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Triangulating Colonial Modernization

America is the original version of modernity. We are the dubbed or subtitled versions. America ducks the question of origins; it cultivates no origin or mythical authenticity; it has no past and no founding truth.

—Jean Baudrillard, America (1986)

The availability of French-dubbed U.S. products is determined by their marketability first in France. If an American program has not been dubbed for use in France, it is not available to French-speaking Africa.

—Floyd M. Land, “Television, Culture, and the State” (1990)

IN THE WAKE of the opening of the Vridi Canal, many observers had predicted that Ivory Coast would become an economic powerhouse; a new hub in West Africa likely to attract businesses and investors within and without the French Empire.¹ Few had imagined, however, that the territory would turn into a source of political strain between France and the United States. In hindsight and within the larger framework of transatlantic relations, historians have demonstrated that such Franco-American tensions over the colonies were unavoidable, especially given a strong strand of anti-Americanism in French culture, the perception that the United States was fundamentally anticolonialist, and the fact that the modernity many Ivorian elite were aspiring to was heavily inflected by American ideals of the good life.²

As early as 1948, French writer Georges Soria had articulated the anxiety many of his compatriots felt about their country’s postwar relationship with the United States. His book, which appeared at a time when French communists were denouncing the “Marshallization” of their patrie, echoed the already widespread resentment of the French elite over asymmetrical Franco-American cooperation.³ In a context marked by an unprecedented affirmation of American hegemony on a global scale, the concerns of the French were actually shared by a substantial number of Europeans who invariably saw American-led reconstruction of war-torn Europe as a clever means set up by the Americans to erode their lifestyles and worldviews. Consequently they decided to act, if not popularly, then at least with a populist rhetoric. To provide resistance against what Georges Duhamel had prophesied during the interwar years as the slow diffusion of the American way of life into the world was therefore the aim of the anti-US mobilization that spanned political affiliations.⁴

I argue in this chapter that French colonial administrators and experts—a substantial number of whom went to the United States as productivity missionaries—had a much more difficult task in appropriating American modernization precepts. In the face of mounting anticolonial nationalism led by the Rassemblement Démocratique Africain (RDA) and especially its Ivorian branch—the Parti Démocratique de Côte d’Ivoire (PDCI), not only did they have to find ways to uphold the myth of a modern and civilized France before their colonial subjects, but they also had to acknowledge the hollowness of their mission civilisatrice compared to the American modernization paradigm: hence the politics of dubbing, that is, the project and process aimed at translating and adapting for their colonial subjects development concepts and techniques that largely emanated from the United States. A subtle yet still paternalistic trick, the politics of dubbing ensured that French colonial administrators and experts would remain the hegemonic mediators between American modernity and the indigenous people of the newly created Union Française. In other words, by attempting to suppress the historically constituted “American-ness” of postwar developmentalism, the French colonial state and its managers aimed to brand themselves as the sole providers of progress and the “good life” to their colonial subjects.

This chapter looks at the outcomes of such political acts of seduction as it focuses on the efforts at technopolitical translation and their conditions of possibility. It argues that the spatial extent of the process of exporting American development techniques, values, and ways of being was not restricted to the European, Latin American, and Asian landscapes. Even more interesting, I suggest that the coming of American modernity in colonial Ivory Coast opened a new space for the emerging nationalist leaders who used the opportunity to triangulate the relationship of their society with metropolitan France. The subsequent trilateral politics that came in the wake of the American Century created or deepened extant chaos within the French Empire. Such conjuncture ultimately forced colonial authorities to resort to dubbing modernization in a last effort to bolster the weakening imperial ties. If the politics of dubbing and the efforts at infrastructural development were meant to help roll back the nationalist/anticolonial tide in the French Empire, they failed—especially since the colonial state was equally unable to reconcile the demands of younger African activists who wanted immediate independence and their seniors who dreamed of a supra Franco-African nation. On the other hand, Raymond Cartier and other metropolitan French Rightist opinion leaders were calling on the end of colonialism because it was a drain on France’s resources. By the mid-1950s, the signs pointed to the fact that Ivorians (and Africans in general) were snatching the initiative locally and that decolonization had become irreversible.⁵

COLONIAL MODERNIZATION IN THE WAKE OF AMERICANIZATION

With very few exceptions, historians of American expansionism in the twentieth century have rarely anchored their investigations in Africa’s past, let alone inquired into the African ramifications of the rise of the United States as a global hegemon. Instead, Latin America, Canada, Western Europe, and Asia have customarily been the focus of much scholarship on the extension and ultimate globalization of US soft power.⁶ To a certain degree, this scholarly fixation has meant that the spread of the American dream and the faith in consumer capitalism on a global scale have operated within a certain, if narrowly defined, geography of market attractiveness, consumer behavior, and knowledge that American firms and marketers have mustered about the rest of the world.⁷

In contrast with such a view, this chapter offers that such a relatively marginal territory as Ivory Coast was not outside the purview and circulatory reach of American products after the Second World War. My aim is not only to track how the coming of American modernity was perceived by both colonial subjects and imperial rulers but also to pay close attention to the particular logics of subaltern engagements with Americanization in a colonial Francophone context. As will become apparent later, only then will we be able to ascertain whether the sociopolitical actions of the French administrators and their colonial subjects in the Ivorian territory merely replicated the disputation and populist politics that targeted the so-called “Marshallization” of postwar society in metropolitan France.

