of France’s overseas territories was, however, a source of tension. As early as 1949, Raphaël Saller, an eccentric white senator representing the territory of Guinea, had lashed out at the “monstrous egoism” of the metropolitan interests over what he saw as unfair allocations of the funds.13 The Americans themselves were not shy in criticizing the French. Reporting his impressions on how the Marshall Plan aid was operated in French West Africa in September 1949, for instance, William Moreland offered an assessment that was shared by many American diplomats in French West Africa. His verdict on the financial management of the aid money was without appeal: a “confused and jumbled story.”14 Less than a year later, the American consul general reportedly painted a similar picture to a United Nations administrator, arguing that the key characteristic of French development work in Africa was its “lack of overall planning.” Consequently, the diplomat continued, the “bulk of the public works is undertaken randomly and without any clear logic.”15 Despite these criticisms, which put into relief the weaknesses of French colonial financial practices, the Americans maintained their contribution to FIDES. This assistance helped the postwar developmentalist institution to leave an indelible legacy on the overseas territories. For this reason, the French colonial authorities were ever grateful, even as they remained wary of their overbearing transatlantic partner.16
In Ivory Coast, the impact of the fund’s infrastructural development effort was immediately visible on the landscape (see map 1.1), especially in Abidjan where the bulk of the money was spent. For instance, the territory that had only a couple of car-friendly passageways in the interwar period boasted not only new bridges but also 10,850 kilometers of roads by 1948, including several kilometers of tarred expressways, which allowed the country to increase its importation of automobiles.17 The infrastructural effort also rehabilitated many railroad tracks of the Abidjan-Niger line. In addition to expanding or improving the network of roads and railways, FIDES also attempted to create a lagoon transportation system along the coast by building canals and waterways to link the Ebrié Lagoon to adjacent bodies of water, including the Aby Lagoon of the Aboisso region.18 Furthermore, the airport of Abidjan at Port-Bouët was updated to accommodate modern standards while smaller airfields were erected in various regional hubs.19
While FIDES planners in postwar Ivory Coast paid attention to an inestimable number of infrastructural projects, their primary focus was on the so-called grands travaux (large scale public works). This selectivity allowed them to finish the cutting of a channel through the strip of land that separated the Ebrié Lagoon from the Atlantic Ocean—an effort that sped up and eventually helped complete the quarter-century-old projected harbor of Abidjan.20 Already during the war, the Vichy government had attempted to rush the completion of the maritime project in an effort to keep at bay the British forces at Freetown in Sierra Leone.21 After the war, and with the help of American aid money, millions of dollars were invested to open the Vridi Canal and build new wharves in an attempt to provide, in the words of a visiting journalist, “new wealth and prosperity for this long-neglected area of Black Africa.”22
In addition to such focus on infrastructural development, there were efforts on the social front in the hope to not only “cause the transformation” of Ivory Coast into a “modern” country but also to “meet [its] need for social progress.”23 With demographic and urban demands on the rise in most African territories during the postwar years, FIDES planners found themselves assisting the Ivorian colonial authorities as much as other rulers in the larger French West Africa in designing the new urbanism of the territory.24 In this élan, the planners endorsed the increase of the FIDES share devoted to social infrastructural modernization, which reached more than 30 percent of the overall FIDES expenditure in Ivory Coast by the time of the collapse of the French Empire. Concretely, this new emphasis on social development allowed the construction of hospitals, clinics, and schools in various cities of the territory.25
MAP 1.1. Key FIDES operations in colonial Ivory Coast. Adapted from Ambassade de France (USA), French Africa: A Decade of Progress, 20. Cartography by author.
There is a basis to argue that FIDES gave a decisive boost to the modernization drive in postwar Ivory Coast. By creating a network of transportation systems, it contributed to a smoother circulation of people, goods, and ideas—a process not unlike the impact of Sarraut’s colonial policy after the First World War. While such circulation transformed the territory, it should not be forgotten that the purpose of the grands travaux undertaken by the late colonial state was to create a network of communication and transportation facilities that would expedite the delivery of colonial raw materials and foodstuffs to the metropole and beyond. In that, it resembled the interwar colonial policy of mise en valeur, which labored to extract the resources of the forest regions even as it forced northerners to migrate south and work on the budding tree-crop economy.26 Similarly, the postwar mobilization of colonial experts and their knowledge was reminiscent of the interwar period, when the first web of France’s tropical research organizations was consolidated in the hope that they would help the metropole to better exploit its overseas territories.
POSTWAR REMOBILIZATION OF COLONIAL SCIENTISTS
Arguably, the need for more intense practical knowledge emerged after the Second World War at the time when the French economy had to be reassembled. In fact, science, technology, and social engineering played a critical role in this postwar drive toward both reconstruction and modernization. In metropolitan France, for instance, the rise of applied science at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) proved to be a most opportune conjuncture in assisting the government in its efforts at revitalizing an economy that the war had crippled.27 Authorities in charge of France’s overseas territories anticipated a similar scenario. Consequently, they set up the Office de la Recherche Scientifique et Technique Outre-Mer (ORSTOM) in the 1940s, strategically disseminating its network of regional/territorial centers (see map 1.2) throughout the empire.28
If the late interwar mise en valeur projects relied on the research expertise of such institutions as the Institut National d’Agronomie Tropicale (INAC), its experimental gardens, and the Institut Français d’Afrique Noire (IFAN), the French colonial modernizers of the late 1940s and 1950s mobilized the epistemic power of a new crop of institutions that produced tropical knowledge, including the Institut de Recherches des Huiles et Oléagineux (IRHO), Institut de Recherches du Coton et des Textiles Exotiques (IRCT), the Institut de Recherches sur le Caoutchouc (IRCA), the Institut d’Elevage et de Médecine Vétérinaire Tropicale (IEMVT), and ORSTOM.29 In a context dominated by a search for a better means to exploit the resources of the outre-mer and make its populations more productive, ORSTOM’s agenda was updated to include not only applied ecological experiments but also social science research. In this regard, and echoing a practice already in place among their fellow sociologists in metropolitan France, the imperial authorities called upon the expertise of the colonial social scientists to guide postwar development policies. Within the international context of the emergence of new tools to measure poverty and an ever-incessant refinement of statistical methods, survey teams were immediately dispatched to various parts of the outre-mer, including French Equatorial and West Africa, Madagascar, and New Caledonia.30
MAP 1.2. ORSTOM’s global reach. Cartography by author.
To the satisfaction of the local authorities, the colonial social scientists, now equipped with presumably better measurement tools, re-highlighted the supposed mentalités of the “natives” with regard to their economic, social, and agronomical practices.31 This was the case with Jean-Louis
