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Becoming an Attractive Colony

As to the Ivory Coast, it is without any doubt the richest, actually and potentially, of all the French African territories. The Ivory Coast produces the bulk—about 60,000 tons—of French West African coffee, practically the whole of its cocoa and timber, and also bananas, palm oil, palm kernels, cotton, and kapock; indeed, everything that the African soil can produce is to be found there, and its future promises to be bright.

—A. H. S., “Progress in French W. Africa,” World Today (1951)

WHEN THE COLONY OF Ivory Coast was formally established in 1893, few observers would have predicted that the youngest territory among France’s colonial possessions in West Africa would become the engine of the imperial economy in the region. Although it was not landlocked, the new colony had no natural harbor. It certainly was not a desert, but the immense luxuriant forest that the territory boasted in the South was generally perceived as a “green inferno” inhabited largely by wicked cannibals. In addition, the expansion of the Samorian Empire to the north of the fledgling colony threatened to put a halt to France’s ambition to establish a viable colonial state in the area. This danger was compounded by the actions of Baule chiefs in the middle section of the territory, who, along with other resisters to European encroachment, continued their opposition to French rule.¹ In the space of half a century, however, the colony that Governor Maurice Lapalud once called the “Cinderella of French West Africa” turned out to be the “milking cow” of France’s West African Empire. In newspapers, magazines, and even academic journals (as the epigraph shows), the territory inexorably came to be hailed as an attractive regional hub whose economic dynamism made Ivory Coast the engine of development for the entire group of French possessions in the area.²

This chapter elaborates on this new imagination of Ivory Coast as it inquires into the postwar foundations and consequences of the boom that the territory witnessed in the aftermath of the Second World War. Locating partly the origins of the perceptual change in the infrastructural development that the Fonds d’Investissement pour le Développement Economique et Social (Investment Fund for Economic and Social Development, or FIDES) wrought in France’s overseas territories, and critically tracking the logic of this exercise in late colonial developmentalism, the chapter reveals a certain continuity between the policy of mise en valeur (development/exploitation) deployed in the interwar period and postwar modernization ideology and practices. While colonial bureaucrats and their retinue of experts contributed to the birthing of the Ivorian regime of miracle, the chapter suggests that it was ultimately the agency of African farmers that proved decisive in turning this once-backwater territory of French West Africa into a model colony that attracted investors beyond metropolitan France.

SHAPING UP POSTWAR IVORY COAST

If colonial statistics are to be trusted, the transformation of Ivory Coast in the aftermath of the Second World War must have then been an impressive achievement. Between 1947 and the early 1950s, for instance, the combined agricultural output of cash crops such as tobacco, pineapples, and bananas grew almost five times. Similarly, commercial food crops like rice increased from 74,400 tons to 118,300 tons. In the meantime, the export of coffee beans grew from 36,000 tons in 1945 to 61,000 tons in 1949. The export of cocoa beans showed a similar upsurge, evolving from 26,000 tons in 1944 to more than 56,000 tons five years later. There was much more: with these dramatic increases in agricultural outputs, the Ivorian share in the overall export of French West Africa went up from 22 percent before the war to almost 50 percent at the beginning of the last decade of French colonial rule.³

Changes in the Ivorian agrarian world resulted from demographic transformations, which, in turn, were partly fed by the expansion of agricultural activities. For observers of the colonial scene in Ivory Coast, the first indication of the changing demography was provided by administrative censuses that suggested an increase in the overall population from 1,980,000 inhabitants in 1945 to about 3,000,000 in 1958.⁴ Voluntary transborder migration certainly contributed to this shift, but the bulk of the growth was a consequence of the practice of forced labor that the colonial state resorted to in its effort at implementing mise en valeur. As early as the 1920s, a trickle of migrant laborers from Upper Volta and the French Sudan had found their way into southern Ivory Coast. First forced by the logic of colonial development but later attracted by the prospect of employment, they had descended southward seasonally to work on Ivorian tree-crop plantations. After the Second World War, however, their number increased exponentially. This wave of immigrants, along with migrant workers from the savanna regions of Ivory Coast and administrative politics that favored the South, would come to lay the foundation of a new political economy, characterized not only by the economic differentiation between Ivory Coast and the rest of French West Africa, but also by the creation of regional disparities between the northern and southern halves of the territory.⁵

The story of these revolutionary changes cannot be dissociated from Ivorian imperial history and from the larger context of postwar international economics. In the wake of the war, French authorities had established the Monnet Plan, which, with the assistance of the American Marshall Plan, was intended to achieve a thorough reconstruction of France.⁶ Faced with a renewed need to capitalize on the resources of a still-vast empire, the postwar authorities initiated a modernization program that purported to strengthen the links between the metropole and the overseas territories. Informed by the pervasive idea of long-range planning as the safest way to economic recovery, the imperial program was supported directly by newly created imperial financial institutions and indirectly by the Marshall Plan’s fund for the modernization of Europe’s dependent territories. Together with local and grassroots initiatives, the new economic and financial environments contributed to the reshaping of Ivory Coast—a process not unlike those that unfolded in other parts of the French Empire.⁷