By dislodging Europe’s “old regime of consumption” and replacing its “ethics of distinction” with an ethics geared toward service, America’s market empire certainly proved itself to be, according to Victoria de Grazia, an “irresistible” force.⁸ Following the work of Kristin Ross, we have a better understanding of how Americanization and decolonization reordered metropolitan culture in postwar France.⁹ France’s dependencies and overseas territories were not spared the social and cultural restructuring that the rise of a hegemonic US emporium/imperium orchestrated throughout the world. From the postwar architectural ventures in Morocco’s premier international city of Casablanca to US cultural diplomacy in Southeast Asia, American informal imperialism, indeed, shied away from no barrier, except perhaps the various “curtains” of the Cold War. Even then, American policy makers and Cold War strategists sought to expand the reach of a US-dominated “Free World” and its irresistible consumerist ethics everywhere, even in kitchens in the Soviet Union.¹⁰

There is evidence that the coming of American consumer durables into colonial Ivory Coast predated the postwar rise of the United States as an international leader in the provision of cheap industrial products to the world.¹¹ Still, the adoption or at least admiration of American consumption patterns by the Ivorian évolués occurred only after the Second World War, when rapid urbanization, consumer euphoria, and an oversupply of equipment made Ivory Coast a prime site for the expansion of America’s market empire in French West Africa. Such was the case because French residents in the territory had begun, despite lagging behind their peers in metropolitan France, to conspicuously display their newfound modernity in the form of imported refrigerators, cars, scooters, air conditioners, and other consumer durables.¹²

It is very difficult to quantify how many of these products were American-made, but given the Hexagon’s own reliance on US consumer goods in the immediate postwar period, it is quite plausible that some of these goods found their way into the dependencies. In their efforts to mimic the new French middle class, French residents in Ivory Coast used their access to the consumer products that the Marshall Plan had rendered available to distance themselves further from the colonial subjects.¹³ As it turned out, this imperial differentiation deepened the frustration of the Ivorian elite and ultimately prompted some of them to deploy a politics of triangulation by calling upon the United States to advance their own budding nationalist agenda. This development was made possible by the flow of foreign media images into the colony, exposing both metropolitan residents and colonial subjects to the marvels of postwar American modernity. Compounding this situation was the growing number of students who not only were ever more restive in the nationalist cause but also were drawn to the American cornucopia.¹⁴ The resulting conjuncture, in many ways, explained why the colonial authorities were so much afraid of what Benedict Anderson, in his history of the origin of Southeast Asian nationalism, has referred to as the “spectre of comparisons,” that is, colonial subjects’ comparison of the actions of their immediate overlords with those of other imperial powers.¹⁵

French fear that they might lose control over their colonial “wards” if the latter were exposed to Americanization was not misguided, at least if assessed against the backdrop of the decolonization saga in the larger French Empire. In Indochina, for instance, Vietnamese nationalists had not only deployed the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, but they also strategically used a number of tropes drawn from the annals of American history, such as the Declaration of Independence, to articulate their own aspiration for independence. The resulting Vietnam War certainly succeeded in convincing many French colonial authorities that America, whether “real” or “imagined,” posed a serious threat to continuance of French rule in the outre-mer. This was so because the mere presence of the United States even as transatlantic ally invariably acted as a force that threatened to dislodge French colonial dominance and its mission civilisatrice. At the same time, the very specter of the United States provided the colonial subjects with an alternative to French colonial modernity.¹⁶

Contemporary developments in Ivory Coast proved such an assessment to be on target. For example, the lawyer Kouamé Binzème, acting as the mouthpiece of the Syndicat des Planteurs et Eleveurs Africains de la Côte d’Ivoire, decided in the fall of 1948 to write directly to American Marshall planners to enlist their active support for what he anticipated would be the effective modernization of his country.¹⁷ Such action does not seem to conform to the conventional depiction of the Ivorian postwar elite, who have usually been posited as right-hand men of French colonialism and its exclusivist civilizing mission.¹⁸ In fact, even though Binzème was educated in the French system and was completing his law degree in a metropolitan French institution, he had come to see the United States as a modernizing force to be reckoned with. Accordingly, he arrogated himself with the task of initiating a partnership with the Americans. To be sure, such a move was an implicit critique of France’s colonial governmentality.

Born to parents from the wealthier Ivorian cocoa belt of the Southeast, Kouamé Binzème completed elementary school in Ivory Coast. He first worked as a clerk for a local merchant and later went to France for secondary education schooling. After securing a scholarship, he started his university training in legal studies in the 1930s. In 1935, Binzème returned to Ivory Coast to set up a newspaper, which did not run for more than a year. After this short-lived experiment, Binzème made his way back to France. He completed his law degree and soon came back home to become enmeshed in the postwar political and nationalist battles, which led to a confrontation with Félix Houphouët-Boigny and his political machine. It was in this context of political and nationalist upheavals that Binzème wrote to the managers of the Marshall Plan. While his aim was clearly to recruit the Americans for the socioeconomic development of Ivory Coast, Binzème’s attitude also confirmed the fear of the French colonial authorities regarding the subversive potential inherent in the rise of a comparative consciousness among France’s colonial subjects.¹⁹

FIGURE 2.1. Kouamé Binzème, circa 1951. Source: Amon d’Aby, La Côte d’Ivoire dans la cité, plate 3. Courtesy of Editions Classiques Garnier.

