African Miracle, African Mirage. Abou B. Bamba

       Preface and Acknowledgments

      This book is about the not-so-distant past of Ivory Coast. It is an attempt to shed light on the political economy that informed how the country became an African miracle of sorts in the three decades that preceded the 1980s. It opens a window onto those years when agricultural production went up, deep-sea ports were constructed, hydroelectric dams were built, and an apparent welfare state was instituted; all of which left an impressive paper trail. Thereafter, the phenomenal economic growth of the country seemingly came to a halt, a situation that comforted the predictions of those who had early on argued that the spectacular growth of the Ivorian economy was built on shaky ground. At the current conjuncture where talks on a new Ivorian economic miracle abound, I want to provide a historical analysis that interrogates the past and moves the country’s international history beyond the familiar terrain of the Françafrique. This is achieved through a transnational history approach that attends to both local and global forces to understand the making and remaking of the so-called “Glorious Years” of Ivory Coast.

      From the outset, I want to make it clear that this is not a work in economics. Rather, I reflect historically on the larger “social life” of some economic ideas. In fact, the project of this book began as a doctoral dissertation in history. Its primary goal in that first iteration was to provide a theoretically informed historical critique of US-led development efforts in late colonial and postcolonial Ivory Coast. My initial inclination was to offer a typical bilateral history of the foreign relations between the United States and Ivory Coast over the latter’s modernization. But a new and creative look at the legacy of France’s colonial past in Ivory Coast, the US Cold War crusades, and France’s neocolonial projects in Francophone Africa soon turned the notion of a bilateral relationship between Abidjan and Washington into a dynamic triad and more.

      From this perspective, then, one of the issues that this project aimed to address and still relates to is the triangulated conceptualizations of development in Ivory Coast, the United States, and France. While the US perspective on these conceptualizations will be of prime concern, a look at the way Ivorian elite and French colonial bureaucrats and later coopérants conceived of the modernization of Ivory Coast will also be explored. In effect, given the historical French (neo)colonial presence in Ivory Coast, it was important to inquire into how France perceived US involvement in Ivorian development. Were there attempts on the part of the French to collaborate with the Americans, or were they out to sabotage, as some US sources suggest, American efforts in Ivory Coast development projects? Moreover, how did the Ivorian elite react to both France and the United States as providers of developmental assistance and the ultimate example of modernity at work? Did they have their own alternative ways of undertaking development? What input (if any) did the people involved in the implementation of modernization projects bring to development as experienced in Ivory Coast? How did the Ivorian people who were supposed to receive the benefits of development negotiate its inherent regime of discipline?

      These are some of the issues that the book has set itself to address. In my attempt to provide answers to the questions posed above, I have adopted an approach that is informed not only by diplomatic/transnational history, historical geography, and the anthropology of knowledge production in its interaction with society and social change. My analysis also draws inspiration from the social and critical studies regarding the moral economy of developmentalism. Moreover, I have purposefully engaged Ivorian (and African) scholars and intellectuals whose voices, as a rule, rarely find their way into the mainstream debates on political economy and its transnational history. Much more could have been said, as I sketch out in the conclusion of this book. But it is my hope that what has been initiated here will inspire others and that we will pay a more critical attention to the very production of knowledge regarding the Ivorian miracle.

      . . .

      A work of this magnitude could not have been completed without the assistance of many people and institutions from Ivory Coast, France, and the United States. I would like to acknowledge the generosity of many of them: First, my heartfelt thanks to the University of Abidjan-Cocody, the US Department of State, the French Ministry of Culture, and Georgia State University for granting me fellowships that allowed me to initiate this project as a doctoral dissertation. Later, the Kennedy Library Foundation, the LBJ Library Foundation, Hobart and William Smith Colleges, and Gettysburg College offered short-term grants that covered expenses to conduct further research and deepen the findings of the project and ultimately turn the dissertation into a book. In tending to such work, I benefited from the assistance