African Miracle, African Mirage. Abou B. Bamba
from Assinie to Tabou was far from a tabula rasa where the French came to inscribe the first modernist signs. Such precolonial modernity also existed in other parts of the territory. In the northern and midwestern regions, for instance, many polities had been involved in long-distance trading activities that connected the forest zones to the savanna, the Sahelian corners of West Africa, and even to the Mediterranean world. In the Southwest, there had equally existed numerous transregional exchanges that resulted in innovative cultural changes and technological advances.17
To argue the existence of this precolonial modernity does not mean that the arrival of the French in the area was inconsequential. In fact, the extension of France’s imperial control went hand in hand with a vast program of infrastructural development that expanded the zone of interactions among groups as it made the movement of people and ideas within the borders of French West Africa much easier.18 No sooner did effective occupation and colonization become the option for the imperial state than the French began constructing wharves, roads, and a south-north rail line.19 In 1900, planning began to equip the colony with a reliable seaport. In the meantime, the building of the railroad (see map I.1), which had started in 1904, reached such localities as Agboville (1906), Dimbokro (1910), Bouaké (1912), Katiola (1923), and Ferkessédougou (1928). Finally, the Assagny Canal was dug in 1929, to link the Ebrié Lagoon to the estuary of the Bandama River and the Grand-Lahou lagoon network, in an effort to make coastal trading more efficient.20
As in other parts of the empire, French concerns for the development of the natural resources of Ivory Coast were almost coeval with the project of imperial expansion. While the systematic exploitation of woods, ivory, and wild rubber began as early as the late nineteenth century, the limitations of such an extractive economic approach soon became evident and a need for a remedy emerged. Thus, in the early twentieth century, through trial and error, French colonial authorities experimented with European plantation agriculture and later embarked on the promotion of native-run commercial agriculture. These experiments had initially mixed results. The end of the First World War, however, marked a turning point in this new approach. In the aftermath of the war, the new agricultural policy that centered on the natives became articulated as a legitimate governmental policy when the minister for the colonies, Albert Sarraut, conceived the doctrine of mise en valeur.21
In a bid to make colonialism pay for itself, but also in an explicit effort to curb perceived communist-led agitation in France’s colonial possessions, Sarraut indeed argued that “economic development was essential to limit the popular appeal of leftist ideas to colonized peoples.”22 Equally premised on the interwar ideas of developmentalism and politique indigène—the conceit that a new policy that paternalistically respected indigenous culture(s) was essential to lead the natives into progress—Sarraut’s doctrine envisioned a renovated colonial governmentality as the surest road to secure the welfare of the colonial subjects.23 More critically, however, mise en valeur was designed to help France revive its economy after the First World War. This was all the more necessary since the war had left metropolitan France crippled and its citizens demoralized.24
MAP I.1. Ivory Coast and French infrastructural development, ca. 1930. Cartography by author.
The implementation of mise en valeur echoed the practices that the British were deploying in their own empire. Thus, in the French colonies as much as in the British ones, the gradual accumulation of practical knowledge on the colonial subjects, on their mores, their lands, and their agronomic practices, proved essential.25 Minister Sarraut made such doctrine clear when he suggested that science, a systematic imperial division of labor (between metropole and colonies), and the notion of comparative advantage should guide France in a rational development of its empire.26 Although the trend had started in an early decade of the twentieth century, the ministerial sanction of rational exploitation did accelerate the transformation of the various botanical and trial gardens (jardins d’essais) into science-backed experimentation centers geared toward finding and creating improved seeds and plant breeds for colonial agriculture.27 In addition to merging the Ecole Nationale Supérieure d’Agriculture Coloniale and the Jardin Colonial into an Institut National d’Agronomie Tropicale (INAC) in the metropole in 1921, the imperial decision makers worked to change agronomic institutions in the colonies. In this drive, the Dabou and Bingerville botanical gardens in Ivory Coast that had been created at the beginning of French rule were upgraded to become experimental stations charged with studying cocoa, coffee, cola nuts, and other tropical crops. New agronomic stations were also set up in the colony after 1920, including the Bouaké station, which was charged with studying cotton; a station at La Mé meant to focus on oil palm tree research; and the Man station, which specialized in both coffee and cinchona.28
While these early investments in applied research and infrastructural development boosted the local economy, it was ultimately the actions of the colonial subjects in Ivory Coast that set the stage for what would become an agricultural revolution in the territory. Well before the incorporation of the Ivorian territory into the expanding French West African Empire, some people in the southwestern regions of Ivory Coast had developed coffee and later cocoa plantations. However, the coming of the French and their focus on the southeastern seaboard led to the decline of this first experiment in tree cropping.29 Some decades later, cash cropping resumed in the colony, this time with white colonists whom the colonial state supported and on the eastern border as its geographic base. By the 1920s, however, African farmers—in a move that echoed the choices of planters in the nearby Gold Coast—had emerged as the leading producers of coffee and cocoa.30 Thus, on the eve of the Second World War, some of the key ingredients for the eventual boom of the Ivorian economy had been clearly, if modestly, set in place. These included not only the construction of a network of roads, a rail line, and lagoon water lanes to make movement easier, but also the expansion of African-initiated cash cropping in the forest regions—a development that relied on the manual labor of the northerners, many of whom had migrated or were made to migrate to cocoa and coffee plantations in the southern half of the territory.31
The first signs that the Africans would defend their interests against the colonists were also visible. For instance, in an article that he wrote in 1932, Félix Houphouët-Boigny—an African doctor, a cash-crop planter, and the future independence leader who ultimately came to dominate politics in Ivory Coast—denounced the exploitative practices of the French import-export firms and their associated colonial trading houses, and called for a fair price for the products of the African farmers.32 The postwar era would amplify these historical trends. Even more, the rise of the American Century and the onset of the global Cold War would interact to complicate the story of Ivory Coast’s bid for development. For if the process of social change since 1893 had largely been the outcome of Franco-African interactions, after the Second World War, the United States and other global forces would insert themselves into the Ivorian visions of modernity. As will become clear, this new conjuncture would decidedly renew the problematic of Ivory Coast’s postwar economic growth.
PROBLEMATIZING THE “IVORIAN MIRACLE”
The Ivorian method and efforts toward achieving a capitalist modernity in the twentieth century have always been subject to impassioned debates among scholars and development practitioners alike. Many analysts have specifically underlined the benefits of implementing flexible planning measures, the creation of parastatal corporation, or the use of the mechanism of a Budget spécial d’investissement et d’équipement (special budget for public investment and infrastructural development, or BSIE). Even though some experts criticized French hegemonic control of Ivory Coast’s economy from the late 1950s through the early 1980s, almost all those who assessed the postwar evolution of the African country concluded that its socioeconomic achievements were indeed impressive.33 The completion of a deep-sea harbor in the capital city of Abidjan in 1951 marked the beginning of an economic boom that soon helped the country to displace Senegal as the most successful of France’s colonial possessions in West Africa. After independence in 1960, Ivory Coast continued its