Binzème’s plan for the modernization of Ivory Coast was striking in more than one regard. From the outset, it boldly argued for an active participation of the United States in an Ivorian postwar development drive, almost to the exclusion of the French colonial state. As the lawyer put it himself, his program was informed by the “principle of partnership (association) between American capital and African labor.”²⁰ Implicitly critiquing the French doctrine of colonial mise en valeur, which was more exploitative than beneficial to the colonial subjects, Binzème added that the Ivoiro-American partnership in the domain of development should, above all, “protect the integrity of indigenous natural resources” while it promoted, at the same time, “freedom, economic progress, and social betterment for the Africans.”²¹

The emphasis that Binzème put on the ideas of freedom and transnational capital, and ultimately his faith in American-style progress, as key ingredients to secure the welfare of the Africans certainly echoed the scripts of American modernization theorists and the fantastic public diplomacy that sold them to the world at large. Since the end of the war, US officials had pointed to their own example with the Philippines to demand that Europe’s colonial empires be dismantled. In their stead, American decision makers envisioned international cooperation, free trade, and the transfer of technology as the soundest means to achieve material progress for the “backward” peoples of the world. In contrast to European colonial developmentalism, which reportedly made “a living off of” colonial subjects, American postwar modernizers believed that “if we make it better for the other fellow, we will make it better for ourselves.” Informed by such reasoning, then, the United States inaugurated many institutionalized projects, including the famed Point Four Program, whose goal was to help train technicians, doctors, and social workers in the Global South.²²

There is room to argue that the difference between US and European development visions was almost nil, especially if we trace their origins to nineteenth-century ideas of progress. Yet one should not miss the dissimilarities. Unlike their European counterparts, American planners tended to shun the massive presence of colonial bureaucrats to run the show. In a sense, it might have been the case that the modernization style of the US authorities in the global arena was only confirming an earlier astute insight that Argentinean writer Manuel Ugarte offered in the 1920s; arguing that in contrast to European colonial powers, the United States was an imperial hegemon that had strategically opted for a “system of annexing wealth, apart from inhabitants or territories, disdaining outward shows in order to arrive at the essentials of domination without a dead-weight of areas to administer and multitudes to govern.”²³ Notwithstanding this fact, which most enthusiasts for Americanization did not see as a real problem, political entrepreneurs as diverse as Haile Selassie, Jomo Kenyatta, and Binzème saw a genuine opportunity in embracing the language and promise of US-enlightened developmentalism.²⁴

Despite (or because of) its deployment of an American modernization trope, however, the Binzème plan actually appeared as a reappropriation of some of the programs that the Fonds d’Investissement pour le Développement Economique et Social (FIDES) had initiated in Ivory Coast. These included the industrial exploitation of strategic minerals such as manganese, iron, silver, gold, and oil.²⁵ Still, in line with the FIDES program, Binzème hoped to mechanize Ivorian agriculture and forestry for a better exploitation of their resources.²⁶ Against France’s protectionist policy limiting the importation of consumer goods into the outre-mer, Binzème solicited the “active collaboration” of American industries to meet the “unsatisfied needs” of the indigenous peoples.²⁷ Finally, the Ivorian lawyer requested that American financial groups participate in the creation of a venture firm whose aim would be the exploitation of Ivorian natural resources.²⁸

It is not clear how American Marshall planners responded to Maître Binzème’s proposals. Nor can we ascertain whether the French colonial authorities took notice of his correspondence with the Americans. Still, the attitude of the Ivorian lawyer crystallized a tendency visible throughout the larger French Empire in the postwar period: the nationalist politics of triangulating the development encounter and a rather voluntarist call for more Americanization. If modernization had indeed emerged as a transnational ideology that most people espoused, French colonial subjects increasingly came to doubt the modernizing capability of Paris and its imperial extension. In contrast to France’s mission civilisatrice, people like Kouamé Binzème were counterposing the potential benefits of the American way of life and the modernization theory that informed its expansion.

As would be confirmed repeatedly, the dangers inherent in the politics of triangulating modernization were not lost on the French colonial administrators. Their reaction, which came in the form of dubbing American modernization, if desperate, at least suggested that knowledge, translation, and comparativism had become transnational discursive forces in the postwar world of French imperialism, not unlike the doctrine of mise en valeur that informed the early French civilizing mission. How did this work out? Who implemented this effort at translation? What were its ultimate outcomes?

ENACTING THE POLITICS OF DUBBING

The architects of the ingenious effort at dubbing were the colonial administrators and their retinue of specialists, technicians, and experts. Given the decentralized nature of French colonial rule, the local administrators may have been the actual makers of much of French imperialism in Africa.²⁹ But their commandement would have amounted to nothing had the colonial administrators not been able to rely on the counsels and even guidance of the colonial experts. During the early moments of the drive toward mise en valeur, for instance, geographers and engineers had to survey the newly acquired territories to make them legible for colonial rule. In a similar vein, military engineers had to build roads, railways, bridges, and canals while doctors and medical biologists were making sure the outre-mer was free from debilitating germs and diseases. Without these efforts, the realization of the project of mise en valeur would have proved elusive. After the Second World War, this pattern of collaboration between science, technology, and colonial rule was maintained and extended with the addition of the dubbing of American modernization theory by colonial experts.

Even while the war was still raging, American diplomats had anticipated that a US-led global market economy would be the basis for any reconstruction efforts. In this regard, Washington economic planners designed programs to boost productivity around the world in an attempt to bridge the postwar “dollar gap” and the wider trade imbalance between the United States and its European partners.³⁰ Typically, the planners believed that the reconstruction of Europe and the stability of the wider world were untenable unless foreign governments managed their economies according to the dictates of consumer capitalism. To this end, the Economic Cooperation Administration (ECA) brought thousands of visitors to the United States to expose them to American modernity in the hope that they would replicate an American model of development once they returned to their home countries.³¹

Among these visitors, French officials and executives numbered in the thousands. Between 1949 and 1956, some 335 French missions went to the United States, totaling around 3,700 people.³² As a rule, the French travelers wanted to learn about the “causes and methods of American high productivity.”³³ The more enthusiastic members of French delegations used the opportunity of the transatlantic voyage to initiate critical self-examinations of their own society.³⁴ At the same time, many productivity missionaries struggled to adapt the American gospel to the realities of metropolitan France.³⁵

