African Miracle, African Mirage. Abou B. Bamba
modernization theory, which, as a particular variation of and a carrier of a distinctive vision of modernity, was mobilized to achieve ecosocial changes as well as checkmate the spread of communism. It was largely this variation of modernity/development (along with the tools to achieve it) that was institutionalized in the World Bank and other agencies of the post-1945 new world order.54 Finally, one can see in the developmentalist ethos of the late twentieth century the temporalities of local politics that have so well been mapped out in the critical ethnographies of development.55
Building on the pioneering works of historians of development and the insights of such anthropologists as Arjun Appadurai, Emily Martin, and George Marcus, I posit development packaging as a commodity-like object whose social/cultural life should be explored at the various sites of its production, mediation, and consumption.56 Much like Martin in her analysis of immunity in American culture, I have deliberately crossed “back and forth across the borders between the institutions in which scientists produce knowledge [. . .] and the wider [Ivorian] society,” which was supposed to receive the benefits of progress in the form of modernization.57 This translocal approach complicates our understanding of the US Cold War development initiatives toward Ivory Coast, for it demonstrates that development was much more than the material and supposedly moral transformation of a society according to a hegemonic French or American model. In fact, it suggests that it is through the mapping and analysis of dialogues among experts, diplomats, bureaucrats, local brokers, and the general population that we will come to a more profound understanding of late twentieth-century modernity.58
As part of my effort to make this translocal research approach more efficient, I interviewed people who planned, enforced, witnessed, and underwent the discipline inherent in the implementation of development projects. These oral histories enabled me to “read” written sources, both archival and published, in new ways. In fact, I used a mass of diplomatic records and official policy papers for an appreciation of the moral/ethical foundation of policy making, and the press and academic literature for the formulation of opinions, then and now. Opting to use news stories and scholarly articles as performative speech acts along with official records and oral interviews finds its justification in the ubiquitous presence of these journalistic, scholarly, and even popular sources in the archives and personal papers of many a policy maker.59
These uses of written and oral sources, and the deployment of an interdisciplinary approach, have allowed me to provide a fresh perspective on the history of developmentalism in the wake of the Cold War. In the last decade or so, there has been an explosion of historical studies that focus attention on American involvement in modernization efforts in various parts of the world to undercut the appeal of Soviet internationalism. Others have shown that the Soviet Union and even communist China attempted similar transnational modernization efforts to make friends.60 By zooming in on the case of America’s role in Ivorian modernization drives, the book reminds us that places receiving US-inflected modernization packages were hardly blank slates. Rather, they had a long history of engagement with modernity—whether in its precolonial manifestations, colonial guise, or otherwise. The narrative recounted here suggests that local actors in Ivory Coast constantly used the unwritten script of such a longer history of engagement with cosmopolitanism, along with their embodied memories of the modern, to “domesticate” foreign development assistance in the twentieth century. Here, then, as never before, the “glocal” characteristics of modernity become manifest.
MAIN ARTICULATIONS OF THE BOOK
To substantiate the claims sketched out above, I have divided African Miracle, African Mirage into three parts that are largely (but not exclusively) chronological and thematic. Titled “The Postwar Years,” part 1 (chapters 1 and 2) focuses on the years between 1946 and 1960. It is set in the context of the rise of the American Century, the emerging Cold War, transformations in the colonial rule of European powers, and decolonization. It highlights the roots/routes of the Ivorian miracle by underlining the importance of the African-led cash-crop revolution in its unfolding. This section also demonstrates the role of the postwar modernization drive and how such socioeconomic phenomenon was informed by an American-inflected modernization theory. Part 2, “The Decade of Development” (chapters 3–5), sheds light on the changes that followed the cascade of independence proclamations in the 1960s. It demonstrates the difficulty for the leaders of the newly independent Ivory Coast to overcome the legacy of late colonialism and the appeal of postwar modernization theory, even as they initiated a nation-building strategy based on regional planning. To support this point, the section fleshes out, among other things, two modernization projects that crystallized the pervasive presence of American ideas in the Ivorian modernization drive. Part 3, “The Fate of Modernization” (chapters 6 and 7), brings the story to the 1970s when signs that the Ivorian model had been built on shaky ground became visible. It also places the last years of the Ivorian miracle in the global context of the oil shocks of the decade—a conjuncture that paved the way for the emergence of recession and subsequent structural-adjustment programs.
Chapter 1 focuses on the infrastructural development boom in postwar Ivory Coast. Tracking the logic of late colonial developmentalist efforts, I reveal the continuity between the policy of mise en valeur that was implemented in the interwar period and postwar modernization ideology. The chapter also uncovers the role of colonial agronomic research and, more importantly, the agency of African farmers in turning this once-backwater territory of French West Africa into a model colony that attracted investors beyond metropolitan France. Such conjuncture illuminates the interest of the United States in socioeconomic processes in Ivory Coast.
Chapter 2 is an examination of the ways in which French colonial administrators responded to the implicit critique that modernization theory raised against their rule in French Africa. In particular, I highlight the logics that informed the French policy of dubbing modernization discourse. Increasingly aware of the threat that the coming of the American Century posed to the maintenance of French rule in Ivory Coast and other parts of the outre-mer (overseas territories), French colonial authorities opted to translate American-inflected modernization concepts into the language of a rejuvenated mise en valeur of their “dependent” territories. Such a move was all the more clever since it secured the steady flow of American Marshall Plan funds into the French Empire while providing a timely answer to the politics of triangulation that some nationalist leaders had just begun to articulate. As it turned out, the reappropriation of modernization theory proved insufficient. In fact, most of France’s colonies, including Ivory Coast, gained their independence by the end of 1960.
Chapter 3 investigates how the coming of independence provided an opportunity to reframe development planning in Ivory Coast. I begin this chapter by looking at the dilemma faced by the Ivorian leadership in the field of human resources. Decolonization had meant for many nationalists just an Africanization of the staff that managed a largely Euro-American type of bureaucratic state in an African setting. But meeting the demand of filling vacancies led the Ivorian leaders to resort to international cooperation as a viable alternative to what some of them called “cut-rate” Africanization. Having proved themselves a reliable source of expertise, French researchers from the Office de la Recherche Scientifique et Technique Outre-Mer came to dominate the design of Ivorian postcolonial modernization. Furthermore, they attempted to bring regional concerns—styled after the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA)—into Ivorian development planning. Rejecting a sectoral understanding of development, the Orstomians would reintroduce spatial analysis as a central parameter in any postcolonial nation-building effort undertaken by the