The French investment fund for the modernization of the overseas territories was arguably the single most important centerpiece of the new economic outlook in France’s postwar imperialism. Instituted in April 1946 and managed by the Caisse Centrale de la France d’Outre-Mer (Central Bank for France’s Overseas Territories, or CCFOM), FIDES was a development fund whose very existence showed that times had changed—at least on the surface. Unlike during the interwar period when the colonies were expected to finance their own infrastructural development, for instance, the newly created fund was fed primarily by the budget of metropolitan France.⁸ The bureaucrats who operated the fund divided FIDES accounts into two categories that were financed through grants or loans. A general section was charged with financing development projects that were likely to “benefit all or more than one” territory, including undertakings like scientific research, public works studies, and even public development corporations. The second category of FIDES operated exclusively on loans—repayable at a low interest rate—and focused on specific projects within a given territory and usually involved “basic local equipment expenditures [such as] roads, railroads, ports, airports, schools, hospitals, housing, etc.”⁹ Exhibited unabashedly as the “first practical effort in cooperation” within the empire, FIDES projects were unprecedented in their magnitude. FIDES planners insisted that in order to raise the living standard of the erstwhile colonial subjects, the economies of the overseas territories had to become productive. This argument justified a new focus on improving the communication infrastructure within the empire.¹⁰

The launching of the Marshall Plan was a conjuncture that facilitated this process. In fact, given the sorry state of the finances of the metropole itself, resorting to foreign loans and redirecting them to shape up the overseas territories appeared necessary. In this vein, taking advantage of American aid money in 1948, France and the United States signed an agreement that promised to disburse $130 million for the dependent territories, including $13 million for French West Africa.¹¹ The beginning of President Truman’s Point Four Program offered an additional opportunity for FIDES administrators, especially since the destructions wrought on France by two world wars left the colonial authorities with few options but to accept the American offer. Although there were reasons to fear that France might lose its sovereignty in the overseas territories if it relied too much on American generosity, one financial expert reassuringly argued, it was likely that French investments would remain dominant in the overseas territories.¹²

The management of American aid money intended for the development of France’s overseas territories was, however, a source of tension. As early as 1949, Raphaël Saller, an eccentric white senator representing the territory of Guinea, had lashed out at the “monstrous egoism” of the metropolitan interests over what he saw as unfair allocations of the funds.¹³ The Americans themselves were not shy in criticizing the French. Reporting his impressions on how the Marshall Plan aid was operated in French West Africa in September 1949, for instance, William Moreland offered an assessment that was shared by many American diplomats in French West Africa. His verdict on the financial management of the aid money was without appeal: a “confused and jumbled story.”¹⁴ Less than a year later, the American consul general reportedly painted a similar picture to a United Nations administrator, arguing that the key characteristic of French development work in Africa was its “lack of overall planning.” Consequently, the diplomat continued, the “bulk of the public works is undertaken randomly and without any clear logic.”¹⁵ Despite these criticisms, which put into relief the weaknesses of French colonial financial practices, the Americans maintained their contribution to FIDES. This assistance helped the postwar developmentalist institution to leave an indelible legacy on the overseas territories. For this reason, the French colonial authorities were ever grateful, even as they remained wary of their overbearing transatlantic partner.¹⁶

In Ivory Coast, the impact of the fund’s infrastructural development effort was immediately visible on the landscape (see map 1.1), especially in Abidjan where the bulk of the money was spent. For instance, the territory that had only a couple of car-friendly passageways in the interwar period boasted not only new bridges but also 10,850 kilometers of roads by 1948, including several kilometers of tarred expressways, which allowed the country to increase its importation of automobiles.¹⁷ The infrastructural effort also rehabilitated many railroad tracks of the Abidjan-Niger line. In addition to expanding or improving the network of roads and railways, FIDES also attempted to create a lagoon transportation system along the coast by building canals and waterways to link the Ebrié Lagoon to adjacent bodies of water, including the Aby Lagoon of the Aboisso region.¹⁸ Furthermore, the airport of Abidjan at Port-Bouët was updated to accommodate modern standards while smaller airfields were erected in various regional hubs.¹⁹

While FIDES planners in postwar Ivory Coast paid attention to an inestimable number of infrastructural projects, their primary focus was on the so-called grands travaux (large scale public works). This selectivity allowed them to finish the cutting of a channel through the strip of land that separated the Ebrié Lagoon from the Atlantic Ocean—an effort that sped up and eventually helped complete the quarter-century-old projected harbor of Abidjan.²⁰ Already during the war, the Vichy government had attempted to rush the completion of the maritime project in an effort to keep at bay the British forces at Freetown in Sierra Leone.²¹ After the war, and with the help of American aid money, millions of dollars were invested to open the Vridi Canal and build new wharves in an attempt to provide, in the words of a visiting journalist, “new wealth and prosperity for this long-neglected area of Black Africa.”²²

In addition to such focus on infrastructural development, there were efforts on the social front in the hope to not only “cause the transformation” of Ivory Coast into a “modern” country but also to “meet [its] need for social progress.”²³ With demographic and urban demands on the rise in most African territories during the postwar years, FIDES planners found themselves assisting the Ivorian colonial authorities as much as other rulers in the larger French West Africa in designing the new urbanism of the territory.²⁴ In this élan, the planners endorsed the increase of the FIDES share devoted to social infrastructural modernization, which reached more than 30 percent of the overall FIDES expenditure in Ivory Coast by the time of the collapse of the French Empire. Concretely, this new emphasis on social development allowed the construction of hospitals, clinics, and schools in various cities of the territory.²⁵

MAP 1.1. Key FIDES operations in colonial Ivory Coast. Adapted from Ambassade de France (USA), French Africa: A Decade of Progress, 20. Cartography by author.