The job of the French colonial administrators and experts who visited the United States was even more complicated. With anticolonial nationalism on the rise, one mission proposal suggested, the colonial administrators had to minimize the time-consuming process of trial and error inherent to development practice. It went on to argue that the focus should be on speeding up colonial productivity by the introduction of American machinery.³⁶ This proposal was confirmed in subsequent reports. For instance, after his second month touring the United States, P. Labrousse concluded that while a “tremendous work of verification” would be needed, it was “more likely that we would end up trying some of the machines in our pilot regions.”³⁷ Saint Hippolite adopted the same position when he argued that France had no other option but to “bring some [American machines] to our possessions.”³⁸ A few colonial scientists joined the missionary wave. Such was the case of the Ivory Coast–based Hubert Moulinier, who spent four months in the United States studying agronomic issues. At the end of his visit, the chef de travaux de laboratoires returned to West Africa convinced that many American methods, if adapted judiciously, could improve the productivity of such tropical cash crops as coffee and cocoa.³⁹

The United States did not provide leadership to the French only in the field of agronomy. The French envoys also looked up to such American social experiments as race relations, from which they surprisingly hoped to draw lessons for the outre-mer. In fact, even though French scholars were among the inventors of “race” as an anthropological category in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, French political and cultural elites came to shun discussion of race in twentieth-century France. Rather, they claimed race was an American problem. This myth of a color-blind France attracted many African Americans to the Hexagon.⁴⁰ Yet a racialist unconscious haunted French society as a whole, which was revealed at the time of France’s embrace of US technoculture. If anything, the claim that social conditions in the overseas territories were closer to the United States (because of the presence of blacks) than metropolitan France betrayed the belief that race indeed mattered to some French decision makers. Already in their discussion of what telecommunication equipment to procure in the US, colonial authorities in France observed what they believed was a similarity in land-use patterns between certain American southern regions and Africa.⁴¹

Yet it was in their observations on housing and hygiene that the racialist unconscious became obvious. Revealingly, one administrator claimed that the existence of blacks in the American South made it imperative for the productivity missionaries to visit this part of the United States. Another administrator suggested that the mission on overseas equipment would have to study both the “adaptation of whites to special living conditions (in terms of housing, climate, and interactions with backward [peu évolué] natives) and training as well as adaptation of a backward labor force to mechanized work.”⁴² Implicit in these recommendations was the belief that African Americans shared the status of corps d’exception with France’s colonial subjects in Africa. Furthermore, by insisting on a study of interactions between blacks and whites in the United States, the French colonial administrators suggested that successful race relations were part and parcel of the modernization package.⁴³

Not all colonial authorities had to make the transatlantic voyage in order to be exposed to American developmental know-how. Sometimes they could have their share of American modernity mediated through Paris. For instance, at the end of the mission on gold mining, Mr. Philippe asked various French overseas institutions to let him know the number of copies of the final report they would need. Many of the institutions in charge of the outre-mer, including the Haut Commisariat d’AOF and the Office de la Recherche Scientifique Outre-Mer (ORSOM), responded promptly.⁴⁴ In other instances, American development missionaries carried out the reverse voyage overseas to train French colonial managers. For example, the Mutual Security Agency (MSA) sent a US cotton geneticist to French Africa, while another American expert was lent to French colonial authorities to train them in American techniques of mechanical rice harvesting.⁴⁵ Despite the suspicion of some colonial administrators, a number of French institutions in charge of overseas affairs actively sought this type of cooperation. Such was the case of ORSOM, which not only asked for the delivery of American scientific equipment and documentation to its various laboratories but also proposed to send its own technicians to the United States while it anticipated hosting American experts at its overseas facilities in Africa.⁴⁶

At the level of implementation, French colonial administrators translated American modernization precepts into the terms of a rejuvenated pacte colonial. Burying the industrialization projects that Vichy had intended for the outre-mer, postwar leaders and planners soon resuscitated the stale notion of pacte colonial, that is, a policy of economic complementarity between the metropole and the colonies that confined the latter into the provision of raw materials. In the minds of most postwar modernizers, what mattered, after all, was increased sectoral productivity within the framework of the imperial (and international) division of labor.⁴⁷ As he gave his blessings for the sending of French productivity missionaries to the United States, Jean Monnet emphasized the extractive activities of the overseas territories, including the colonial dependencies in French West Africa.⁴⁸ With Marshall Plan (and later MSA) money channeled through FIDES, French authorities rehabilitated, for instance, the irrigation project of the Office du Niger as it was envisioned in the 1920s.⁴⁹

Even though they were heirs to the emerging American modernization paradigm, and perhaps because of these very filiations, many FIDES projects entrenched the status quo as they unduly gave technopolitical power to French colonial bureaucrats and experts to act as the “mandarins of the future” for the Ivorians. In the end, then, the novelty of American-inflected developmentalism was more a rhetorical prowess than anything else.⁵⁰ The story of postwar development of mass housing in Ivory Coast exemplified this situation. At the same time, it underlined the limits of a state-led modernization scheme that failed to take stock of the agency of common people.

