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(Re)Framing Postcolonial Development

In a world turned upside-down, Fama had inherited an honor without the means to uphold it, like a headless snake.

—Ahmadou Kourouma, Suns of Independence (1968)

FROM THE PREVIOUS CHAPTERS, it should be evident now that late colonial development in Ivory Coast was never a bounded experience. The search for a renovated developmental governmentality, the rise of the American Century, and the global reach of international institutions all set people, ideas, and funding on the move within and across the French Empire. The coming of independence in 1960 did not alter the nature of this dynamics of postwar modernization and its fantastic goal of increasing the productivity of the Ivorian agriculture-based economy. The demands of postcolonial nation building amplified the magnitude of such an already transnational process. In this chapter, I suggest that any deeper understanding of modernization in postcolonial Ivory Coast must broaden the spatial focus of the analysis and move beyond the Françafrique paradigm. Of course, such an approach does not imply a total rejection of the insights that activist/scholar François-Xavier Verschave and others have brought to bear on the shady workings of Franco-African relations. It does mean, however, that the story of the intimate rapports between African and French decision makers must contend with the narrative of Africa’s embeddedness in a larger world.¹

One crucial way to look at this embeddednes is to explore what I call the postcolonial geopolitics of knowledge production and, in the case of the thinking that informed the official Ivorian modernization drive, its Eurocentric exclusion of any African epistemology regarding the quest of the good life. In a sense, if Claude Lévi-Strauss’s mid-century observation, that “what the ‘insufficiently developed’ countries reproached the others with is not so much that they have been Westernized, but that they were not quickly given the means to Westernize,” captured any truth, it was maybe to reveal the narrowness of postwar development thinking; that the ultimate problem of postcolonial development in many regions of the Global South was the rather dominant belief, among many independence leaders, that Euro-American bureaucratic rationality was the way to organize the various postcolonial polities, especially if real progress was to be achieved in the task of nation building.² In this light, what was at stake in the various Africanization drives that came in the wake of decolonization was less the deep structure of Euro-American governmentality than the spectacularity of indigenization performances. It was less the Eurocentric moral economy of governance that mattered than who was holding the reins of political power. It was as if, as Ahmadou Kourouma poetically put it in the late 1960s, the power that came in the wake of independence was “like a headless snake,” a clout with no consequential attribute.³

Africanist epistemologists and other philosophically minded scholars have aptly criticized this as a predicament that obstructed a genuinely African emancipation. We shall further see below that the Franco-American struggle over the direction of Ivorian development planning, and especially the treatment reserved to local Ivorians in articulating a postcolonial vision of modernization, amply supports such assessment.⁴ Beyond this point, what emerged in the mid-1960s as a key parameter in the competition between France’s Office de la Recherche Scientifique et Technique Outre-Mer (ORSTOM) and other research firms for the control of Ivory Coast’s development planning was the importance of epistemic memories—a concept I employ to denote the memories that typically come through remembrance of past scientific practices and their attendant truth-claims. While the idea builds on Valentin Mudimbe’s notion of the “colonial library” as the body of knowledge on Africa that was put together by European colonial administrators, missionaries, anthropologists, and other social scientists, the concept of epistemic memories suggests a more dynamic approach to the production of knowledge as it puts into relief the agency of knowledge producers as a group of individuals engaged in a particular type of politics.⁵

This chapter elaborates on these issues of epistemology and politics, highlighting along the way that the United States, as a potential source of developmental assistance, was never off the radar of the Ivorian decision makers. It shows that both the geopolitics of expertise and the eventual French dubbing of American-inflected modernization theory in the form of planification à base régionale (regional planning) played a crucial role in Ivorian projections of development in the aftermath of decolonization. Equally important in shaping the design of postindependence development in Ivory Coast were the tensions arising from the demands of an increasingly vocal Ivorian youth calling for indigenization, the growing French migrant and expatriate presence in Ivory Coast, and the amplification of Félix Houphouët-Boigny’s ambivalence regarding French neocolonial designs for his country. All of this conspired to not only frame the temporality of high politics in the Ivory Coast of the 1960s, but to also turn development planning, which ORSTOM ultimately dominated, into a political imbroglio of sorts. I suggest that this situation reinforced the predicament of modernization in the Ivorian postcolony since it was not local factors and ideas that presided over its conceptualization. Yet the rise of ORSTOM at the apex of development planning in the country was much less the result of the permanence of neocolonial capitalist relations than it was because the French experts judiciously tapped the resources of the “colonial library” to increase their political advantage in the market of postcolonial expertise in Ivory Coast. Before we substantiate this point, however, it may be apposite to discuss the significance of the United States in the Ivorian expectations of postcolonial modernity.

