roots of which went back to the interwar period when African farmers took up commercial farming. In the forest region of the Southeast, and after the relative failure of forced cultivation policy, native farmers took advantage of the new network of roads and railways and bought seedlings from either planters in the Gold Coast or the white colonists to develop hundreds of tree-crop farms on which they labored with family members. In the savanna regions of the territory, peasants increased their agricultural production, even if sometimes this was achieved under duress.52 With the liberalization of labor recruitment in the mid-1940s, an ever-increasing number of Africans set up their own plantations of cash crops. These factors, along with the rise in the price of crops like cocoa and coffee, set in place the conditions for a tree planting revolution in colonial Ivory Coast.53
As in other parts of West Africa, smallholder farming was the backbone of such an agrarian revolution. In the early twentieth century, in its effort to promote cash-crop agriculture, the colonial state had favored collective farming, which it reasoned was the closest approximation of the traditional agronomic practice of the indigenous people in the territory. This approach ended in abysmal failure. Unlike the promoted collectivist scheme, it was individual families who rose to operate small farms and produce cocoa, coffee, cotton, and food crops. These smallholder farmers shunned the use of agricultural machinery and increasingly made use of wage labor to run their plantations. In the process, they dramatically improved the Ivorian output of agricultural commodities (see fig. 1.1). Thus, it was grassroots modernization in the form of free access to agricultural labor that informed the cash-crop revolution in Ivory Coast—a scenario that would be repeated again and again in the history of postwar Ivorian capitalism. Mobilizing what might be called an early, if nonclassical, manifestation of “rational choice” strategy, African farmers not only appropriated and domesticated the cultivation of cash crops, but, adding another layer to the meaning of agricultural modernity, they also pushed the white planters to adopt the principle of free labor.54
Of course, there is no denying that by providing funds for agricultural services such as the Caisse Centrale de Credit Agricole (agricultural bank) to help a few planters get loans, the Comptes Café-Cacao to maintain and improve feeder roads and bridges, and by generously distributing seedlings and subsidized fertilizers, the colonial state created a favorable agronomic environment.55 Yet, it was the shift from lineage production of cash crops and the passage to small-scale capitalist farming that gave the decisive boost. In his cultural ecology of the lineage system among the Dida in South-Central Ivory Coast—a region that witnessed a dramatic increase in its output of both cocoa and coffee in the 1950s—Robert Hecht has shown that the “social reproduction hinged upon the recruitment of labor into the kin group, mainly though not exclusively through marriage.” However, under the pressure of global and local forces, marriage exchange had increasingly become “dependent during 1930–45 upon production of cocoa, and later coffee, which were sold and converted into the prevailing bridewealth media: manillas and cash.” At this juncture, “internally-generated pressure on the lineage to expand its cocoa and coffee production could not [. . .] be satisfied by the relatively limited and inflexible quality of labor available from the kin group.” Under these conditions, the “solution for the lineage in the post-War years was to resort to various non-kin types of labor. Over time, wage labor gradually emerged as the dominant form.”56
FIGURE 1.1. Value and relative importance of Ivorian cocoa, coffee, and wood exports, 1939–1956. Note that the combined share is relative to the overall agricultural export. Data sources: Territoire de Côte d’Ivoire, Inventaire économique de la Côte d’Ivoire, 165–66; Kipré, Côte d’Ivoire, 156; Gbagbo, La Côte d’Ivoire: Economie et société, 112, 124, 132; Peterec, The Port of Abidjan, 43a.
Such reality, which pointed to the flexibility and agency of the Africans in the agricultural transformation of the territory, would come to play a key role in Ivorian (rural) cosmopolitanism and agrarian modernity.57 It was not limited to South-Central Ivory Coast: indeed, other Ivorianists have long identified similar trends among the Guéré/Wè (western region), the Bété (midwestern region), and even the Baule (central region).58 And this was not lost on the many contemporary colonial social scientists who had flocked into the rural areas of Ivory Coast in their mission to study the natives. As early as 1939, pioneering French Africanist Henri Labouret had underlined the significance of African farmers in the production of cocoa beans in the territory.59 After the Second World War and within the context of calls for expanded socio-anthropological research on the Africans, such knowledge was increasingly shared by French and other foreign observers. For instance, in the mid-1950s, the budding ORSTOM geographer Hubert Fréchou recognized that while white planters seemed to keep better outward-looking cocoa and coffee plantations, it was the African smallholders who produced the majority of the Ivorian exported crops. Through the latter days of French colonial rule, the idea that Africans were the pillars of the Ivorian agricultural boom was consistently reaffirmed by colonial social scientists.60
Despite the knowledge that African farmers were producing much of the export commodities, the economic policies that colonial bureaucrats enacted discriminated against indigenous planters. During the war, for instance, much of the credit disbursed to subsidize agriculture was kept by white planters. In addition, not only were some African planters victimized by labor roundups to work on white plantations, but most of them were sold agricultural equipment at much higher prices compared to their white competitors. To exacerbate the situation, native commodity growers received a decisively lower price for their products.61 It was in this context that African planters, including Félix Houphouët-Boigny, set up in 1944 the Syndicat Agricole Africain (African Planters Union, or SAA), which soon became a platform for anticolonial political actions in Ivory Coast during the remainder of the war.62 In the aftermath of the war, SAA activism grew more militant even as the French Empire transformed itself into a relatively liberal transnational polity. To be sure, this situation set the stage for the appointment of Laurent Péchoux as a new governor whose mission was to crack down on radicalism and to prepare the territory for a “second colonial occupation.”63
FASHIONING THE TERRITORY FOR TAKEOFF: PÉCHOUTAGE AND ITS AFTERMATH
In the context of a relative liberalization of the political space that came in the wake of the Allies’ victory during the Second World War, associational life became widespread in the French colonial possessions. Soon thereafter, a number of local nationalist leaders created political parties and increasingly adopted Marxist-Leninist rhetoric to denounce continued European rule and exploitation. In Ivory Coast, the Parti Démocratique de Côte d’Ivoire (Ivory Coast Democratic Party, or PDCI) was the leading political organization to carry out such denunciation. Emerging from the same social milieu as the SAA, it soon mobilized other segments of the Ivorian population, and during the elections for the Constituent Assembly succeeded in having Houphouët-Boigny elected to the Palais Bourbon in late 1945.64 There, with other African parliamentarians, the planter now turned politician immediately sponsored many laws affecting the daily lives of the Africans, including the suppression of both the indigénat (February 1946) and the travail forcé (April 1946), as well as the extension of citizenship rights (May 1946) to all the colonial subjects living in France’s overseas territories.65
Alarmed by these seemingly liberal developments, the French colonial lobby and their metropolitan backers met during the summer of 1946 in Douala (Cameroon) and later in Paris to come up with plans to regain control of colonial affairs. The colonists’ rearguard resistance partly paid off, as they first succeeded in having the proposed constitution of April 1946 rejected. They effectively replaced the proposal with the schizophrenic constitutional arrangement of the Union Française (French Union). Under this new constitutional legal frame, Africans were certainly granted some civil and political freedoms. Yet the law restricted the self-governing