PUBLIC HOUSING AND THE LIMITS OF DUBBING

The First World War had opened many windows for the circulation of American housing and urban modernity to Western Europe, a trend that was further amplified with the onset of the Marshall Plan program and its effort to reconstruct Europe after the Second World War. In postwar France, the appropriation of American modernity in the housing sector was most visible in the use of breeze blocks, plywood, and vacuum-packed concrete. Except for passing comments, the colonial ramifications of this Americanization have not always been adequately appreciated.⁵¹ Yet as American modernity began its transatlantic voyage, it invariably dropped anchor on the shores of colonial metropolises. In the context of the flagging French Empire of the 1940s, such anchorages came through the mediation of the young French civil engineers, architects, and urban designers who were increasingly imbued with Taylorist dreams and Corbusean ideas regarding the advantage of concrete masonry units, mass-produced housing, mechanization, and ultimately the modern functional city.⁵²

In late colonial Ivory Coast, the deployment of American technological innovations and building techniques was carried out by individual architects such as Daniel Badani and Henri Chomette, who left their distinctive marks on the urban and architectural landscapes of Abidjan and other Ivorian cities.⁵³ In 1952, Chomette’s firm was contracted to build the Immeuble Clozel, which experimented with high-rise housing in the Ivorian capital.⁵⁴ Incorporating both African motifs and indigenous construction materials into his work in order to minimize cost, the architect and his associates utilized concrete and steel to erect numerous buildings in the country, making sure their projects were forward-looking and functional—a choice not unlike those of many of their contemporaries in metropolitan France. Such rejection of the backward-looking style of the beaux arts and adoption of concrete monumental structures were best epitomized in the construction of the Hôtel de Ville in Abidjan (see fig. 2.2), which the Bureau Chomette completed in 1956 to the general acclaim of reviewers.⁵⁵

French postwar colonial modernizers also recirculated American technological and building construction ideas by applying them to the development of public housing projects. In the face of urban explosion in the colonies in the aftermath of the war and fearing the spread of anticolonial discontent among the populace, the colonial authorities reorganized the Office des Habitations Economiques (Bureau of Low-Cost Housing, or OHE) in 1946—which provided Ivory Coast and the other territories with their own OHE branches. This was followed up with the development of a housing policy for the masses: the improvement of living conditions in rural areas, a crackdown on excessive rents in cities, the establishment of housing credit institutions in view of “reinforc[ing] the housing demand of employed urban residents,” and, in the case of Ivory Coast, the creation in 1952 of the Société Immobilière d’Habitation de Côte d’Ivoire (SIHCI).⁵⁶

Despite the implementation of these measures, few Africans could afford to pay for the new houses because of their exorbitant prices and the complexity of the procedure involved in getting a loan from the housing credit institutions.⁵⁷ It was in this context of failure to deliver on the promise of modernity that Kouamé Binzème and a number of the French-educated African elite promoted and ultimately established in 1949 the Habitat Africain—a credit union whose goal was to help the Africans acquire cheap and decent housing.⁵⁸ Anticipating even some collaboration of sorts with SIHCI, the managers of Habitat Africain requested a credit line of 10 million francs from OHE/Ivory Coast; however, it was denied.⁵⁹ Although Habitat Africain went ahead to build numerous housing units using some of the American innovations and techniques (e.g., cinder blocks, plywood, and concrete) that had found their way into postwar France, the refusal of the colonial authorities to provide full financial backing to the African-supported credit institution pointed to the limits of a grandiose vision that saw only a heavily bureaucratic administration and centralized state as the sole provider of modernity.⁶⁰ The dream of providing affordable accommodations to the many was so constricted that by 1955, that is, ten years after launching the program, mass low-cost housing was still lacking in Ivory Coast as much as in the rest of the French colonies in sub-Saharan Africa.⁶¹

FIGURE 2.2. Hôtel de Ville, Abidjan, circa 1956. Source: http://www.postalesinventadas.com. Courtesy of Rafael Cazorla.

Under these historical circumstances, African accommodation seekers took matters into their own hands. In the relatively wealthy rural areas where the prices of cash crops were on the rise, for instance, rich planters—in the coffee and especially the cocoa belts of southeastern and South-Central Ivory Coast—began improving their homes. Sometimes with no external financial support, individual planters tapped the experiential knowledge of Togolese masons and other hired construction laborers to build their own versions of the modern house and, in this way, partook of the conspicuous treasure economy (économie du trésor) that Jean-Marc Gastellu has so well studied. In other instances, they formed mutual aid associations to promote the construction of affordable housing units in their villages.⁶²

In the cities, the proactive stances of the Africans were equally at play, particularly since the efforts of the various colonial states in the field of housing were focused on “constructing housing estates and subsidizing and regularizing housing for the more stable and compact working class [whom] officials hoped to shape.”⁶³ In Abidjan, however, such efforts were not sufficient, especially since migration to the port city was reaching unmanageable proportions. Pushed to the margins of the colonial urban world, the African residents of Treichville and other “native” quarters empowered themselves by establishing voluntary associations with the ultimate goal of improving their daily lives and living conditions.⁶⁴ As early embodiments of civil society, these civic associations emerged as “countervailing powers” that disputed the hegemony of the colonial state and its minimalist take on social reproduction in the city. The proliferation of the cours communes (shared compounds) and other slums in and around Abidjan’s legal districts provided an early hint that the African residents of the city were determined to be full agents in the production of Abidjan and the definition of its modernity.⁶⁵

If dubbing modernization and accelerating infrastructural development were meant to appease and moderate the nationalist demands of the colonial subjects, they met with poor results. For the coming of American modernity in the dependencies, even mediated through the paternalism of the colonial administrators and experts, was like the opening of Pandora’s box, with the nationalist leaders and social activists mobilizing the late colonial development policies to request more concessions from Paris. As Frederick Cooper has persuasively demonstrated, the colonial subjects effectively argued—not without subaltern wit—that what the French authorities portrayed as the benefits of France’s benevolent development efforts were, in fact, long-overdue entitlements.⁶⁶ Moreover, with Marshall Plan (and later MSA) administrators’ dissatisfaction with French management of American credits, French authorities were forced to mount a public relations campaign to brand their amended version of mise en valeur as something novel and daring.⁶⁷

Regardless of these propaganda ploys, decolonization appeared irresistible, as evidenced by the election of Félix Houphouët-Boigny as the first black mayor of Abidjan in 1956 on the platform that African elected officials would be better suited to manage the municipality of the port city.⁶⁸ Similarly, the signs that the politics of dubbing was not the appropriate response to the nationalist calls for more African control over decision making were also demonstrated in the struggle that shook some of the tenets of the French grip over agronomic research in late colonial Ivory Coast.

