its modernity.65
If dubbing modernization and accelerating infrastructural development were meant to appease and moderate the nationalist demands of the colonial subjects, they met with poor results. For the coming of American modernity in the dependencies, even mediated through the paternalism of the colonial administrators and experts, was like the opening of Pandora’s box, with the nationalist leaders and social activists mobilizing the late colonial development policies to request more concessions from Paris. As Frederick Cooper has persuasively demonstrated, the colonial subjects effectively argued—not without subaltern wit—that what the French authorities portrayed as the benefits of France’s benevolent development efforts were, in fact, long-overdue entitlements.66 Moreover, with Marshall Plan (and later MSA) administrators’ dissatisfaction with French management of American credits, French authorities were forced to mount a public relations campaign to brand their amended version of mise en valeur as something novel and daring.67
Regardless of these propaganda ploys, decolonization appeared irresistible, as evidenced by the election of Félix Houphouët-Boigny as the first black mayor of Abidjan in 1956 on the platform that African elected officials would be better suited to manage the municipality of the port city.68 Similarly, the signs that the politics of dubbing was not the appropriate response to the nationalist calls for more African control over decision making were also demonstrated in the struggle that shook some of the tenets of the French grip over agronomic research in late colonial Ivory Coast.
REFASHIONING DEVELOPMENT COOPERATION
Even as French colonial bureaucrats and experts crisscrossed the United States as fellows of the productivity missions program in search of recipes for the overseas territories, the political landscape in Ivory Coast was changing. After its disaffiliation from the French Communist Party in 1951, the Ivorian branch of the Rassemblement Démocratique Africain (RDA) had moved even closer to the colonial government in Abidjan, ushering in an era of cohabitation in the late colonial period that a contemporary scholar aptly dubbed as dyarchic rule.69 In addition, Houphouët-Boigny entered the government of Guy-Mollet in 1956 as a minister without portfolio. Subsequently, RDA’s leader became actively involved in drafting and ultimately sponsoring the passage of the Loi-cadre (framework law), which devolved much power to the African territories even as it paved the way for their balkanization.70
It was in this context that the struggles to control agronomic research emerged. As early as 1953, French authorities in Paris had been trying to reorganize the structure of the various overseas research institutions in view of bringing them under a common directorate. A task force was set up to study the scheme. It concluded on the desirability of the idea and suggested that agronomic research should come under the supervision of ORSTOM. This recommendation, however, was to create frictions between the partisans of state rights and the enthusiasts for centralized rights, on the one hand, and on the other, the various interest groups involved in African agricultural production, including planters, researchers, politicians, and bureaucrats from Ivory Coast.71 In a 1956 speech in Abidjan, for instance, Raymond Desclers criticized what he thought would be armchair agronomic research if agronomy were to integrate ORSTOM, adding that what Ivorian planters wanted was an “independent bureau of research in Africa, specialized in studying coffee, cocoa, and cola nuts.” More fundamentally, the Ivory Coast–based white planter insisted that the headquarters of the envisioned bureau “should be in Africa to be in touch with the daily realities” of the peasants.72
Desclers was not the only white planter to develop this line of argument. The chairperson of the Federation of Overseas Coffee Planters Associations, R. Dubled, thought similarly. Writing in July 1957 to rally support for his group’s position, he lamented that “no real research has been done in French Africa regarding cocoa and coffee.” For him, French researchers were not to be blamed since the reason for the problem was not so much their inabilities as it was the system under which they worked. To remedy a situation that only resulted in the lack of serious investigation, he recommended the creation of “an autonomous institute” to be charged with research and development in agriculture. Concluding his missive, Dubled asked his correspondent not to support the centralization plan that was being circulated, because “no one should accept the integration of agronomic research under ORSTOM bureaucracy.”73
Sensing the potential impact of these negative campaigns, ORSTOM officials began to counterattack. In 1956, Jean-Jacques Juglas, as new chairman of ORSTOM, wrote to the Ivorian authorities trying to appease their concerns. Aware that Ivory Coast was out to have its own cocoa and coffee institute, separate from the ORSTOM system, he offered to run ORSTOM in a “decentralized and flexible manner.” Moreover, responding to the Ivorian request to have the involvement of international specialists in the fields of agronomic research, he asked the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) to send an expert. Still in line with the old strategy of using French researchers as brokers of Ivorian modernization, he promised to send Orstomians to Brazil, Trinidad, and the Gold Coast to study the genetics of coffee, hoping that at their return they would apply their knowledge and know-how to improve Ivorian production of the cash crop.74
The deployment of the counterarguments and many other counterproposals continued into the late years of French rule in Ivory Coast. But emboldened by the passage and subsequent implementation of Loi-cadre, the partisans of an autonomous agronomic institute pushed their case—leading the secretary general of ORSTOM to note: “Ivory Coast continue to take advantage of a political peculiarity to which it is very much attached.” Still wishing a favorable outcome from the political turf, Roger Trintignac added that France’s star territory in West Africa was “not opposed to the principle of continued link with ORSTOM.” In fact, Ivory Coast could even “become integrated into our entire dispositif as long as its character and territorial independence are not disputed.” In other words, there was hope that ORSTOM would remain the powerhouse to mediate the modernization of Ivorian agronomy—provided that ORSTOM showed some flexibility.75
This proved to be wishful thinking. Although a ministerial ruling intended to place the whole Ivorian agronomic research center under ORSTOM was drafted, the project never materialized. Rather, only the Bouaké research center was attributed to ORSTOM. In the meantime Georges Monnet, the Ivorian minister for agriculture, established a separate Institut Français du Café et du Cacao (IFCC) in 1957 with its main headquarters at Bingerville.76 But when the Franco-African community was born in 1958, ORSTOM attempted to resuscitate the project of a unified agronomic directorate. This new effort, however, proved ineffective. Thus, at the collapse of France’s formal empire in West Africa in 1960, ORSTOM had only marginally succeeded in integrating the various branches of agronomic research; besides losing the battle to control the stellar sector of cocoa and coffee research, ORSTOM also witnessed powerlessly the creation of the Institut de Recherches Agronomiques Tropicales et des Cultures Vivrières (IRAT)—a new institute in Paris charged with applied research on food crops.77 Even more threatening to the policy that ORSTOM should remain the key institution to dub agricultural modernity for Ivory Coast was the persistent desire on the part of the Ivorian authorities to nationalize ORSTOM facilities at Adiopodoumé—an aspiration that continued to poison the relationship between the French institution and Ivory Coast in the immediate aftermath of independence.78
Despite these frictions, the Ivorian leadership remained expectant that France would underwrite much of their country’s overall scheme of agrarian modernization. In 1959, the secretary of the Ivory Coast Chamber of Agriculture and Industry, J. Manet, expanded on this point: “Extension service, technical assistance, cooperation; these are the objectives of Ivorian agriculture. It is up to the [Franco-African] Community to help us and lend the needed ‘scientists,’ technicians as well as investment capital.” Even as he diligently reorganized the Ivorian agricultural sector, Georges Monnet also believed that France should continue to provide financial assistance in view of “contributing to the rapid development of our African states.”79 In light of these positions, it should not come as a surprise that one of the first
