African Miracle, African Mirage. Abou B. Bamba
coupled with an “open door” policy to attract cheap labor from neighboring countries like Burkina Faso, Mali, and Guinea, the nation indulged in an extensive cash-crop cultivation that soon turned the country into the world’s largest producer of cocoa and the third-biggest producer of coffee. By the late 1960s, these two primary products, together with timber, provided 70 percent of the government’s earnings and 40 percent of its national budget. Even more, with an annual growth rate of 7 percent in the 1950s, domestic growth reached the double digits in the early 1970s. By the late 1970s, however, the Ivorian miracle had turned into a mirage, an economic illusion whose reverberations still inform people’s reading of the country’s current sociopolitical predicament. How can one make sense of this dramatic shift and of the historicism that it begot? What role can a serene historical analysis play in such a quest for meaning? What was the role of local Ivorians and transnational forces in shaping the so-called Ivorian miracle and its eventual decline?
In the wake of political commentators and activists, scholars have long underscored the role of France in the making of the Ivorian economic miracle. If anything, the presence of an exceptionally high number of French expatriate and immigrant communities in Ivory Coast since the 1950s has provided undeniable evidence of the “privileged” relations between Ivory Coast and France with regard to the politics of Ivorian development. In particular, William Zartman and Christopher Delgado have supported this point by showing that postcolonial Ivory Coast had the “highest number of French technical assistants in Africa, the highest number of students in French universities, and the highest number of large French firms in any African country.”34 Other scholars have rightly demonstrated how Ivory Coast’s political economy crystallizes the drawbacks of neocolonial Franco-African relations, especially the power of the infamous Françafrique on the Ivorian economy.35
There is no denying that the scholarship on Franco-Ivorian relations within the frame of Françafrique has added much to our understanding of the Ivorian miracle and its immediate beneficiaries. Still, much has been obscured by an excessive reliance on an unpacked paradigm that downplays the power of forces outside French and African elite decision makers. In contradistinction to such a view that casts France as the unchallenged foreign power in post/colonial Ivory Coast, African Miracle, African Mirage argues that Ivorian leaders wittily contested the hegemony of Paris by appealing to the United States to become involved in targeted areas of the Ivorian politics of development. While they never pushed for a dramatic break from the former colonial power, Houphouët-Boigny and his companions also repeatedly wooed Washington to provide development assistance. These overtures to the Americans created triangulated relationships whose frictions, together with the structure of the world system, opened and shut many possibilities for the Ivorian post/colony.36
Using a multiarchival and international history approach, African Miracle, African Mirage revisits these frictions along with the contested trajectory of Ivory Coast’s modernization up to the early 1980s. Focusing on the multi-stranded interactions among Ivorians, French, and Americans, the book narrates the course of the unusual, if short-lived, success story of an export-led economic growth in Africa. In the study, I attempt to complicate and explain historically why the Ivorian economic miracle of the 1950s and 1960s turned into a mirage by the late 1970s. The book also inquires whether the Ivorian failure to modernize along the path drawn by modernization theorists was really due to the inherent fragility of the national economic system. Should part of the blame be put on the shortsightedness of the local bourgeoisie, as suggested by dependency theorists? If this is the case, what role did US support of the autocratic Ivorian regime play in the unfolding of the Ivorian miracle? What role did common Ivorians, especially farmers, play in this fantastic story of modernization gone awry?
In tackling these questions, this work breaks new ground in the study of development in Africa and, especially, in Francophone West Africa’s leading country. Samir Amin’s seminal opus on capitalism in Ivory Coast had concluded in 1967 that an Ivorian economic miracle was unsustainable; in fact, it was a classic case of “growth without development” since foreign capital and extrinsic factors were the driving engine of expansion.37 This thesis would have a lasting impact on subsequent discussions on the merits and demerits of the Ivorian model. Not only did the Ivorian government itself try to engage the Aminian ideas, but other scholars also came up with their own readings of the economic experience of Ivory Coast. For instance, in a frontal rebuttal of Amin’s fundamental claim, Henrik Marcussen and Jens Torp argued in 1979 that Ivory Coast was well on its way toward self-sustained development. Writing almost a quarter of a century after the Egyptian Marxist economist’s initial pronouncement, John Rapley also challenged both Amin’s conclusions and the very premises of his argument. Analyzing data he collected during fieldwork in Ivory Coast in the 1980s, he offered that “Ivoirien capitalism is healthy and dynamic.” Taking the counterpoint of Amin’s thesis, Rapley claimed that “the growth of capitalism in Côte d’Ivoire [Ivory Coast]—which nobody questions, even if they often doubt its prospects—would arguably not have occurred had it not been for Ivoirien capital.”38 Other analysts and scholars, including experts at the World Bank, Elliot Berg, Bonnie Campbell, Yves-André Fauré and Jean-François Médard, Moustapha Diabaté, and a new crop of young social scientists, have participated in (and continue to contribute to) the debate over the nature, sources, and limits of the country’s model of exceptional economic expansion.39
It seems, though, that the scholarly confrontation over Ivory Coast reached a stalemate a long time ago, mostly because the ultimate fate of the Ivorian model of development is like a moving target whose end appears always projected into a never-ending future. So, while I partake in the discussions on the origins and destiny of the Ivorian experiment in modernization in the aftermath of the Second World War, I do so in order to bring a historian’s perspective into a largely economics-centered debate. Engaging with the economists but also using them as historical subjects who performatively participated in the (re)making of the Ivorian model, I deploy a historical sociology of knowledge and insights from (post)colonial studies to shed light not only on policy making and its consequences, but also on the discursive postures that social scientists adopted to name and challenge what ultimately is best labeled as Ivory Coast’s “Thirty Glorious Years.” Such epistemology and interdisciplinary historical approach have the advantage of bringing to the fore the idea that not only did local actors shape the politics of development in Ivory Coast, but transnational agents such as France’s Ivorianist social scientists and American financial institutions were key forces in the rise and eventual crisis of the Ivorian miracle.
A TANGLE OF PLAYERS: TRANSNATIONALISM AND STATE-LED DEVELOPMENT
The protagonists of the story of Ivorian development were many: peasant farmers and cash-crop planters, colonial bureaucrats, diplomats, corporations, experts, radical students/intellectuals, and more. Ideals regarding the good life and their translations into policy actions could also be seen as part of the cast of characters. In emphasizing their entangled geographies across nation-states, I place the history of Ivory Coast’s modernization in a transnational perspective. That is, in a vista that looks at “processes which can no longer be clearly assigned either to states or—as suggested by the model of ‘inter-national politics’—to the area between states.”40 Unlike the assumption of certain authors, this recognition of the power of transnationalism need not imply that state actors were no longer important. It does mean, however, that in explaining national histories, one has to take into account the “direct horizontal transactions between societal actors of different nation-states, transactions which bypass the institutions of government but strongly affect their margin of maneuver; the various forms of mutual penetration of formally separate entities; and the growing activities of a number of nonstate actors.”41
Revisiting the era of the 1970s and 1980s, when there emerged a debate on the significance of multinational corporations (MNCs) in the development process of Third World countries, sheds a new light on this point. In the academic dispute that pitted dependency theorists against neoclassical economists, liberal economists had claimed that MNCs were great conduits for development since they not only provided needed foreign investment, but also because their presence in a country resulted in intended and unintended knowledge spillovers that usually accrue to the host countries.42 In contrast, neo-Marxists