REFASHIONING DEVELOPMENT COOPERATION

Even as French colonial bureaucrats and experts crisscrossed the United States as fellows of the productivity missions program in search of recipes for the overseas territories, the political landscape in Ivory Coast was changing. After its disaffiliation from the French Communist Party in 1951, the Ivorian branch of the Rassemblement Démocratique Africain (RDA) had moved even closer to the colonial government in Abidjan, ushering in an era of cohabitation in the late colonial period that a contemporary scholar aptly dubbed as dyarchic rule.⁶⁹ In addition, Houphouët-Boigny entered the government of Guy-Mollet in 1956 as a minister without portfolio. Subsequently, RDA’s leader became actively involved in drafting and ultimately sponsoring the passage of the Loi-cadre (framework law), which devolved much power to the African territories even as it paved the way for their balkanization.⁷⁰

It was in this context that the struggles to control agronomic research emerged. As early as 1953, French authorities in Paris had been trying to reorganize the structure of the various overseas research institutions in view of bringing them under a common directorate. A task force was set up to study the scheme. It concluded on the desirability of the idea and suggested that agronomic research should come under the supervision of ORSTOM. This recommendation, however, was to create frictions between the partisans of state rights and the enthusiasts for centralized rights, on the one hand, and on the other, the various interest groups involved in African agricultural production, including planters, researchers, politicians, and bureaucrats from Ivory Coast.⁷¹ In a 1956 speech in Abidjan, for instance, Raymond Desclers criticized what he thought would be armchair agronomic research if agronomy were to integrate ORSTOM, adding that what Ivorian planters wanted was an “independent bureau of research in Africa, specialized in studying coffee, cocoa, and cola nuts.” More fundamentally, the Ivory Coast–based white planter insisted that the headquarters of the envisioned bureau “should be in Africa to be in touch with the daily realities” of the peasants.⁷²

Desclers was not the only white planter to develop this line of argument. The chairperson of the Federation of Overseas Coffee Planters Associations, R. Dubled, thought similarly. Writing in July 1957 to rally support for his group’s position, he lamented that “no real research has been done in French Africa regarding cocoa and coffee.” For him, French researchers were not to be blamed since the reason for the problem was not so much their inabilities as it was the system under which they worked. To remedy a situation that only resulted in the lack of serious investigation, he recommended the creation of “an autonomous institute” to be charged with research and development in agriculture. Concluding his missive, Dubled asked his correspondent not to support the centralization plan that was being circulated, because “no one should accept the integration of agronomic research under ORSTOM bureaucracy.”⁷³

Sensing the potential impact of these negative campaigns, ORSTOM officials began to counterattack. In 1956, Jean-Jacques Juglas, as new chairman of ORSTOM, wrote to the Ivorian authorities trying to appease their concerns. Aware that Ivory Coast was out to have its own cocoa and coffee institute, separate from the ORSTOM system, he offered to run ORSTOM in a “decentralized and flexible manner.” Moreover, responding to the Ivorian request to have the involvement of international specialists in the fields of agronomic research, he asked the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) to send an expert. Still in line with the old strategy of using French researchers as brokers of Ivorian modernization, he promised to send Orstomians to Brazil, Trinidad, and the Gold Coast to study the genetics of coffee, hoping that at their return they would apply their knowledge and know-how to improve Ivorian production of the cash crop.⁷⁴

The deployment of the counterarguments and many other counterproposals continued into the late years of French rule in Ivory Coast. But emboldened by the passage and subsequent implementation of Loi-cadre, the partisans of an autonomous agronomic institute pushed their case—leading the secretary general of ORSTOM to note: “Ivory Coast continue to take advantage of a political peculiarity to which it is very much attached.” Still wishing a favorable outcome from the political turf, Roger Trintignac added that France’s star territory in West Africa was “not opposed to the principle of continued link with ORSTOM.” In fact, Ivory Coast could even “become integrated into our entire dispositif as long as its character and territorial independence are not disputed.” In other words, there was hope that ORSTOM would remain the powerhouse to mediate the modernization of Ivorian agronomy—provided that ORSTOM showed some flexibility.⁷⁵

This proved to be wishful thinking. Although a ministerial ruling intended to place the whole Ivorian agronomic research center under ORSTOM was drafted, the project never materialized. Rather, only the Bouaké research center was attributed to ORSTOM. In the meantime Georges Monnet, the Ivorian minister for agriculture, established a separate Institut Français du Café et du Cacao (IFCC) in 1957 with its main headquarters at Bingerville.⁷⁶ But when the Franco-African community was born in 1958, ORSTOM attempted to resuscitate the project of a unified agronomic directorate. This new effort, however, proved ineffective. Thus, at the collapse of France’s formal empire in West Africa in 1960, ORSTOM had only marginally succeeded in integrating the various branches of agronomic research; besides losing the battle to control the stellar sector of cocoa and coffee research, ORSTOM also witnessed powerlessly the creation of the Institut de Recherches Agronomiques Tropicales et des Cultures Vivrières (IRAT)—a new institute in Paris charged with applied research on food crops.⁷⁷ Even more threatening to the policy that ORSTOM should remain the key institution to dub agricultural modernity for Ivory Coast was the persistent desire on the part of the Ivorian authorities to nationalize ORSTOM facilities at Adiopodoumé—an aspiration that continued to poison the relationship between the French institution and Ivory Coast in the immediate aftermath of independence.⁷⁸