There is a basis to argue that FIDES gave a decisive boost to the modernization drive in postwar Ivory Coast. By creating a network of transportation systems, it contributed to a smoother circulation of people, goods, and ideas—a process not unlike the impact of Sarraut’s colonial policy after the First World War. While such circulation transformed the territory, it should not be forgotten that the purpose of the grands travaux undertaken by the late colonial state was to create a network of communication and transportation facilities that would expedite the delivery of colonial raw materials and foodstuffs to the metropole and beyond. In that, it resembled the interwar colonial policy of mise en valeur, which labored to extract the resources of the forest regions even as it forced northerners to migrate south and work on the budding tree-crop economy.²⁶ Similarly, the postwar mobilization of colonial experts and their knowledge was reminiscent of the interwar period, when the first web of France’s tropical research organizations was consolidated in the hope that they would help the metropole to better exploit its overseas territories.

POSTWAR REMOBILIZATION OF COLONIAL SCIENTISTS

Arguably, the need for more intense practical knowledge emerged after the Second World War at the time when the French economy had to be reassembled. In fact, science, technology, and social engineering played a critical role in this postwar drive toward both reconstruction and modernization. In metropolitan France, for instance, the rise of applied science at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) proved to be a most opportune conjuncture in assisting the government in its efforts at revitalizing an economy that the war had crippled.²⁷ Authorities in charge of France’s overseas territories anticipated a similar scenario. Consequently, they set up the Office de la Recherche Scientifique et Technique Outre-Mer (ORSTOM) in the 1940s, strategically disseminating its network of regional/territorial centers (see map 1.2) throughout the empire.²⁸

If the late interwar mise en valeur projects relied on the research expertise of such institutions as the Institut National d’Agronomie Tropicale (INAC), its experimental gardens, and the Institut Français d’Afrique Noire (IFAN), the French colonial modernizers of the late 1940s and 1950s mobilized the epistemic power of a new crop of institutions that produced tropical knowledge, including the Institut de Recherches des Huiles et Oléagineux (IRHO), Institut de Recherches du Coton et des Textiles Exotiques (IRCT), the Institut de Recherches sur le Caoutchouc (IRCA), the Institut d’Elevage et de Médecine Vétérinaire Tropicale (IEMVT), and ORSTOM.²⁹ In a context dominated by a search for a better means to exploit the resources of the outre-mer and make its populations more productive, ORSTOM’s agenda was updated to include not only applied ecological experiments but also social science research. In this regard, and echoing a practice already in place among their fellow sociologists in metropolitan France, the imperial authorities called upon the expertise of the colonial social scientists to guide postwar development policies. Within the international context of the emergence of new tools to measure poverty and an ever-incessant refinement of statistical methods, survey teams were immediately dispatched to various parts of the outre-mer, including French Equatorial and West Africa, Madagascar, and New Caledonia.³⁰

MAP 1.2. ORSTOM’s global reach. Cartography by author.

To the satisfaction of the local authorities, the colonial social scientists, now equipped with presumably better measurement tools, re-highlighted the supposed mentalités of the “natives” with regard to their economic, social, and agronomical practices.³¹ This was the case with Jean-Louis Boutillier, who co-led a study mission in the Bouaké region to survey the foodways and agricultural mores of the Baule in Central Ivory Coast.³² In the wake of the FIDES modernization drive, ORSTOM was also contracted to train agricultural extension agents for the overseas territories. On the assumption that the colonial farmers would better produce only if they were guided appropriately, the FIDES managing directorate (comité directeur) granted substantial funds to ORSTOM to establish a training program for extension agents.³³

It was perhaps in the earth sciences (pedology, entomology, plant sciences, and other related disciplines) that the early Orstomians associated with Adiopodoumé made their lasting impact on the field of development in postwar Ivory Coast. During the negotiations for the establishment of the Ivorian branch of ORSTOM, Professor Raoul Combes, the chairman of the research agency, told the governor-general of French West Africa that his institution would not fail to serve the interest of any territory willing to host ORSTOM’s facilities and research centers.³⁴ A little earlier, he had pitched a similar argument to the territorial governor of Ivory Coast, emphasizing specifically that his organization would “render innumerable services” to Ivory Coast if it were allowed to open its leading tropical branch in the territory.³⁵

Turning this promise into a reality, Orstomians carried out soil research in various regions of the French-ruled territories of West Africa in the late 1940s to determine soil types and suggest the corresponding best agricultural uses for them.³⁶ Sometimes the contributions of ORSTOM researchers were at the request of private, if influential, individuals. This was certainly the case when Raymond Desclers—a leading voice in the white planter community—asked ORSTOM scientists to conduct pedological prospection on his plantation in view of helping him extend his coffee farm.³⁷ Similarly, the Compagnie Bananière et Fruitière de la Côte d’Ivoire (COBAFRUIT) appealed to the organization when it planned on expanding its activities.³⁸ In other instances, it was the public authorities themselves who mobilized the expertise of ORSTOM, directing the attention of its researchers to specific agricultural issues. Convinced that ORSTOM research might be useful in the agricultural development of the territory and given that the Bingerville agronomic research center was technically a federal institution directed from Dakar, colonial authorities in Abidjan requested in the early 1950s that an autonomous bureau be created within Adiopodoumé whose role would be to focus uniquely on Ivorian agronomic research. The request was granted, and a Section Autonome de Recherche Agronomique (Autonomous Agronomic Research Section, or SARA) was established in 1953 with its funding coming exclusively from Ivory Coast.³⁹

