African Miracle, African Mirage. Abou B. Bamba
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even “become integrated into our entire dispositif as long as its character and territorial independence are not disputed.” In other words, there was hope that ORSTOM would remain the powerhouse to mediate the modernization of Ivorian agronomy—provided that ORSTOM showed some flexibility.75
This proved to be wishful thinking. Although a ministerial ruling intended to place the whole Ivorian agronomic research center under ORSTOM was drafted, the project never materialized. Rather, only the Bouaké research center was attributed to ORSTOM. In the meantime Georges Monnet, the Ivorian minister for agriculture, established a separate Institut Français du Café et du Cacao (IFCC) in 1957 with its main headquarters at Bingerville.76 But when the Franco-African community was born in 1958, ORSTOM attempted to resuscitate the project of a unified agronomic directorate. This new effort, however, proved ineffective. Thus, at the collapse of France’s formal empire in West Africa in 1960, ORSTOM had only marginally succeeded in integrating the various branches of agronomic research; besides losing the battle to control the stellar sector of cocoa and coffee research, ORSTOM also witnessed powerlessly the creation of the Institut de Recherches Agronomiques Tropicales et des Cultures Vivrières (IRAT)—a new institute in Paris charged with applied research on food crops.77 Even more threatening to the policy that ORSTOM should remain the key institution to dub agricultural modernity for Ivory Coast was the persistent desire on the part of the Ivorian authorities to nationalize ORSTOM facilities at Adiopodoumé—an aspiration that continued to poison the relationship between the French institution and Ivory Coast in the immediate aftermath of independence.78
Despite these frictions, the Ivorian leadership remained expectant that France would underwrite much of their country’s overall scheme of agrarian modernization. In 1959, the secretary of the Ivory Coast Chamber of Agriculture and Industry, J. Manet, expanded on this point: “Extension service, technical assistance, cooperation; these are the objectives of Ivorian agriculture. It is up to the [Franco-African] Community to help us and lend the needed ‘scientists,’ technicians as well as investment capital.” Even as he diligently reorganized the Ivorian agricultural sector, Georges Monnet also believed that France should continue to provide financial assistance in view of “contributing to the rapid development of our African states.”79 In light of these positions, it should not come as a surprise that one of the first actions of his ministry after Ivory Coast’s declaration of independence was to ask ORSTOM to help the Ivorians set up their own school of agriculture.80
As ironic as this may look, the request should be seen as evidence of the realization that French mediation could not be stopped abruptly as well as an indication of the refusal to give in to what Houphouët-Boigny would later call “cut-rate Africanization.”81 More fundamentally, though, the Ivorian demand for assistance confirmed Robert Keith’s observation that even as “many of the [African] leaders remain[ed] willing to accept the economic and cultural benefits of a French-African ‘Community,’” especially in the era of decolonization, the initiative for sociopolitical actions had “pass[ed] increasingly into African hands.”82 It is quite instructive that the deployment of such a newfound initiative occurred precisely when Americans were increasingly knocking at the doors of France’s dying empire. To be sure, this added another layer to the saga of modernization in Ivory Coast.
INTERLOPING ON AN ALLY’S DOMAIN? AMERICANS IN LATE COLONIAL IVORY COAST
To the alarm of French politicians, some opinion leaders and officials in the United States not only applauded the move toward independence in France’s colonies, but they also seemed to have wanted the suppression of European mediation in their country’s relationship with Africa. Consequently, they pressed for a revision of US policy toward Africa. Fearful that the disintegration of the European empires on the continent would create a void, which, by necessity, would be exploited by the Soviet Union, American policy makers and social scientists expanded the reach of the American empire of knowledge through the imposition of new epistemologies regarding modernity, tradition, and ultimately the meaning of the “good” life.83 If in postwar Europe this agenda was carried out through the institutionalization of American studies, the funding of cultural events and prizes, and the granting of scholarships to talented students, in Africa (and the rest of the Global South) the building of an empire of knowledge was graphed on the development of international and area studies as well as modernization theory, all of which aimed at producing usable knowledge on the emerging countries of the Third World. To this end, the federal government, private foundations, and major American universities established research programs targeting African, Asian, and Latin American countries.84
While hardly at the forefront of studies carried out by modernization theorists, Africa was never missing from their scholarship. Already in early 1950, Africanist researcher and diplomat Vernon McKay had urged academics to include Africa in their area studies research, claiming that the “time has arrived for a full-fledged program of African studies at a major university, preferably in the area around Washington or New York.”85 Echoing this exhortation, George McGhee announced a couple of months later during an address at Northwestern University that the State Department was pleased to cooperate with Melville Herskovits’s institution in promoting African studies.86
With the passing of time and the availability of new funding made through both Title VI of the US National Defense Act of 1957 and philanthropic foundations, academic programs and centers for the study of Africa mushroomed in American universities and colleges, including at the University of California at Los Angeles, Michigan State, and Howard, Duquesne, and Syracuse Universities.87 This focus on Africa in American academic circles culminated in a number of ways: an ever-greater number of American missions were sent to Africa to gather data so as to “inform long-term aid programs”; to foster a community of Africanists, the African Studies Association (ASA) was established in 1957; and to disseminate knowledge about Africa, a number of specialized journals were created.88
Given its emerging reputation as an economic engine of French West Africa or an intriguing foil to the radical British-ruled Gold Coast, many of the American foundation-supported social scientists interested in Africa, including Elliott J. Berg (1957), Immanuel Wallerstein (1957), Aristide Zolberg (1958), and George Horner (1958–1959), found their way into Ivory Coast.89 Although many of these junior scholars were critical of the US government, the knowledge they produced not only competed with French academic discourse on the country, but also soon became the resource for building an informal American empire in Ivorian territory, particularly so since the knowledge they disseminated extended the ethnographic gaze of the United States into late colonial Ivory Coast, a phenomenon that added to the concerns of the colonial state.90
Thus, even as they accepted the presence of a US consulate in Ivory Coast, the French authorities never dropped their suspicion of the Americans. Betraying this mistrust of their Atlantic partner was the French refusal to allow a US Information Service (USIS) to be adjoined to the consular offices in Abidjan.91 Furthermore, the colonial officials in Abidjan kept a watch on the activities of the American researchers, including both Wallerstein and Zolberg.92 It was in this climate of suspicion that the first American consul was recalled, allegedly for making public statements during the 1958 referendum that a French diplomat found “unpleasant and preposterous.”93
The suspicion of the French colonial authorities was not without foundation. The memory of Vietnam was still fresh on the minds of many French diplomats, who now saw the reincarnation of the “quiet American” in every American diplomat posted in a French colony.94 Compounding this situation, American businesses were increasingly showing interest in Ivory Coast, whose leading city they aspired to use as a regional gateway to the other territories of French West Africa. Their interest was all the more well targeted since the dissemination of the first results of the many research projects supported by the Ford, Rockefeller, Carnegie, and other US foundations confirmed the relative edge of Ivory Coast over the other French-speaking countries in West Africa.95 In this context, the Plymouth Oil Company expressed an interest in deep drilling near the coast of Abidjan.96 Similarly, David E. Lilienthal—the world-renowned former chairman of the Tennessee Valley Authority—established contacts with the Ivorian government in Abidjan