Despite these frictions, the Ivorian leadership remained expectant that France would underwrite much of their country’s overall scheme of agrarian modernization. In 1959, the secretary of the Ivory Coast Chamber of Agriculture and Industry, J. Manet, expanded on this point: “Extension service, technical assistance, cooperation; these are the objectives of Ivorian agriculture. It is up to the [Franco-African] Community to help us and lend the needed ‘scientists,’ technicians as well as investment capital.” Even as he diligently reorganized the Ivorian agricultural sector, Georges Monnet also believed that France should continue to provide financial assistance in view of “contributing to the rapid development of our African states.”⁷⁹ In light of these positions, it should not come as a surprise that one of the first actions of his ministry after Ivory Coast’s declaration of independence was to ask ORSTOM to help the Ivorians set up their own school of agriculture.⁸⁰

As ironic as this may look, the request should be seen as evidence of the realization that French mediation could not be stopped abruptly as well as an indication of the refusal to give in to what Houphouët-Boigny would later call “cut-rate Africanization.”⁸¹ More fundamentally, though, the Ivorian demand for assistance confirmed Robert Keith’s observation that even as “many of the [African] leaders remain[ed] willing to accept the economic and cultural benefits of a French-African ‘Community,’” especially in the era of decolonization, the initiative for sociopolitical actions had “pass[ed] increasingly into African hands.”⁸² It is quite instructive that the deployment of such a newfound initiative occurred precisely when Americans were increasingly knocking at the doors of France’s dying empire. To be sure, this added another layer to the saga of modernization in Ivory Coast.

INTERLOPING ON AN ALLY’S DOMAIN? AMERICANS IN LATE COLONIAL IVORY COAST

To the alarm of French politicians, some opinion leaders and officials in the United States not only applauded the move toward independence in France’s colonies, but they also seemed to have wanted the suppression of European mediation in their country’s relationship with Africa. Consequently, they pressed for a revision of US policy toward Africa. Fearful that the disintegration of the European empires on the continent would create a void, which, by necessity, would be exploited by the Soviet Union, American policy makers and social scientists expanded the reach of the American empire of knowledge through the imposition of new epistemologies regarding modernity, tradition, and ultimately the meaning of the “good” life.⁸³ If in postwar Europe this agenda was carried out through the institutionalization of American studies, the funding of cultural events and prizes, and the granting of scholarships to talented students, in Africa (and the rest of the Global South) the building of an empire of knowledge was graphed on the development of international and area studies as well as modernization theory, all of which aimed at producing usable knowledge on the emerging countries of the Third World. To this end, the federal government, private foundations, and major American universities established research programs targeting African, Asian, and Latin American countries.⁸⁴

While hardly at the forefront of studies carried out by modernization theorists, Africa was never missing from their scholarship. Already in early 1950, Africanist researcher and diplomat Vernon McKay had urged academics to include Africa in their area studies research, claiming that the “time has arrived for a full-fledged program of African studies at a major university, preferably in the area around Washington or New York.”⁸⁵ Echoing this exhortation, George McGhee announced a couple of months later during an address at Northwestern University that the State Department was pleased to cooperate with Melville Herskovits’s institution in promoting African studies.⁸⁶

With the passing of time and the availability of new funding made through both Title VI of the US National Defense Act of 1957 and philanthropic foundations, academic programs and centers for the study of Africa mushroomed in American universities and colleges, including at the University of California at Los Angeles, Michigan State, and Howard, Duquesne, and Syracuse Universities.⁸⁷ This focus on Africa in American academic circles culminated in a number of ways: an ever-greater number of American missions were sent to Africa to gather data so as to “inform long-term aid programs”; to foster a community of Africanists, the African Studies Association (ASA) was established in 1957; and to disseminate knowledge about Africa, a number of specialized journals were created.⁸⁸

Given its emerging reputation as an economic engine of French West Africa or an intriguing foil to the radical British-ruled Gold Coast, many of the American foundation-supported social scientists interested in Africa, including Elliott J. Berg (1957), Immanuel Wallerstein (1957), Aristide Zolberg (1958), and George Horner (1958–1959), found their way into Ivory Coast.⁸⁹ Although many of these junior scholars were critical of the US government, the knowledge they produced not only competed with French academic discourse on the country, but also soon became the resource for building an informal American empire in Ivorian territory, particularly so since the knowledge they disseminated extended the ethnographic gaze of the United States into late colonial Ivory Coast, a phenomenon that added to the concerns of the colonial state.⁹⁰

Thus, even as they accepted the presence of a US consulate in Ivory Coast, the French authorities never dropped their suspicion of the Americans. Betraying this mistrust of their Atlantic partner was the French refusal to allow a US Information Service (USIS) to be adjoined to the consular offices in Abidjan.⁹¹ Furthermore, the colonial officials in Abidjan kept a watch on the activities of the American researchers, including both Wallerstein and Zolberg.⁹² It was in this climate of suspicion that the first American consul was recalled, allegedly for making public statements during the 1958 referendum that a French diplomat found “unpleasant and preposterous.”⁹³