ORSTOM’s practical involvement in Ivorian agronomic development was wide-ranging. While some of its researchers worked on ways to improve the cutting and grafting techniques of commercial tree plants, others mapped out the various pathologies affecting tropical plants, including coffee and cocoa trees. In addition, there was research done on the best feeding practices of commercial tree plants.⁴⁰ Given that the early reputation of ORSTOM was built on soil science, it came as no surprise that the pedological expertise of the Orstomians was a “hot commodity” among planters and colonial bureaucrats in charge of agricultural development in Ivory Coast.⁴¹ In fact, even before the creation of SARA, the Orstomians had been pushed to map out the pedological profile of the Ivorian territory as a whole. In this regard, Jean-Marie Brugière and Maurice Schmid surveyed the soil characteristics of farmlands at La Mé experimental station as early as 1947.⁴² Subsequently, a sizable amount of research was conducted to determine the best soil types for growing coffee beans, cocoa beans, bananas, sugarcane, and other cash crops suitable for the colony.⁴³

It is not a leap of imagination, therefore, to argue that the work of the Orstomians contributed to the Ivorian agricultural boom that came in the aftermath of the Second World War. Through their research on soil types, parasites, and plant pathologies, they helped make sense of farm management in a tropical setting. By developing pest-resistant breeds, they equally assisted in preventing outbreaks of plant diseases. In a sense, then, the activities of the Orstomians confirmed that knowledge production is part and parcel of the politics of development.

Significant as their work might have been, the importance of ORSTOM experts should not be overstated. First, the Orstomians shared the dissemination of agrarian knowledge in Ivory Coast with the technicians and earth scientists of the Bureau of Agriculture and the researchers of Bingerville’s agronomic research center.⁴⁴ Moreover, as in many development encounters, there existed a time lag between agronomic research in the controlled environment of the experimentation station and its application in the “wild” field of the farm.⁴⁵ There is also the fact that the farmers likely to have directly benefited from ORSTOM’s science of agriculture in colonial Ivory Coast were primarily the white colons with much larger plantations. Given that it was not the white planters who were at the forefront of cash cropping or food farming, and that the European agronomic experts had only a marginal direct impact on the farming practices of the Africans, other factors, including the agency of the Africans, must be taken into account in understanding the boom in agricultural production in late colonial Ivory Coast.⁴⁶ The unsuccessful bid for a top-down policy of mechanization of farming clearly illustrated this point. As we shall see, it also puts into relief one of the paradoxes of postwar developmentalism in French West Africa.

MACHINES, PEASANTS, AND ECONOMIC REVIVAL

As they stepped up their developmentalist efforts through bigger funding for agronomic research, FIDES bureaucrats also bet on mechanization as the ultimate tool for modernizing colonial agriculture. In fact, impressed as they were by the output of American and Soviet agricultural models that relied heavily on machine technology, colonial rulers in France and Britain “sought to increase African agricultural production with the help of mechanical modes of production to cope with the postwar foreign-exchange crisis.”⁴⁷ The labor shortage in the fields caused by the suppression of the institution of forced labor in the French Empire in 1946 made mechanization even more pressing in Ivory Coast. In this context, Raphaël Saller, in his capacity as director of planning at the Ministry of Overseas France, observed that the introduction of machines would help improve productivity while cutting down the cost of production.⁴⁸

The Martinican-born colonial administrator was not alone in thinking in these terms. As early as 1946, the Ivorian Chamber of Agriculture had set up the Experimental Committee for the Mechanization of Cropping to investigate ways of modernizing the agricultural sector, especially cocoa and coffee production.⁴⁹ As in other corners of the empire, this imperial interest in mechanization continued through the late 1950s, sustained by periodic scientific missions abroad, by conferences and agriculture fairs, and by the launching of promotional media campaigns to proselytize the idea.⁵⁰

The dream to mechanize agriculture might have been big, but its realization was doomed—at least in the immediate aftermath of the war. First, mechanization required an enormous start-up capital investment in machines and other sophisticated equipment that only a handful of wealthier white planters could afford. The financial sacrifice was all the more difficult to contemplate because most of the commercial farming was done on smallholder plantations whose owners could hardly capitalize on a hypothetic economy of scale. Moreover, the suppression of forced labor in 1946 had meant that most African farmers could now mobilize a relatively abundant free supply of hands, which made the need for machines less pressing for them. Even more damaging for the plan of launching mechanized agriculture was the stubborn reality of the unregimented nature of the extant crop fields. Unlike in scientific agriculture, of which mechanization was a brainchild, most of the farms that existed in colonial Ivory Coast did not have their crop stands arranged in regular and linear alleys. The original spacing between tree stands was neither long enough nor standardized. Such an ungridded planting design ultimately prevented the use of machines. By the early 1950s, it was clear that the idea of mechanization would be hard to sell to both white and African farmers. Consequently, the experimental committee set up to promote the mechanization of agriculture was disbanded.⁵¹

