African Miracle, African Mirage. Abou B. Bamba

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