The suspicion of the French colonial authorities was not without foundation. The memory of Vietnam was still fresh on the minds of many French diplomats, who now saw the reincarnation of the “quiet American” in every American diplomat posted in a French colony.⁹⁴ Compounding this situation, American businesses were increasingly showing interest in Ivory Coast, whose leading city they aspired to use as a regional gateway to the other territories of French West Africa. Their interest was all the more well targeted since the dissemination of the first results of the many research projects supported by the Ford, Rockefeller, Carnegie, and other US foundations confirmed the relative edge of Ivory Coast over the other French-speaking countries in West Africa.⁹⁵ In this context, the Plymouth Oil Company expressed an interest in deep drilling near the coast of Abidjan.⁹⁶ Similarly, David E. Lilienthal—the world-renowned former chairman of the Tennessee Valley Authority—established contacts with the Ivorian government in Abidjan in anticipation of a contract that would eventually allow his consulting firm (Development and Resources Corporation) to undertake development planning work for Ivory Coast.⁹⁷

Such American interest was matched by the desire of the Ivorian leadership to tap the benefits of the emerging development aid industry. During a stay in November 1959 in the United States, where he headed the French delegation to a United Nations (UN) meeting, Houphouët-Boigny highlighted an aspect of this aspiration when he attempted to convince the Americans to assist only their “true friends.” Reportedly, he told President Dwight D. Eisenhower not to provide any help to those “African countries that have asked and obtained aid from the communists. We, your friends and who have already chosen to be by your side in the Western Bloc, we should be able to count on you.”⁹⁸ This move prefigured the Ivorian statesman’s postindependence deployment of the global Cold War card to advance his developmental agenda for Ivory Coast. In some cases, the strategy paid off—at least in the short term. Yet problems were brewing. For despite the growth of the local economy, the benefits of the postwar boom did not always trickle down to the people, thus creating an atmosphere of resentment likely to explode in violence.

An indication of this explosive situation had already occurred in October 1958, when, led by the Ligue des Originaires de Côte d’Ivoire (LOCI), unemployed Ivorian youth and other segments of the population of Abidjan began to attack Dahomeyans, Togolese, and other foreign Africans whom they accused of monopolizing the market of white-collar jobs. By the end of the month, it was estimated that more than five hundred houses had been damaged or destroyed. Concomitantly, about twenty-five thousand African foreigners were coerced into leaving the country. While law and order were restored in the subsequent weeks, this first wave of xenophobic riots in Abidjan revealed that the Houphouëtian vision of Ivorian development was fraught with perils that could erupt anytime into forceful collective action.⁹⁹

The most serious threat to Houphouët-Boigny’s dream, however, came from the educated cadres of the Parti Démocratique de Côte d’Ivoire (PDCI) and the Ivorian university students who were studying in France. At the time of the désapparentement in the early 1950s, many of them had criticized their leader and blamed him for what they saw as a rightward drift of the Rassemblement Démocratique Africain (RDA). Having come to intellectual maturity in the era when negritude and Marxism among France’s colonial subjects were in vogue, they viewed Houphouët-Boigny’s policies as backward. Although they did not leave the party, key members of this educated elite were active in building a political base so as to control decision making within the PDCI.¹⁰⁰ By the late 1950s, a number of the Ivorian intellectuals were tactfully disputing the political economy that informed Houphouët-Boigny’s vision of capitalist development. If some of these opponents used a cultural nationalist approach to lay claim to an alternative future for Ivory Coast, others did not hesitate to mobilize Marxist rhetoric to voice their criticism of the good life that the Ivorian leader was proposing to the masses. While they did not produce any social scientific discourse as elaborate as the treatises of the emerging dependency theorists, their opposition suggested that development was more than a matter of increasing the productivity of an economy.¹⁰¹

. . .

The story of late colonial development in Ivory Coast thus reiterates the agency of the Africans. Whether they were peasants, migrants to the cities, or belonged to the cadre of educated elite, these local actors incessantly appropriated the terms of postwar modernization and, in the process, threatened to exclude the colonial state in its implementation. The correspondence of Kouamé Binzème with the American Marshall Plan managers is quite illustrative in this regard. Having realized that much of the French modernization performances were a dubbed version of American practices, the lawyer figured that getting rid of the mediation of Paris was the right course of action. Although it is not clear how the Americans responded to Binzème’s appeal, his very action bespoke of the opening of a new chapter in the Ivorian strategy for development: the era of decolonial thinking (vis-à-vis France) and proactive triangulation to get a better deal on modernization.¹⁰²

Self-conscious of the decline of their own power, French colonial authorities attempted to control events in the territories under their rule as they sped up colonial development projects or reappropriated the US-inflected modernization drive. These efforts notwithstanding, the coming of the Pax Americana opened new spaces that helped the French colonial subjects triangulate their dreams and expectations of modernity. This was all the more so because the brave new world of the American Century subtly displaced the older mission civilisatrice that had so long justified the French presence in West Africa and other parts of Greater France. Perhaps no instance better typified this imperceptible displacement of French hegemony than the slow decline of Paris in the management of local affairs in the outre-mer.

Still, the charm of the politics of dubbing that the French colonial authorities enacted should not be lost on us. While the outcome of the translational ploy was illusory, the effort at cultural translation itself suggested that development, whether informed by mise en valeur or modernization theory, was never a ready-made recipe. Posited as a process as much as an end, it appeared that modernization was the terrain where competing social actors engaged with one another so as to establish a certain understanding of development. Thus when independence came in August 1960, not only were the Americans eyeing Ivory Coast as a potential anchor for a beachhead strategy in France’s outre-mer in West Africa, but there were signs that the Franco-American cold war over the country would not subside. Even more, it was clear that Houphouët-Boigny’s dream of turning Ivory Coast into a showcase of capitalist, if authoritarian, modernity would have some internal opponents whose loyalties remained hard to secure.