Although the idea of mechanized agriculture did not jell, the postwar period did witness an expansion of agriculture in colonial Ivory Coast, the roots of which went back to the interwar period when African farmers took up commercial farming. In the forest region of the Southeast, and after the relative failure of forced cultivation policy, native farmers took advantage of the new network of roads and railways and bought seedlings from either planters in the Gold Coast or the white colonists to develop hundreds of tree-crop farms on which they labored with family members. In the savanna regions of the territory, peasants increased their agricultural production, even if sometimes this was achieved under duress.⁵² With the liberalization of labor recruitment in the mid-1940s, an ever-increasing number of Africans set up their own plantations of cash crops. These factors, along with the rise in the price of crops like cocoa and coffee, set in place the conditions for a tree planting revolution in colonial Ivory Coast.⁵³

As in other parts of West Africa, smallholder farming was the backbone of such an agrarian revolution. In the early twentieth century, in its effort to promote cash-crop agriculture, the colonial state had favored collective farming, which it reasoned was the closest approximation of the traditional agronomic practice of the indigenous people in the territory. This approach ended in abysmal failure. Unlike the promoted collectivist scheme, it was individual families who rose to operate small farms and produce cocoa, coffee, cotton, and food crops. These smallholder farmers shunned the use of agricultural machinery and increasingly made use of wage labor to run their plantations. In the process, they dramatically improved the Ivorian output of agricultural commodities (see fig. 1.1). Thus, it was grassroots modernization in the form of free access to agricultural labor that informed the cash-crop revolution in Ivory Coast—a scenario that would be repeated again and again in the history of postwar Ivorian capitalism. Mobilizing what might be called an early, if nonclassical, manifestation of “rational choice” strategy, African farmers not only appropriated and domesticated the cultivation of cash crops, but, adding another layer to the meaning of agricultural modernity, they also pushed the white planters to adopt the principle of free labor.⁵⁴

Of course, there is no denying that by providing funds for agricultural services such as the Caisse Centrale de Credit Agricole (agricultural bank) to help a few planters get loans, the Comptes Café-Cacao to maintain and improve feeder roads and bridges, and by generously distributing seedlings and subsidized fertilizers, the colonial state created a favorable agronomic environment.⁵⁵ Yet, it was the shift from lineage production of cash crops and the passage to small-scale capitalist farming that gave the decisive boost. In his cultural ecology of the lineage system among the Dida in South-Central Ivory Coast—a region that witnessed a dramatic increase in its output of both cocoa and coffee in the 1950s—Robert Hecht has shown that the “social reproduction hinged upon the recruitment of labor into the kin group, mainly though not exclusively through marriage.” However, under the pressure of global and local forces, marriage exchange had increasingly become “dependent during 1930–45 upon production of cocoa, and later coffee, which were sold and converted into the prevailing bridewealth media: manillas and cash.” At this juncture, “internally-generated pressure on the lineage to expand its cocoa and coffee production could not [. . .] be satisfied by the relatively limited and inflexible quality of labor available from the kin group.” Under these conditions, the “solution for the lineage in the post-War years was to resort to various non-kin types of labor. Over time, wage labor gradually emerged as the dominant form.”⁵⁶

FIGURE 1.1. Value and relative importance of Ivorian cocoa, coffee, and wood exports, 1939–1956. Note that the combined share is relative to the overall agricultural export. Data sources: Territoire de Côte d’Ivoire, Inventaire économique de la Côte d’Ivoire, 165–66; Kipré, Côte d’Ivoire, 156; Gbagbo, La Côte d’Ivoire: Economie et société, 112, 124, 132; Peterec, The Port of Abidjan, 43a.

Such reality, which pointed to the flexibility and agency of the Africans in the agricultural transformation of the territory, would come to play a key role in Ivorian (rural) cosmopolitanism and agrarian modernity.⁵⁷ It was not limited to South-Central Ivory Coast: indeed, other Ivorianists have long identified similar trends among the Guéré/Wè (western region), the Bété (midwestern region), and even the Baule (central region).⁵⁸ And this was not lost on the many contemporary colonial social scientists who had flocked into the rural areas of Ivory Coast in their mission to study the natives. As early as 1939, pioneering French Africanist Henri Labouret had underlined the significance of African farmers in the production of cocoa beans in the territory.⁵⁹ After the Second World War and within the context of calls for expanded socio-anthropological research on the Africans, such knowledge was increasingly shared by French and other foreign observers. For instance, in the mid-1950s, the budding ORSTOM geographer Hubert Fréchou recognized that while white planters seemed to keep better outward-looking cocoa and coffee plantations, it was the African smallholders who produced the majority of the Ivorian exported crops. Through the latter days of French colonial rule, the idea that Africans were the pillars of the Ivorian agricultural boom was consistently reaffirmed by colonial social scientists.⁶⁰

Despite the knowledge that African farmers were producing much of the export commodities, the economic policies that colonial bureaucrats enacted discriminated against indigenous planters. During the war, for instance, much of the credit disbursed to subsidize agriculture was kept by white planters. In addition, not only were some African planters victimized by labor roundups to work on white plantations, but most of them were sold agricultural equipment at much higher prices compared to their white competitors. To exacerbate the situation, native commodity growers received a decisively lower price for their products.⁶¹ It was in this context that African planters, including Félix Houphouët-Boigny, set up in 1944 the Syndicat Agricole Africain (African Planters Union, or SAA), which soon became a platform for anticolonial political actions in Ivory Coast during the remainder of the war.⁶² In the aftermath of the war, SAA activism grew more militant even as the French Empire transformed itself into a relatively liberal transnational polity. To be sure, this situation set the stage for the appointment of Laurent Péchoux as a new governor whose mission was to crack down on radicalism and to prepare the territory for a “second colonial occupation.”⁶³