LOOKING TOWARD AMERICA FOR DEVELOPMENT AID

On 19 August 1960, only twelve days after proclaiming the formal independence of his country from France, President Félix Houphouët-Boigny (whom many were now referring to as Le Vieux, meaning “Old/Wise Man”) wrote a letter to the US ambassador in Abidjan. A translation of the correspondence, which was telegraphed to the Department of State the following day, read “Desirous of devoting its efforts to building with [the] greatest speed [the] economic power of state and thereby to reinforce its political independence, Government of Ivory Coast has [the] honor to solicit aid from [the] US [. . .] to contribute to development.” Giving Washington room to maneuver, the Ivorian leader added: “Amount and means [of] this aid could be determined by common agreement after [a] study that would be made in Ivory Coast by [a] mission of your government’s experts that I would be happy to welcome at Abidjan as soon as possible.”⁶ Despite their rather laconic and approximate rendition of Houphouët-Boigny’s letter, American diplomats posted in Abidjan did acknowledge and actually gave importance to the principal request of the Ivorian leader: aid for development.

Two days later, on 22 August 1960, the US Embassy in Abidjan cabled yet another message to Washington, this time to appeal to the State Department for an International Cooperation Agency (ICA) survey team to be sent to Ivory Coast by 15 September 1960.⁷ During the second week of September, an American survey team of the ICA did arrive in Abidjan. Responding to the Ivorian request, the Americans assessed the development needs of the newly sovereign republic of Ivory Coast and offered plans for its modernization.⁸

French diplomats, who were always on guard in what they now saw as France’s pré carré (exclusive sphere of influence), did not fail to underline the Ivorian request as a new opportunity that Washington was likely to exploit. They construed the swiftness of the US response as a form of propaganda, showcasing America’s “will to provide Ivory Coast with an assistance which allegedly portrays itself as disinterested.”⁹ Subsequent developments proved the French right. Basing its judgment on the ICA report, the US Embassy observed in a 1961 telegram that Ivory Coast was a “relatively well-endowed” country in West Africa whose “economic development [was] within reach of the stage of self-sustaining growth.” The telegram deplored the fact that this remarkable progress in Ivory Coast was “the result almost exclusively of French planning, financing, and execution.” This omnipresence of France, the embassy ruled, was the “basic weakness” of developmental endeavors in Ivory Coast.¹⁰ Thus, even though the American diplomats in Abidjan recognized that France had the “main burden and responsibility for Ivory Coast development,” they nonetheless recommended that Washington show the “non-colonial U.S. interest in Ivory Coast development in a concrete way.”¹¹

The embassy’s insistence on demonstrating the “non-colonial U.S. interest” in Ivory Coast exudes a clear benevolence in Washington’s self-representation of US relations with the Third World. Obviously, such a construction glosses over the rather long imperial history of the United States, a history that spans from the westward expansion of the thirteen colonies to the colonization of the Philippines and beyond. There is more than a narcissistic self-image to this construction, though. For by foregrounding its own selfless effort in Ivory Coast, the US Embassy’s message strategically inscribed France as a neocolonial, if no longer explicitly colonialist, power in West Africa. Ironically, then, both American diplomats and Left-leaning Africanist economists like Samir Amin seemed to agree that French-style decolonization was a myth. Of course, for different reasons: For the Egyptian Marxist, it was because the collapse of the empire did not destroy the very structures of capitalist relations linking Ivory Coast to France. For the Americans, however, France’s colonialist relations lived on because of the hegemonic presence of the French—a situation that prevented fair operation of an unfettered capitalism.¹²