African Miracle, African Mirage. Abou B. Bamba

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СКАЧАТЬ are key agents in the transformation of their societies; to demonstrate that the people of the African continent were present at the birth of modernity. However, I have chosen to proceed with a different vignette—one that emphasizes not only the significance of the mid- to late twentieth century in the history of modernization worldwide but, more importantly, the pervasiveness of American factors and the frictions they raised in the unfolding of developmentalism in Francophone Africa. Perhaps a brief foray into the memoir of David E. Lilienthal, one of the omnipresent faces of the American modernization paradigm in the twentieth century and a character whom we shall meet episodically in this book, will highlight this point succinctly.²

      In March 1961, the American Lilienthal, a man whose name was intimately associated with the world-acclaimed Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), paid a visit to Abidjan—capital of the newly independent state of Ivory Coast. Unlike most Americans who had ventured to Africa before decolonization and immediately thereafter, Lilienthal was neither on a safari nor on a scholarly field-trip expedition. Rather, the man, then past his sixties, had come to the West African country to add the finishing touches to a contract that the Ivorian government was negotiating with Development and Resources Corporation (D&R), the transnational firm that he had set up when he retired from the public sector. Although consulting for the mineral development of the country, Lilienthal—as former director of the TVA—could not help but visit Ivory Coast’s first hydroelectric dam. And in the March 18 entry of his journal, the assiduous diary keeper noted:

      Visited the [Ayamé I] dam about noon—a medium-sized concrete gravity and earth fill, total capacity about 30,000 kw; only one of the two generators now being required. When we arrived the only person on duty was an intelligent young African, at the power-control board. The French technicians, quite a group, some of them students, were at the canteen having an apéritif. After lunch, with the engineer in charge, a Frenchman, we returned to the power station; again the only man around the place was a tall, friendly, handsome Ivorian.

      Said the homesick French engineer: “We can’t trust the Africans with so complicated a thing as a dam and powerhouse; they must always have someone watching over them.”

      Nuts.

      While he was saying this he and his quite beautiful bride of three months (from Nancy in Lorraine) were giving us an elaborate and delicious luncheon, served with elegance in the heart of the forest. Down in the powerhouse the men “who couldn’t be trusted” and had to be “watched every minute” were tending to the production of electricity. A sense of indispensability and superiority is an essential of being a good colonialist.³

      Few readers of Lilienthal’s memoirs would have missed his invective against the French. In the United States, where he published his multivolume opus, France was indeed increasingly seen as an anachronistic colonial power that refused to abide by the principles of a postcolonial new world order. With the war in Algeria still raging, public opinion in America was ripe for French bashing and mudslinging. In this particular context, and despite its hyperbolic tone, Lilienthal’s critical observation on Franco-Ivorian relations struck an important chord with the American reading public.⁴

      Even without the history and legacy of French bashing in the United States, not many scholars would question the claim that French-style decolonization was like a drama without an epilogue: while the collapse of the empire had forced the French authorities to redirect their disciplinary gaze toward the “colonization of everyday life” in the metropole, France designed its departure from many of its overseas possessions so as to perpetuate their dependency.⁵ In the case of sub-Saharan Africa, this was all the more possible since historically and epistemologically the makers of French foreign policy remained convinced that black Africans were “inherently inferior.” More specifically, they considered that their former colonial subjects characteristically and permanently needed to be “dependent on France for their survival.”⁶

      It was in this orientalist context that various bilateral defense agreements (accords de défense) were signed with countries like Senegal, Mauritania, Madagascar, Togo, Central African Republic, Gabon, Ivory Coast, Congo, Chad, and Dahomey. The neocolonial design of the French state in Africa was further entrenched when its Fonds d’Investissement pour le Développement Economique et Social (FIDES) and the Caisse Centrale de la France d’Outre-Mer (CCFOM) were transformed into the Fonds d’Aide et de Coopération (FAC) and the Caisse Centrale de Coopération Economique (CCCE). With largely cosmetic legal changes, these institutions emerged as France’s prime channels for assistance to its former colonies. In fact, while the French government resorted to other conduits for its cooperation with Africa, the FAC and CCCE remained by far the most effective means to perpetuate a French colonial type of developmentalist governmentality.⁷

      In light of perceived Franco-African geopolitical intimacy that smacked of paternalism and neocolonialism, Lilienthal’s critique thus hit right on target—especially with reference to Ivory Coast and President Félix Houphouët-Boigny, whom the Martinique-born scholar and activist Frantz Fanon had dismissed as early as 1958 as the “traveling salesman of French colonialism.”⁸ Other observers pinpointed the same issue, including French artist-scholar Michel Leiris, who visited Ivory Coast in 1962. He, too, highlighted how the country had remained French, despite the formal proclamation of independence: “In Abidjan,” the surrealist poet/ethnographer noted, “no street has been renamed,” adding deploringly, “One can still read on numerous plates the names of [French] governors.”⁹ In regard to the denunciation of France’s relations to the Ivorian people, then, Lilienthal was in good company.

      The lingering hegemony of the French in postcolonial Ivory Coast did not appall only the former TVA executive or the French surrealist poet. From US career diplomats to American investors and journalists posted in Abidjan, most American visitors seemed to be agreed on the view that Houphouët-Boigny’s country was indeed in French hands.¹⁰ And there was much truth in these perceptions. Yet it is part of my argument that French control in postcolonial Ivory Coast was not all-encompassing. Beginning in the postwar period, the United States and other global forces had begun appearing in unoccupied interstices. Consequently, they were transforming what had been a largely bilateral Franco-Ivorian relationship into something akin to a multilateral encounter. While colonialism had been replaced by a “‘neocolonial’ postcolonial world,” especially in the aftermath of French-style decolonization, I suggest that such a world was increasingly a globalized ecumene where the allure of American-inflected modernity loomed large, and accordingly it attracted many enthusiastic modernizers in extant or soon-to-be postcolonial nations in the Global South.¹¹

      African Miracle, African Mirage is an attempt to substantiate this point as it focuses on the transnational struggle to turn Ivory Coast into a showcase of capitalist modernization. The narrative strategically immerses readers in the euphoric years that, in the words of one scholar, raised Ivory Coast to the semiperiphery of the world system.¹² Such a relatively privileged position attracted many footloose historical actors, including development experts, social scientists, and foreign job-seekers anxious to tap into the exceptional wealth of the country. In this book, I explore the making and ultimate unmaking of Ivory Coast’s Thirty Glorious Years, the country’s postwar economic boom that spanned the period of the 1950s to the early 1980s.¹³

      Unlike much of the recent scholarly work on Third World development in the post-1945 era, the book underscores that the struggle to provide Ivory Coast with foreign aid and developmental assistance was not between American and Soviet ideologues. Although the global Cold War was never off the radar of some of the historical actors, I argue that the main struggle in the arena of late colonial and postcolonial development in this particular African setting was, in many ways, among French development workers, American modernizers, and Ivorian enthusiasts for rapid social change. In numerous chapters of this book, I elaborate on the contours of this struggle and other related issues in the entangled geographies of Ivorian modernization.

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