FASHIONING THE TERRITORY FOR TAKEOFF: PÉCHOUTAGE AND ITS AFTERMATH

In the context of a relative liberalization of the political space that came in the wake of the Allies’ victory during the Second World War, associational life became widespread in the French colonial possessions. Soon thereafter, a number of local nationalist leaders created political parties and increasingly adopted Marxist-Leninist rhetoric to denounce continued European rule and exploitation. In Ivory Coast, the Parti Démocratique de Côte d’Ivoire (Ivory Coast Democratic Party, or PDCI) was the leading political organization to carry out such denunciation. Emerging from the same social milieu as the SAA, it soon mobilized other segments of the Ivorian population, and during the elections for the Constituent Assembly succeeded in having Houphouët-Boigny elected to the Palais Bourbon in late 1945.⁶⁴ There, with other African parliamentarians, the planter now turned politician immediately sponsored many laws affecting the daily lives of the Africans, including the suppression of both the indigénat (February 1946) and the travail forcé (April 1946), as well as the extension of citizenship rights (May 1946) to all the colonial subjects living in France’s overseas territories.⁶⁵

Alarmed by these seemingly liberal developments, the French colonial lobby and their metropolitan backers met during the summer of 1946 in Douala (Cameroon) and later in Paris to come up with plans to regain control of colonial affairs. The colonists’ rearguard resistance partly paid off, as they first succeeded in having the proposed constitution of April 1946 rejected. They effectively replaced the proposal with the schizophrenic constitutional arrangement of the Union Française (French Union). Under this new constitutional legal frame, Africans were certainly granted some civil and political freedoms. Yet the law restricted the self-governing status and other rights that the “native” elites were seeking for their respective territories.⁶⁶ It was in this context that the newly elected député, Houphouët-Boigny (from Ivory Coast), convened a meeting in Bamako (French Sudan) in October 1946. With delegates from most of the territories of French-ruled sub-Saharan Africa, the Bamako convention eventually agreed on the creation of the Rassemblement Démocratique Africain (African Democratic Rally, or RDA).⁶⁷

From its inception, RDA established itself as an interterritorial political movement whose aim was to unite all the democratic forces in sub-Saharan Africa in a common fight against the conservative backlash that came in the wake of the abolition of key colonial laws abridging the rights of colonial subjects. A coalition of African-led political parties, the RDA aimed to establish a genuine Greater France that the “first draft of the constitution had seemed to promise.” As Tony Chafer has suggested, these objectives are best “summed up as the political, economic and social emancipation of Africans within the framework of the French Union, based on equality of rights and duties.”⁶⁸

To achieve this goal, the active support of the Parti Communiste Français (French Communist Party, or PCF) was crucial, especially in the formative years of the movement. French communists not only provided logistical assistance in the organization of the Bamako meeting but also gave the delegates protection against the reactionary retaliation that most of them faced at the hands of zealous local colonial administrators. The ideological and political training that the PCF’s affiliated Groupes d’Etudes Communistes (GEC) offered to RDA members in the various territories was instrumental for the ultimate survival of the budding nationalist movement. In Paris, the communists further consolidated their support by allowing RDA députés to form a parliamentary bloc with the communist representatives.⁶⁹

For the RDA, the affiliation with the French communists was a double-edged sword. In the context of the PCF’s participation in the first postwar French government, the African nationalists enjoyed the protection of an influential metropolitan political movement that still enjoyed the favor of the French people, thanks to its role in the resistance against Nazi occupation.⁷⁰ Such protection helped Houphouët-Boigny and his activists to build and maintain their organization with relative ease. However, when the communists were forced to leave the government in May 1947 because of the emerging global Cold War and their opposition to the Marshall Plan, the RDA—especially its Ivorian branch, whose nationalism hardly went beyond reformism within the frame of the French Union—suddenly found itself a most vulnerable target of the colonial lobby and its metropolitan associates.⁷¹

The best-structured and probably most active of all the RDA’s territorial sections in the late 1940s, the PDCI was the first political organization to experience the new painful reality. The most conservative elements of the French colonists in Ivory Coast, including white planters and the Catholic clergy, had long despised the local leadership of the Rassemblement Démocratique Africain, whom they wrongly identified as “closet communists” and the staunchest opponents to the colonial status quo.⁷² Having secured the recall of the rather liberal governor André Latrille in 1947, they moved against the unprotected RDA. The colonists’ first strike occurred in February 1949, when the newly appointed Péchoux arrested most of the PDCI’s leaders and charged them with instigating the partisan violence surrounding a political dispute in Treichville—the native quarter of colonial Abidjan. The following year, the brutal repression of anticolonial protests in various cities, including Bouaflé, Dimbokro, Agboville, and Séguela, resulted in the killing of at least sixteen people and the wounding of hundreds more. As if these casualties were not sufficient, the police arrested thousands of RDA sympathizers and numerous PDCI field secretaries. In violation of his parliamentarian immunity, the colonial authorities even contemplated the arrest of Houphouët-Boigny himself. However, the mobilization of his supporters dissuaded the police from carrying out this anticonstitutional plan.⁷³

