African Miracle, African Mirage. Abou B. Bamba
Introduction
So before we encounter what was or was not modern we are left with an initial problem of specifying what it is or was that could at any point be regarded traditional. If that is defined, as it has been by some, as involving continuity, repetition and relative lack of choice, we would have to conclude that there had never [. . .] been such a moment or such a place in that extensive West African History for which we have anything like substantiated evidence. That which might appear to be traditional to an uninformed stranger was and is firstly subject to incessant change and it was also the product of generations of imaginative cultural bricoleurs.
—Richard Rathbone, “West Africa” (2002)
WHAT COULD BE MORE FITTING in opening a book on (post)colonial modernization in Africa than the reflections of Richard Rathbone, one of the doyens of African studies of our times? Rightly as the British Africanist puts it, there is a rather long tradition of people’s engagement with modernity in the history of West Africa.1 It would seem even more appropriate to flesh out such a claim in this introductory chapter and show, for instance, the many micropolitics of domestication of the modern in this part of the world that seemingly sits (and has always lived) outside the realm of modernity; to substantiate that Africans indeed are key agents in the transformation of their societies; to demonstrate that the people of the African continent were present at the birth of modernity. However, I have chosen to proceed with a different vignette—one that emphasizes not only the significance of the mid- to late twentieth century in the history of modernization worldwide but, more importantly, the pervasiveness of American factors and the frictions they raised in the unfolding of developmentalism in Francophone Africa. Perhaps a brief foray into the memoir of David E. Lilienthal, one of the omnipresent faces of the American modernization paradigm in the twentieth century and a character whom we shall meet episodically in this book, will highlight this point succinctly.2
In March 1961, the American Lilienthal, a man whose name was intimately associated with the world-acclaimed Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), paid a visit to Abidjan—capital of the newly independent state of Ivory Coast. Unlike most Americans who had ventured to Africa before decolonization and immediately thereafter, Lilienthal was neither on a safari nor on a scholarly field-trip expedition. Rather, the man, then past his sixties, had come to the West African country to add the finishing touches to a contract that the Ivorian government was negotiating with Development and Resources Corporation (D&R), the transnational firm that he had set up when he retired from the public sector. Although consulting for the mineral development of the country, Lilienthal—as former director of the TVA—could not help but visit Ivory Coast’s first hydroelectric dam. And in the March 18 entry of his journal, the assiduous diary keeper noted:
Visited the [Ayamé I] dam about noon—a medium-sized concrete gravity and earth fill, total capacity about 30,000 kw; only one of the two generators now being required. When we arrived the only person on duty was an intelligent young African, at the power-control board. The French technicians, quite a group, some of them students, were at the canteen having an apéritif. After lunch, with the engineer in charge, a Frenchman, we returned to the power station; again the only man around the place was a tall, friendly, handsome Ivorian.
Said the homesick French engineer: “We can’t trust the Africans with so complicated a thing as a dam and powerhouse; they must always have someone watching over them.”
Nuts.
While he was saying this he and his quite beautiful bride of three months (from Nancy in Lorraine) were giving us an elaborate and delicious luncheon, served with elegance in the heart of