African Miracle, African Mirage. Abou B. Bamba
from 1,980,000 inhabitants in 1945 to about 3,000,000 in 1958.4 Voluntary transborder migration certainly contributed to this shift, but the bulk of the growth was a consequence of the practice of forced labor that the colonial state resorted to in its effort at implementing mise en valeur. As early as the 1920s, a trickle of migrant laborers from Upper Volta and the French Sudan had found their way into southern Ivory Coast. First forced by the logic of colonial development but later attracted by the prospect of employment, they had descended southward seasonally to work on Ivorian tree-crop plantations. After the Second World War, however, their number increased exponentially. This wave of immigrants, along with migrant workers from the savanna regions of Ivory Coast and administrative politics that favored the South, would come to lay the foundation of a new political economy, characterized not only by the economic differentiation between Ivory Coast and the rest of French West Africa, but also by the creation of regional disparities between the northern and southern halves of the territory.5
The story of these revolutionary changes cannot be dissociated from Ivorian imperial history and from the larger context of postwar international economics. In the wake of the war, French authorities had established the Monnet Plan, which, with the assistance of the American Marshall Plan, was intended to achieve a thorough reconstruction of France.6 Faced with a renewed need to capitalize on the resources of a still-vast empire, the postwar authorities initiated a modernization program that purported to strengthen the links between the metropole and the overseas territories. Informed by the pervasive idea of long-range planning as the safest way to economic recovery, the imperial program was supported directly by newly created imperial financial institutions and indirectly by the Marshall Plan’s fund for the modernization of Europe’s dependent territories. Together with local and grassroots initiatives, the new economic and financial environments contributed to the reshaping of Ivory Coast—a process not unlike those that unfolded in other parts of the French Empire.7
The French investment fund for the modernization of the overseas territories was arguably the single most important centerpiece of the new economic outlook in France’s postwar imperialism. Instituted in April 1946 and managed by the Caisse Centrale de la France d’Outre-Mer (Central Bank for France’s Overseas Territories, or CCFOM), FIDES was a development fund whose very existence showed that times had changed—at least on the surface. Unlike during the interwar period when the colonies were expected to finance their own infrastructural development, for instance, the newly created fund was fed primarily by the budget of metropolitan France.8 The bureaucrats who operated the fund divided FIDES accounts into two categories that were financed through grants or loans. A general section was charged with financing development projects that were likely to “benefit all or more than one” territory, including undertakings like scientific research, public works studies, and even public development corporations. The second category of FIDES operated exclusively on loans—repayable at a low interest rate—and focused on specific projects within a given territory and usually involved “basic local equipment expenditures [such as] roads, railroads, ports, airports, schools, hospitals, housing, etc.”9 Exhibited unabashedly as the “first practical effort in cooperation” within the empire, FIDES projects were unprecedented in their magnitude. FIDES planners insisted that in order to raise the living standard of the erstwhile colonial subjects, the economies of the overseas territories had to become productive. This argument justified a new focus on improving the communication infrastructure within the empire.10
The launching of the Marshall Plan was a conjuncture that facilitated this process. In fact, given the sorry state of the finances of the metropole itself, resorting to foreign loans and redirecting them to shape up the overseas territories appeared necessary. In this vein, taking advantage of American aid money in 1948, France and the United States signed an agreement that promised to disburse $130 million for the dependent territories, including $13 million for French West Africa.11 The beginning of President Truman’s Point Four Program offered an additional opportunity for FIDES administrators, especially since the destructions wrought on France by two world wars left the colonial authorities with few options but to accept the American offer. Although there were reasons to fear that France might lose its sovereignty in the overseas territories if it relied too much on American generosity, one financial expert reassuringly argued, it was likely that French investments would remain dominant in the overseas territories.12
The management of American aid money intended for the development of France’s overseas territories was, however, a source of tension. As early as 1949, Raphaël Saller, an eccentric white senator representing the territory of Guinea, had lashed out at the “monstrous egoism” of the metropolitan interests over what he saw as unfair allocations of the funds.13 The Americans themselves were not shy in criticizing the French. Reporting his impressions on how the Marshall Plan aid was operated in French West Africa in September 1949, for instance, William Moreland offered an assessment that was shared by many American diplomats in French West Africa. His verdict on the financial management of the aid money was without appeal: a “confused and jumbled story.”14 Less than a year later, the American consul general reportedly painted a similar picture to a United Nations administrator, arguing that the key characteristic of French development work in Africa was its “lack of overall planning.” Consequently, the diplomat continued, the “bulk of the public works is undertaken randomly and without any clear logic.”15 Despite these criticisms, which put into relief the weaknesses of French colonial financial practices, the Americans maintained their contribution to FIDES. This assistance helped the postwar developmentalist institution to leave an indelible legacy on the overseas territories. For this reason, the French colonial authorities were ever grateful, even as they remained wary of their overbearing transatlantic partner.16
In Ivory Coast, the impact of the fund’s infrastructural development effort was immediately visible on the landscape (see map 1.1), especially in Abidjan where the bulk of the money was spent. For instance, the territory that had only a couple of car-friendly passageways in the interwar period boasted not only new bridges but also 10,850 kilometers of roads by 1948, including several kilometers of tarred expressways, which allowed the country to increase its importation of automobiles.17 The infrastructural effort also rehabilitated many railroad tracks of the Abidjan-Niger line. In addition to expanding or improving the network of roads and railways, FIDES also attempted to create a lagoon transportation system along the coast by building canals and waterways to link the Ebrié Lagoon to adjacent bodies of water, including the Aby Lagoon of the Aboisso region.18 Furthermore, the airport of Abidjan at Port-Bouët was updated to accommodate modern standards while smaller airfields were erected in various regional hubs.19
While FIDES planners in postwar Ivory Coast paid attention to an inestimable number of infrastructural projects, their primary focus was on the so-called grands travaux (large scale public works). This selectivity allowed them to finish the cutting of a channel through the strip of land that separated the Ebrié Lagoon from the Atlantic Ocean—an effort that sped up and eventually helped complete the quarter-century-old projected harbor of Abidjan.20 Already during the war, the Vichy government had attempted to rush the completion of the maritime project in an effort to keep at bay the British forces at Freetown in Sierra Leone.21 After the war, and with the help of American aid money, millions of dollars were invested to open the Vridi Canal and build new wharves in an attempt to provide, in the words of a visiting journalist, “new wealth and prosperity for this long-neglected area of Black Africa.”22
In addition to such focus on infrastructural development, there were efforts on the social front in the hope to not only “cause the transformation” of Ivory Coast into a “modern” country but also to “meet [its] need for social progress.”23 With demographic and urban demands on the rise in most African territories during the postwar years, FIDES planners found themselves assisting the Ivorian colonial authorities as much as other rulers in the larger French West Africa in designing the new urbanism of the territory.24 In this élan, the planners endorsed the increase of the FIDES share devoted to social infrastructural modernization, which reached more than 30 percent of the overall FIDES expenditure in Ivory Coast by the time of the