In the context of the unrest and rebellion in Indochina, Algeria, and Madagascar, the aim of the repression in Ivory Coast in the late 1940s was to nip in the bud the nascent anticolonial movement in French West Africa. Consequently, the first people to be hit by the péchoutage (as Governor Péchoux’s repressive methods came to be known by contemporaries) were local RDA fieldworkers and intellectuals, including the writer Bernard B. Dadié, who spent three years in the colonial prison of Grand Bassam. As in the case of Guinea, other activists were sent to the outposts of the French Empire.⁷⁴

In the face of this colonial repression, the native population remained consistently proactive. From their mobilization to prevent the arrest of Houphouët-Boigny to the march of the Ivorian women on the Grand Bassam prison, via the active boycott of European consumer goods, the African population was always alert and ready to fight back.⁷⁵ In spite of that, péchoutage proved victorious, at least in co-opting many RDA leaders. Indeed, while his colleagues were still in jail, Houphouët-Boigny was approached by various metropolitan officials in charge of French colonial affairs. The ensuing series of secretive discussions resulted in the RDA’s disavowal of communist rhetoric, disaffiliation (désapparentement) from the French Communist Party in 1950, and a partial, if uneasy, realignment of the PDCI with the colonial administration.⁷⁶ Although nationalism in French-ruled West Africa did not die with Houphouët-Boigny’s decision, a move that key voices within RDA denounced as a betrayal, the disaffiliation episode triggered an open crisis in the ranks of RDA leadership and undoubtedly signaled a new political reality in Ivory Coast.⁷⁷

With commercial agricultural output still on the rise and a colonial citizenry apparently cowed, the authorities began to envision Ivory Coast as the new El Dorado of French West Africa, a territory on its way to becoming the economic hub of France’s empire in the region.⁷⁸ As early as 1951, Péchoux had prophesied that the completion of the FIDES-funded port of Abidjan would open “a wide window seaward,” the effect of which would be “rapidly felt over a vast hinterland.”⁷⁹ He proved right in his prophecy. But the opening of the territory to a business world beyond the confines of the empire also meant that the competition to cash in the dividends of the “Second Pacification” would be more complicated—all the more so since foreigners were eager to tap into the Ivorian boom. Among these interested foreigners were the Americans, whose taxpayers’ money partly paid for the infrastructural transformation of the territory.

COMPETING FOR THE BONANZA OF POSTWAR PACIFICATION

American diplomats in West Africa had kept tabs on the political changes in postwar Ivory Coast. With their country having contributed financially to the FIDES program and, more importantly, seeing the United States as the moral compass of the capitalist world, they saw themselves as the purveyors of American economic vision and vanguards of US Cold War activism in the region. During the heydays of RDA’s militant activism, the diplomats repeatedly referred to Houphouët-Boigny as a communist leader, going as far as to blame the “noticeable” deterioration of the “economic conditions in Ivory Coast” on the député and his companions.⁸⁰ In this light, the diplomats had no qualms about pointing fingers at RDA leaders as the agents who “clearly directed” the anticolonial riots that seized the territory in 1949. And when the nationalist organization broke its affiliation with the French communists a year later, the Americans not only credited it to Péchoux’s “handling of the communistic uprising in the Ivory Coast [which] probably destroyed considerable of the strength of the communistic movement in that territory,” but the US consul and his collaborators also sided with Houphouët-Boigny’s faction in the postdisaffiliation crisis that engulfed RDA thereafter.⁸¹

With this close monitoring of sociopolitical events in Ivory Coast and the larger French West Africa, the diplomats on post in French West Africa did not fail to notice the opportunities that came along with the conjuncture of the cash-crop revolution in the territory, especially in the wake of the completion of the harbor of Abidjan. As early as the first years of the 1940s, consular reports had noted that Ivory Coast hosted the greatest number of American businesses in French West Africa.⁸² During the war, the United States (along with Britain) became the prime destination for Ivorian cocoa beans.⁸³ At the conclusion of the hostilities, American importers also developed an interest in Ivorian exotic wood and robusta coffee beans. American economic intelligence had been monitoring the increasing share of Ivorian economy vis-à-vis the overall export-import trade of French West Africa (see fig. 1.2), to which Ivory Coast contributed an average of 95 percent of the region’s exports and 26 percent of its imports from the United States. In this context, the American diplomats were rather eager to push for a larger American share in Ivorian foreign trade.⁸⁴

The Americans were not, however, the only party interested in tapping into the bonanza of the postwar economic boom in Ivory Coast. With the knowledge that there was a big market for tropical produce in the United States, a number of French businesses active in the colonial trade began to explore the expansion of their commercial activities into North America. Capitalizing on the opportunity offered by the Marshall Plan’s productivity missions program, many businessmen and commercial agents based in Abidjan, including Jean Abile-Gal, Olivier de Vigan, and Henri Tardivat, visited the United States in an effort to study the American market for tropical products. Like the key members of the French colonial patronat, others dreamed of joint ventures with US companies to further expand their own operations.⁸⁵

FIGURE 1.2. Ivorian share of the foreign trade of French West Africa. Data source: Territoire de Côte d’Ivoire, Inventaire économique de la Côte d’Ivoire, 89.

