African Miracle, African Mirage. Abou B. Bamba
the developing world led to a mix of economic retardation, unequal development, and the furthering of underdevelopment. Ultimately, MNCs only extended the reach of global capitalism while it perpetuated the peripheral status of host countries.43
This is not the space in which to review the voluminous literature on the debate between the two schools—such task having been undertaken by other scholars. Suffice it to suggest, however, that in spite of their ideological opposition, both sides seemed to agree on the fact of the transnationalism of MNCs as a historical force in the political economy of postcolonial countries. By the same token, one can argue, the movement of multinational corporations across the borders of nation-states in the Global South emerged as a historiographical category.44
Unfortunately, empirical studies that historicized the operation of the MNCs were scarce, and the focus on their activities did not usually go beyond financial or industrial organization theories. This was particularly true for MNC studies that brought attention onto Ivory Coast.45 It is insightful, then, that many of the academic participants in the debate on multinational firms missed the opportunity to assess the performative acts of their peers and colleagues as agents of transnationalism in the saga of development and modernity in the Global South. Yet academic knowledge production was never an end in itself. In fact, scholars, their research, and the eventual circulation of the knowledge that they manufactured in the form of expertise usually acted as a transnational force whose power was mobilized by various constituents of the Ivorian postcolonial state. This was not unlike the relationship between knowledge producers and the colonial state or international institutions that aspired to act as purveyors of global governance. For instance, in the postwar period, as Frederick Cooper and Randall Packard have suggested,
the problem of development gave rise to a veritable industry in the social sciences, with a complex and often ambiguous relationship to governmental, international, and private agencies actively engaged in promoting economic growth, alleviating poverty, and fostering beneficial social change in “developing” regions of the world. From Oxfam to the United States Agency for International Development to the World Bank to rice research institutes in India to the World Health Organization, a diverse and complex set of institutions—funded with billions of dollars—has focused on research and action directed toward development.46
As will become clear in subsequent chapters, the activities of France’s Société d’Etudes pour le Développement Economique et Social (SEDES) and, especially, the work of the Office de la Recherche Scientifique et Technique Outre-Mer (ORSTOM) admirably illustrate this entangled process in Ivory Coast. Set up in the early 1940s to help coordinate the activities of French applied scientists working in the overseas territories in the midst of a changing world, the latter quickly evolved to become an indispensable institution whose power helped France to maintain its dominance over various parts of the Francophone world.47
In Ivory Coast, it was partly the maneuvers of the French state that resulted in ORSTOM’s eventual hegemonic presence in the West African country. But the transnationalization of knowledge production and circulation need not always flow through state officials. This is particularly poignant in recent historical studies on the circulation of the Tennessee Valley Authority’s notion of regional planning, which show the significance of nonstate actors like philanthropic foundations in spreading the TVA model of modernization in Asia and beyond.48 We shall further elaborate on the Ivorian ramifications of this circulation of the TVA idea in chapter 4 and show how it illustrates the pertinence of a transnational history approach to understand Ivory Coast’s bid for a US-inflected postwar modernity. In other instances, as we shall discuss in chapters 5 and 6, the circulation of developmentalist ideas was realized because of an intricate interaction among experts, diplomats, bureaucrats, and scholars who ultimately acted as brokers of modernization.
The players in the saga of state-led development in Ivory Coast were therefore numerous, and their actions were not always in the headlines. This is partly so because the implementation of modernization ideas did not necessarily produce titanic encounters. In this sense, French socio-anthropologist Jean-Pierre Olivier de Sardan’s insight that “interactions between the developmentalist configuration and African populations do not occur as dramatic confrontation” could not be more on target. In fact, the developmentalist encounters operated through “discreet passageways, relays, extended or restricted networks of transmission, interfaces.” To be sure, this means that modernization was, “fundamentally, a process that relies on mediation, which proceeds through a wide range of multiple, embedded, overlapping, intertwined mediations.”49 The story of ORSTOM’s Ivorianists, between 1947 when the institution’s Ivory Coast branch was inaugurated and the 1980s when part of the institution’s asset was Ivorianized, sheds an intriguing light on one aspect of this mediation. Even more, as will be developed later in the book, the ORSTOM developmentalist foray into the West African country complicates the traditional narrative on the transnational circulation of knowledge since the beneficiaries of the Orstomian knowledge spillover were not exclusively the Ivorians. A critical engagement with the multiple sites and archives of Ivory Coast’s modernization élan will make this ever more evident.
METHOD, SOURCES, AND VISIONS FOR A NEW HISTORY
With the present trend to internationalize the historical study of Africa, a resort to multiarchival research to explore the Ivorian miracle should not come as a surprise. The interactive global context of Cold War development projects analyzed in this book also makes my study a multisited and translocal endeavor. In a sense, this should be obvious, especially if one remembers that US relations with Ivory Coast had ramifications for US relations with France. The triangular (and even multilateral) character of US relations with former French colonies in a Cold War context has been aptly demonstrated. More specifically, historically minded scholars who have embraced an international history approach to study postwar developmentalism have revealed that US-led modernization efforts in the Global South antagonized the interests of the European (colonial) powers.50
Departing from this scholarly literature on postwar modernization and Americanization that largely focuses on Latin America and Asia, I argue that the export of American developmental precepts affected (post)colonial Francophone Africa as well, even though the process itself was mediated through France. I show that the promise of American-style modernization provided an opportunity for anticolonial nationalists to triangulate the relationship between Ivory Coast and France beginning in the late 1940s. The ensuing politics of triangulation allowed the Americans to insert themselves into the seemingly tight filial bond between Ivory Coast and France. This new trilateral political configuration contributed to the delegitimization of the French colonialist mission, forcing colonial officials and scholars, and later French postcolonial diplomats, development workers, and social scientists, to resort to what I call “dubbing,” the process by which American-inflected models of development were seemingly translated into French ideas and policies. While it opened new spaces for negotiation, the competition between the French and the Americans also produced a schizophrenic dynamic in the implementation of modernization projects during the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s.51
My resort to a multisited approach is motivated less by the dynamics of the international situation (or even the triangular nature of my project) than by the way I conceive of development—the phenomenological object/process of my inquiry. Specialists in various fields of the social sciences have defined the concept in terms of national prosperity, alleviation of poverty, and increased purchasing power for individuals; all of which points to what has been aptly called the “secular telos of material redemption.”52 Without discarding this materialist perspective altogether, I want to regard development as a nexus of moral discourses and a set of social practices traversed by multiple temporalities. There were certainly at stake the material objectives of increasing capital investment, transferring technology, and achieving economic well-being through the “rational” exploitation of the environment; goals in which the perceptive observer can see the influence of the so-called European Enlightenment to which postwar development is discursively linked through colonialism.53