African Miracle, African Mirage. Abou B. Bamba
the integrity of indigenous natural resources” while it promoted, at the same time, “freedom, economic progress, and social betterment for the Africans.”21
The emphasis that Binzème put on the ideas of freedom and transnational capital, and ultimately his faith in American-style progress, as key ingredients to secure the welfare of the Africans certainly echoed the scripts of American modernization theorists and the fantastic public diplomacy that sold them to the world at large. Since the end of the war, US officials had pointed to their own example with the Philippines to demand that Europe’s colonial empires be dismantled. In their stead, American decision makers envisioned international cooperation, free trade, and the transfer of technology as the soundest means to achieve material progress for the “backward” peoples of the world. In contrast to European colonial developmentalism, which reportedly made “a living off of” colonial subjects, American postwar modernizers believed that “if we make it better for the other fellow, we will make it better for ourselves.” Informed by such reasoning, then, the United States inaugurated many institutionalized projects, including the famed Point Four Program, whose goal was to help train technicians, doctors, and social workers in the Global South.22
There is room to argue that the difference between US and European development visions was almost nil, especially if we trace their origins to nineteenth-century ideas of progress. Yet one should not miss the dissimilarities. Unlike their European counterparts, American planners tended to shun the massive presence of colonial bureaucrats to run the show. In a sense, it might have been the case that the modernization style of the US authorities in the global arena was only confirming an earlier astute insight that Argentinean writer Manuel Ugarte offered in the 1920s; arguing that in contrast to European colonial powers, the United States was an imperial hegemon that had strategically opted for a “system of annexing wealth, apart from inhabitants or territories, disdaining outward shows in order to arrive at the essentials of domination without a dead-weight of areas to administer and multitudes to govern.”23 Notwithstanding this fact, which most enthusiasts for Americanization did not see as a real problem, political entrepreneurs as diverse as Haile Selassie, Jomo Kenyatta, and Binzème saw a genuine opportunity in embracing the language and promise of US-enlightened developmentalism.24
Despite (or because of) its deployment of an American modernization trope, however, the Binzème plan actually appeared as a reappropriation of some of the programs that the Fonds d’Investissement pour le Développement Economique et Social (FIDES) had initiated in Ivory Coast. These included the industrial exploitation of strategic minerals such as manganese, iron, silver, gold, and oil.25 Still, in line with the FIDES program, Binzème hoped to mechanize Ivorian agriculture and forestry for a better exploitation of their resources.26 Against France’s protectionist policy limiting the importation of consumer goods into the outre-mer, Binzème solicited the “active collaboration” of American industries to meet the “unsatisfied needs” of the indigenous peoples.27 Finally, the Ivorian lawyer requested that American financial groups participate in the creation of a venture firm whose aim would be the exploitation of Ivorian natural resources.28
It is not clear how American Marshall planners responded to Maître Binzème’s proposals. Nor can we ascertain whether the French colonial authorities took notice of his correspondence with the Americans. Still, the attitude of the Ivorian lawyer crystallized a tendency visible throughout the larger French Empire in the postwar period: the nationalist politics of triangulating the development encounter and a rather voluntarist call for more Americanization. If modernization had indeed emerged as a transnational ideology that most people espoused, French colonial subjects increasingly came to doubt the modernizing capability of Paris and its imperial extension. In contrast to France’s mission civilisatrice, people like Kouamé Binzème were counterposing the potential benefits of the American way of life and the modernization theory that informed its expansion.
As would be confirmed repeatedly, the dangers inherent in the politics of triangulating modernization were not lost on the French colonial administrators. Their reaction, which came in the form of dubbing American modernization, if desperate, at least suggested that knowledge, translation, and comparativism had become transnational discursive forces in the postwar world of French imperialism, not unlike the doctrine of mise en valeur that informed the early French civilizing mission. How did this work out? Who implemented this effort at translation? What were its ultimate outcomes?
ENACTING THE POLITICS OF DUBBING
The architects of the ingenious effort at dubbing were the colonial administrators and their retinue of specialists, technicians, and experts. Given the decentralized nature of French colonial rule, the local administrators may have been the actual makers of much of French imperialism in Africa.29 But their commandement would have amounted to nothing had the colonial administrators not been able to rely on the counsels and even guidance of the colonial experts. During the early moments of the drive toward mise en valeur, for instance, geographers and engineers had to survey the newly acquired territories to make them legible for colonial rule. In a similar vein, military engineers had to build roads, railways, bridges, and canals while doctors and medical biologists were making sure the outre-mer was free from debilitating germs and diseases. Without these efforts, the realization of the project of mise en valeur would have proved elusive. After the Second World War, this pattern of collaboration between science, technology, and colonial rule was maintained and extended with the addition of the dubbing of American modernization theory by colonial experts.
Even while the war was still raging, American diplomats had anticipated that a US-led global market economy would be the basis for any reconstruction efforts. In this regard, Washington economic planners designed programs to boost productivity around the world in an attempt to bridge the postwar “dollar gap” and the wider trade imbalance between the United States and its European partners.30 Typically, the planners believed that the reconstruction of Europe and the stability of the wider world were untenable unless foreign governments managed their economies according to the dictates of consumer capitalism. To this end, the Economic Cooperation Administration (ECA) brought thousands of visitors to the United States to expose them to American modernity in the hope that they would replicate an American model of development once they returned to their home countries.31
Among these visitors, French officials and executives numbered in the thousands. Between 1949 and 1956, some 335 French missions went to the United States, totaling around 3,700 people.32 As a rule, the French travelers wanted to learn about the “causes and methods of American high productivity.”33 The more enthusiastic members of French delegations used the opportunity of the transatlantic voyage to initiate critical self-examinations of their own society.34 At the same time, many productivity missionaries struggled to adapt the American gospel to the realities of metropolitan France.35
The job of the French colonial administrators and experts who visited the United States was even more complicated. With anticolonial nationalism on the rise, one mission proposal suggested, the colonial administrators had to minimize the time-consuming process of trial and error inherent to development practice. It went on to argue that the focus should be on speeding up colonial productivity by the introduction of American machinery.36 This proposal was confirmed in subsequent reports. For instance, after his second month touring the United States, P. Labrousse concluded that while a “tremendous work of verification” would be needed, it was “more likely that we would end up trying some of the machines in our pilot regions.”37 Saint Hippolite adopted the same position when he argued that France had no other option but to “bring some [American machines] to our possessions.”38 A few colonial scientists joined the missionary wave. Such was the case of the Ivory Coast–based Hubert Moulinier, who spent four months in the United States studying agronomic issues. At the end of his visit, the chef de travaux de laboratoires returned to West Africa convinced that many American methods, if adapted judiciously, could improve the productivity of such tropical cash crops as coffee and cocoa.39
The United States did not provide leadership to the French only in the field of agronomy. The French envoys also looked up to such American social experiments as race relations, from which they