It was in this context of mutual (and competing) transatlantic bidding to exploit trading opportunities in Ivory Coast, the persistent fear that communist activism was not entirely dead in the territory, and especially the anticipation of the “new importance which [Abidjan’s] port will have when the canal has been fully opened to ocean going traffic,” that the American consul general in Dakar began planning to open a consulate in Abidjan. In early 1951, the American diplomats requested the opening of the consular post.⁸⁶ Anticipating such a new post, the Department of State asked for appropriation from the Congress, ostensibly pointing to the conjuncture of the global Cold War in West Africa. However, the French promptly denied the US request because the colonial bureaucrats—using the frame of the other cold war—feared that Washington might use the post to push for undue trade openings.⁸⁷

Although the French authorities rejected the American request, presumably to protect French commercial interests, the projection of US power into France’s star territory did not wane. In fact, mobilizing a proven method used by Marshall planners whereby survey missions were reportedly sent overseas to “systematically map out the resources and opportunities” in the colonial dependencies of European powers, a number of US institutions began sponsoring research trips to Ivory Coast and other territories in French West Africa.⁸⁸ Among these was the Ford Foundation, which launched a program of fellowships for the study of emerging countries in 1952. While the Ford area study program for the African continent largely focused on British Africa, a few of the institution’s funded researchers opted to work on France’s African dependencies, including Ivory Coast.⁸⁹

Crowning the mounting American fascination with the Ivorian colony was the publication and circulation of a number of articles in scholarly and popular circles, all of which emphasized the significance of the territory.⁹⁰ In the context of this construction of Ivory Coast as a cosmopolitan tropical frontier to be tapped, the Department of State was forced to renew its efforts to have an American consulate in Abidjan. Already in 1955, Washington had reiterated its request for a consular post in the Ivorian capital, but lack of adequate funding prevented the Department of State from following up on the issue.⁹¹ The need to have a second American consulate in French West Africa proved more pressing thereafter as Dakar became burdened with diplomatic and economic as well as administrative red tape. As a result, an American consulate finally opened in Abidjan in 1956, with Parke Duncan Massey as its first consular officer.⁹²

Even as the French and the Americans competed to harvest the fruits of the Ivorian postwar boom, other interest groups had emerged to vie for a legitimate share of the earnings of the cash-crop revolution. They included prominently the Syrian-Lebanese merchants and Ivorian economic entrepreneurs who were recruited among the members of SAA (smallholder farmers and relatively big African planters) and the adherents to the Syndicat des Planteurs et Eleveurs Africains de la Côte d’Ivoire—a rival planters union fostered by Kouamé Binzème and his Comité d’Action Patriotique de la Côte d’Ivoire (CAPACI). Deploying the rhetoric of “national liberation” and social justice to enhance its position in the changing Ivorian sociopolitical landscape, this autochthonous group eventually emerged as a distinct historical force in the political economy of development in Ivory Coast.⁹³

Indeed, in the wake of the transnational nationalist upheavals of the 1950s, the African planters began to buy out many of the white planters of cocoa and coffee, some of whom were uncertain about the implications of a worldwide drive toward decolonization. This Africanization of sorts of the Ivorian plantation economy was all the more possible since an increasing number of white planters were moving their operations into pineapple and banana cultivation, but also because African employees on cocoa and coffee farms were leaving their (white) employers to create their own tree-crop plantations, attracted as they were by the steady prices of cocoa and coffee on the international market. Although French, Lebanese-Syrian, and even African cash-crop traders and middlemen continued to cheat some African planters, the emerging class of local planters was expanding the margins of its profit.⁹⁴

Perhaps nothing demonstrated this better than the fragmentation and income differentiation among the cash-crop farmers of agnatic lineages in West-Central Ivory Coast. The amplification of the “treasure economy” (économie du trésor) among cocoa growers of southeastern Ivory Coast in the closing years of the colonial era could also be seen as another sign of this new deal.⁹⁵ We shall see later that such seemingly conspicuous consumption was not the only way that the African planters used their profits. More significantly, some of them strategically would demand that Americans become associated with the development of their resources. To be sure, such a willful transnational gesture put additional pressure not only on US-French cooperation at large, but also on Franco-African relations in the territory.

. . .

The decades that followed the end of the Second World War were determinant in transforming Ivory Coast into a stellar colony—a new status that allowed the territory to displace the hegemony of Senegal in French West Africa. In addition to the impacts of the FIDES infrastructural projects that equipped Ivory Coast with new roads, bridges, airfields, and a deep-sea harbor in Abidjan, the work of the colonial scientists of ORSTOM was instrumental in boosting the postwar agrarian economy of the colony. More importantly, however, it was the African-led cash-crop revolution that laid the foundations of the phenomenal growth that occurred in Ivory Coast in the aftermath of the war.

Convinced as never before that the metropole needed the overseas territories to speed up the reconstruction of France, the French colonial authorities developed new mercantilist economic practices intended to foster what has been aptly called a “second colonial occupation.” But in an era that was seen as the “American Century,” the French had to contend with a constant competition from the United States, which saw itself as guardian of free market capitalism.⁹⁶ The bid of the African planters and nationalists to increase their share of the postwar bonanza threatened to further complicate the Franco-American struggle to cash in on the Ivorian boom. The next chapter will elaborate on this rivalry, delving into the strategies that the French deployed to counter the perceived menace of Americanization and the persistent demands, from within and without, for opening up the West African territory.