law), which devolved much power to the African territories even as it paved the way for their balkanization.70
It was in this context that the struggles to control agronomic research emerged. As early as 1953, French authorities in Paris had been trying to reorganize the structure of the various overseas research institutions in view of bringing them under a common directorate. A task force was set up to study the scheme. It concluded on the desirability of the idea and suggested that agronomic research should come under the supervision of ORSTOM. This recommendation, however, was to create frictions between the partisans of state rights and the enthusiasts for centralized rights, on the one hand, and on the other, the various interest groups involved in African agricultural production, including planters, researchers, politicians, and bureaucrats from Ivory Coast.71 In a 1956 speech in Abidjan, for instance, Raymond Desclers criticized what he thought would be armchair agronomic research if agronomy were to integrate ORSTOM, adding that what Ivorian planters wanted was an “independent bureau of research in Africa, specialized in studying coffee, cocoa, and cola nuts.” More fundamentally, the Ivory Coast–based white planter insisted that the headquarters of the envisioned bureau “should be in Africa to be in touch with the daily realities” of the peasants.72
Desclers was not the only white planter to develop this line of argument. The chairperson of the Federation of Overseas Coffee Planters Associations, R. Dubled, thought similarly. Writing in July 1957 to rally support for his group’s position, he lamented that “no real research has been done in French Africa regarding cocoa and coffee.” For him, French researchers were not to be blamed since the reason for the problem was not so much their inabilities as it was the system under which they worked. To remedy a situation that only resulted in the lack of serious investigation, he recommended the creation of “an autonomous institute” to be charged with research and development in agriculture. Concluding his missive, Dubled asked his correspondent not to support the centralization plan that was being circulated, because “no one should accept the integration of agronomic research under ORSTOM bureaucracy.”73
Sensing the potential impact of these negative campaigns, ORSTOM officials began to counterattack. In 1956, Jean-Jacques Juglas, as new chairman of ORSTOM, wrote to the Ivorian authorities trying to appease their concerns. Aware that Ivory Coast was out to have its own cocoa and coffee institute, separate from the ORSTOM system, he offered to run ORSTOM in a “decentralized and flexible manner.” Moreover, responding to the Ivorian request to have the involvement of international specialists in the fields of agronomic research, he asked the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) to send an expert. Still in line with the old strategy of using French researchers as brokers of Ivorian modernization, he promised to send Orstomians to Brazil, Trinidad, and the Gold Coast to study the genetics of coffee, hoping that at their return they would apply their knowledge and know-how to improve Ivorian production of the cash crop.74
The deployment of the counterarguments and many other counterproposals continued into the late years of French rule in Ivory Coast. But emboldened by the passage and subsequent implementation of Loi-cadre, the partisans of an autonomous agronomic institute pushed their case—leading the secretary general of ORSTOM to note: “Ivory Coast continue to take advantage of a political peculiarity to which it is very much attached.” Still wishing a favorable outcome from the political turf, Roger Trintignac added that France’s star territory in West Africa was “not