African Miracle, African Mirage. Abou B. Bamba
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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.4
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.”6
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.7
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