African Miracle, African Mirage. Abou B. Bamba
its position in the changing Ivorian sociopolitical landscape, this autochthonous group eventually emerged as a distinct historical force in the political economy of development in Ivory Coast.93
Indeed, in the wake of the transnational nationalist upheavals of the 1950s, the African planters began to buy out many of the white planters of cocoa and coffee, some of whom were uncertain about the implications of a worldwide drive toward decolonization. This Africanization of sorts of the Ivorian plantation economy was all the more possible since an increasing number of white planters were moving their operations into pineapple and banana cultivation, but also because African employees on cocoa and coffee farms were leaving their (white) employers to create their own tree-crop plantations, attracted as they were by the steady prices of cocoa and coffee on the international market. Although French, Lebanese-Syrian, and even African cash-crop traders and middlemen continued to cheat some African planters, the emerging class of local planters was expanding the margins of its profit.94
Perhaps nothing demonstrated this better than the fragmentation and income differentiation among the cash-crop farmers of agnatic lineages in West-Central Ivory Coast. The amplification of the “treasure economy” (économie du trésor) among cocoa growers of southeastern Ivory Coast in the closing years of the colonial era could also be seen as another sign of this new deal.95 We shall see later that such seemingly conspicuous consumption was not the only way that the African planters used their profits. More significantly, some of them strategically would demand that Americans become associated with the development of their resources. To be sure, such a willful transnational gesture put additional pressure not only on US-French cooperation at large, but also on Franco-African relations in the territory.
. . .
The decades that followed the end of the Second World War were determinant in transforming Ivory Coast into a stellar colony—a new status that allowed the territory to displace the hegemony of Senegal in French West Africa. In addition to the impacts of the FIDES infrastructural projects that equipped Ivory Coast with new roads, bridges, airfields, and a deep-sea harbor in Abidjan, the work of the colonial scientists of ORSTOM was instrumental in boosting the postwar agrarian economy of the colony. More importantly, however, it was the African-led cash-crop revolution that laid the foundations of the phenomenal growth that occurred in Ivory Coast in the aftermath of the war.
Convinced as never before that the metropole needed the overseas territories to speed up the reconstruction of France, the French colonial authorities developed new mercantilist economic practices intended to foster what has been aptly called a “second colonial occupation.” But in an era that was seen as the “American Century,” the French had to contend with a constant competition from the United States, which saw itself as guardian of free market capitalism.96 The bid of the African planters and nationalists to increase their share of the postwar bonanza threatened to further complicate the Franco-American struggle to cash in on the Ivorian boom. The next chapter will elaborate on this rivalry, delving into the strategies that the French deployed to counter the perceived menace of Americanization and the persistent demands, from within and without, for opening up the West African territory.
2
Triangulating Colonial Modernization
America is the original version of modernity. We are the dubbed or subtitled versions. America ducks the question of origins; it cultivates no origin or mythical authenticity; it has no past and no founding truth.
—Jean Baudrillard, America (1986)
The availability of French-dubbed U.S. products is determined by their marketability first in France. If an American program has not been dubbed for use in France, it is not available to French-speaking Africa.
—Floyd M. Land, “Television, Culture, and the State” (1990)
IN THE WAKE of the opening of the Vridi Canal, many observers had predicted that Ivory Coast would become an economic powerhouse; a new hub in West Africa likely to attract businesses and investors within and without the French Empire.1 Few had imagined, however, that the territory would turn into a source of political strain between France and the United States. In hindsight and within the larger framework of transatlantic relations, historians have demonstrated that such Franco-American tensions over the colonies were unavoidable, especially given a strong strand of anti-Americanism in French culture, the perception that the United States was fundamentally anticolonialist, and the fact that the modernity many Ivorian elite were aspiring to was heavily inflected by American ideals of the good life.2
As early as 1948, French writer Georges Soria had articulated the anxiety many of his compatriots felt about their country’s postwar relationship with the United States. His book, which appeared at a time when French communists were denouncing the “Marshallization” of their patrie, echoed the already widespread resentment of the French elite over asymmetrical Franco-American cooperation.3 In a context marked by an unprecedented affirmation of American hegemony on a global scale, the concerns of the French were actually shared by a substantial number of Europeans who invariably saw American-led reconstruction of war-torn Europe as a clever means set up by the Americans to erode their lifestyles and worldviews. Consequently they decided to act, if not popularly, then at least with a populist rhetoric. To provide resistance against what Georges Duhamel had prophesied during the interwar years as the slow diffusion of the American way of life into the world was therefore the aim of the anti-US mobilization that spanned political affiliations.4
I argue in this chapter that French colonial administrators and experts—a substantial number of whom went to the United States as productivity missionaries—had a much more difficult task in appropriating American modernization precepts. In the face of mounting anticolonial nationalism led by the Rassemblement Démocratique Africain (RDA) and especially its Ivorian branch—the Parti Démocratique de Côte d’Ivoire (PDCI), not only did they have to find ways to uphold the myth of a modern and civilized France before their colonial subjects, but they also had to acknowledge the hollowness of their mission civilisatrice compared to the American modernization paradigm: hence the politics of dubbing, that is, the project and process aimed at translating and adapting for their colonial subjects development concepts and techniques that largely emanated from the United States. A subtle yet still paternalistic trick, the politics of dubbing ensured that French colonial administrators and experts would remain the hegemonic mediators between American modernity and the indigenous people of the newly created Union Française. In other words, by attempting to suppress the historically constituted “American-ness” of postwar developmentalism, the French colonial state and its managers aimed to brand themselves as the sole providers of progress and the “good life” to their colonial subjects.
This chapter looks at the outcomes of such political acts of seduction as it focuses on the efforts at technopolitical translation and their conditions of possibility. It argues that the spatial extent of the process of exporting American development techniques, values, and ways of being was not restricted to the European, Latin American, and Asian landscapes. Even more interesting, I suggest that the coming of American modernity in colonial Ivory Coast opened a new space for the emerging nationalist leaders who used the opportunity to triangulate the relationship of their society with metropolitan France. The subsequent trilateral politics that came in the wake of the American Century created or deepened extant chaos within the French Empire. Such conjuncture ultimately forced colonial authorities to resort to dubbing modernization in a last effort to bolster the weakening imperial ties. If the politics of dubbing and the efforts at infrastructural development were meant to help roll back the nationalist/anticolonial tide in the French Empire, they failed—especially since the colonial state was equally unable to reconcile the demands of younger African activists who wanted immediate independence and their seniors who dreamed of a supra Franco-African nation. On the other hand, Raymond Cartier and other metropolitan French Rightist opinion leaders were calling on the end of colonialism because it was a drain on France’s resources. By the mid-1950s, the signs pointed to the fact that Ivorians (and Africans in general) were snatching the initiative locally and that decolonization had become