African Miracle, African Mirage. Abou B. Bamba
chapter 4, I examine the first large-scale postcolonial development project in which the United States was involved, namely, the construction of the Kossou Dam in Central Ivory Coast and the expansion of the Ivorian electricity grid. Looking at the inflow of both US financial capital through the Export-Import (Exim) Bank and American expertise through Kaiser Engineers, I demonstrate that the making of Kossou was a truly transatlantic process. This was all the more so since the ideology of integrated regional development that informed the Kossou operation had not only been (re)articulated in the American experiment in the valley of the Tennessee River, but had also transited through the region of Languedoc-Roussillon in southern France. I also demonstrate that some of the architects of the Kossou project, including key French development experts, had been inspired by the projects of the TVA.
In chapter 5, I tackle another key postcolonial project directly affected by the United States: the dual incorporation of the Ivorian Southwest into the fold of modernity and the Ivorian nation. By examining the Ivorian activities of David E. Lilienthal, I underline the significance of the United States in the Ivorian leadership’s dreams of modernity. This is demonstrated through an examination of the consulting work of Lilienthal and his partners at Development and Resources Corporation. Through this work, Lilienthal became one key player in the scheme to develop the southwestern part of Ivory Coast. The chapter explains that such a role was all the more possible since the Ivorian authorities had initiated in the mid-1960s a policy of diversification that was informed by a TVA-like outlook on nation building. But the cost of an American-style modernization of the Southwest was not easy to shoulder. This reality eventually forced the Ivorians to fall back on French mediation, including the ever-needed expertise of ORSTOM’s social scientists. Even more, the modernization of the Ivorian Southwest revealed the all-important role of grassroots actors in rearticulating the elitist visions of postcolonial development.
The fate of the Ivorian modernization in the 1970s is the focus of chapter 6. Responding to the performative actions of various interest groups, including university students and school leavers, the authorities created numerous parastatals to employ job-hungry graduates who had appropriated the discourse of Ivorianization of the economy. At the same time, Houphouët-Boigny (commonly called Le Vieux) furthered the fight against the perceived regional disparity in the country. The launching of the sugar production estates and associated mills answered to both of these policies. Set in the northern savanna provinces of Ivory Coast—seen as the poor relation in the Ivorian growth and the “last frontier” of the Ivorian modernization drive—the program relied largely on foreign capital to reinvigorate the diversification of the Ivorian economy. The chapter brings into relief the key consequences of a high-modernist investment in the Greater North.
In the last chapter, I analyze the end of the boom years of the Ivorian economy in the late 1970s. In particular, I pay attention to some of the environmental consequences of the modernization drive of the previous decades. I then look at the ways in which both French and American diplomats and experts viewed the collapse of the economic miracle. The chapter equally explores the responses of the Ivorian authorities to the flagging economy, including their self-initiated internal structural-adjustment program. Finally, I resuscitate the voices of Left-leaning Ivorian intellectuals who, throughout the years of the boom, had cast doubts on the Ivorian model, arguing in the wake of economist Samir Amin that the Ivorian miracle produced “growth without development.”
The conclusion of African Miracle, African Mirage will suggest that the fate of the Ivorian development and modernization drive is best mapped out through a critical reading of local and translocal sources, as well as a keen engagement with the vicissitudes of a world system in transition between French (and European) colonialism, US neocolonialism, and (neoliberal) globalization. Ultimately, it is through a historical approach, which pays close attention to both local and transnational forces, that we may find the answer to the riddle of how a miracle becomes a mirage in an African postcolony.
PART I
The Postwar Years
1
Becoming an Attractive Colony
As to the Ivory Coast, it is without any doubt the richest, actually and potentially, of all the French African territories. The Ivory Coast produces the bulk—about 60,000 tons—of French West African coffee, practically the whole of its cocoa and timber, and also bananas, palm oil, palm kernels, cotton, and kapock; indeed, everything that the African soil can produce is to be found there, and its future promises to be bright.
—A. H. S., “Progress in French W. Africa,” World Today (1951)
WHEN THE COLONY OF Ivory Coast was formally established in 1893, few observers would have predicted that the youngest territory among France’s colonial possessions in West Africa would become the engine of the imperial economy in the region. Although it was not landlocked, the new colony had no natural harbor. It certainly was not a desert, but the immense luxuriant forest that the territory boasted in the South was generally perceived as a “green inferno” inhabited largely by wicked cannibals. In addition, the expansion of the Samorian Empire to the north of the fledgling colony threatened to put a halt to France’s ambition to establish a viable colonial state in the area. This danger was compounded by the actions of Baule chiefs in the middle section of the territory, who, along with other resisters to European encroachment, continued their opposition to French rule.1 In the space of half a century, however, the colony that Governor Maurice Lapalud once called the “Cinderella of French West Africa” turned out to be the “milking cow” of France’s West African Empire. In newspapers, magazines, and even academic journals (as the epigraph shows), the territory inexorably came to be hailed as an attractive regional hub whose economic dynamism made Ivory Coast the engine of development for the entire group of French possessions in the area.2
This chapter elaborates on this new imagination of Ivory Coast as it inquires into the postwar foundations and consequences of the boom that the territory witnessed in the aftermath of the Second World War. Locating partly the origins of the perceptual change in the infrastructural development that the Fonds d’Investissement pour le Développement Economique et Social (Investment Fund for Economic and Social Development, or FIDES) wrought in France’s overseas territories, and critically tracking the logic of this exercise in late colonial developmentalism, the chapter reveals a certain continuity between the policy of mise en valeur (development/exploitation) deployed in the interwar period and postwar modernization ideology and practices. While colonial bureaucrats and their retinue of experts contributed to the birthing of the Ivorian regime of miracle, the chapter suggests that it was ultimately the agency of African farmers that proved decisive in turning this once-backwater territory of French West Africa into a model colony that attracted investors beyond metropolitan France.
SHAPING UP POSTWAR IVORY COAST
If colonial statistics are to be trusted, the transformation of Ivory Coast in the aftermath of the Second World War must have then been an impressive achievement. Between 1947 and the early 1950s, for instance, the combined agricultural output of cash crops such as tobacco, pineapples, and bananas grew almost five times. Similarly, commercial food crops like rice increased from 74,400 tons to 118,300 tons. In the meantime, the export of coffee beans grew from 36,000 tons in 1945 to 61,000 tons in 1949. The export of cocoa beans showed a similar upsurge, evolving from 26,000 tons in 1944 to more than 56,000 tons five years later. There was much more: with these dramatic increases in agricultural outputs, the Ivorian share in the overall export of French West Africa went up from 22 percent before the war to almost 50 percent at the beginning of the last decade of French colonial rule.3
Changes in the Ivorian agrarian world resulted from demographic transformations, which, in turn, were partly fed by the expansion of agricultural activities. For observers of the colonial scene in Ivory Coast, the first indication of the changing demography was provided