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
