seaboard led to the decline of this first experiment in tree cropping.29 Some decades later, cash cropping resumed in the colony, this time with white colonists whom the colonial state supported and on the eastern border as its geographic base. By the 1920s, however, African farmers—in a move that echoed the choices of planters in the nearby Gold Coast—had emerged as the leading producers of coffee and cocoa.30 Thus, on the eve of the Second World War, some of the key ingredients for the eventual boom of the Ivorian economy had been clearly, if modestly, set in place. These included not only the construction of a network of roads, a rail line, and lagoon water lanes to make movement easier, but also the expansion of African-initiated cash cropping in the forest regions—a development that relied on the manual labor of the northerners, many of whom had migrated or were made to migrate to cocoa and coffee plantations in the southern half of the territory.31
The first signs that the Africans would defend their interests against the colonists were also visible. For instance, in an article that he wrote in 1932, Félix Houphouët-Boigny—an African doctor, a cash-crop planter, and the future independence leader who ultimately came to dominate politics in Ivory Coast—denounced the exploitative practices of the French import-export firms and their associated colonial trading houses, and called for a fair price for the products of the African farmers.32 The postwar era would amplify these historical trends. Even more, the rise of the American Century and the onset of the global Cold War would interact to complicate the story of Ivory Coast’s bid for development. For if the process of social change since 1893 had largely been the outcome of Franco-African interactions, after the Second World War, the United States and other global forces would insert themselves into the Ivorian visions of modernity. As will become clear, this new conjuncture would decidedly renew the problematic of Ivory Coast’s postwar economic growth.
PROBLEMATIZING THE “IVORIAN MIRACLE”
The Ivorian method and efforts toward achieving a capitalist modernity in the twentieth century have always been subject to impassioned debates among scholars and development practitioners alike. Many analysts have specifically underlined the benefits of implementing flexible planning measures, the creation of parastatal corporation, or the use of the mechanism of a Budget spécial d’investissement et d’équipement (special budget for public investment and infrastructural development, or BSIE). Even though some experts criticized French hegemonic control of Ivory Coast’s economy from the late 1950s through the early 1980s, almost all those who assessed the postwar evolution of the African country concluded that its socioeconomic achievements were indeed impressive.33 The completion of a deep-sea harbor in the capital city of Abidjan in 1951 marked the beginning of an economic boom that soon helped the country to displace Senegal as the most successful of France’s colonial possessions in West Africa. After independence in 1960, Ivory Coast continued its capitalist-induced growth. With the availability of “free” land in the western part of the country, coupled with an “open door” policy to attract cheap labor from neighboring countries like Burkina Faso, Mali, and Guinea, the nation indulged in an extensive cash-crop cultivation that soon turned the country into the world’s largest producer of cocoa and the third-biggest producer of coffee. By the late 1960s, these two primary products, together with timber, provided 70 percent of the government’s earnings and 40 percent of its national budget. Even more, with an annual growth rate of 7 percent in the 1950s, domestic growth reached the double digits in the early 1970s. By the late 1970s, however, the Ivorian miracle had turned into a mirage, an economic illusion whose reverberations still inform people’s reading of the country’s current sociopolitical predicament. How can one make sense of this dramatic shift and of the historicism that it begot? What role can a serene historical analysis play in such a quest for meaning? What was the role of local Ivorians and transnational forces in shaping the so-called Ivorian miracle and its eventual decline?
In the wake of political commentators and activists, scholars have long underscored the role of France in the making of the Ivorian economic miracle. If anything, the presence of an exceptionally high number of French expatriate and immigrant communities in Ivory Coast since the 1950s has provided undeniable evidence of the “privileged” relations between Ivory Coast and France with regard to the politics of Ivorian development. In particular, William Zartman and Christopher Delgado have supported this point by showing that postcolonial Ivory Coast had the “highest number of French technical assistants in Africa, the highest number of students in French universities, and the highest number of large French firms in any African country.”34 Other scholars have rightly demonstrated how Ivory Coast’s political economy crystallizes the drawbacks of neocolonial Franco-African relations, especially the power of the infamous Françafrique on the Ivorian economy.35
There is no denying that the scholarship on Franco-Ivorian relations within the frame of Françafrique has added much to our understanding of the Ivorian miracle and its immediate beneficiaries. Still, much has been obscured by an excessive reliance on an unpacked paradigm that downplays the power of forces outside French and African elite decision makers. In contradistinction to such a view that casts France as the unchallenged foreign power in post/colonial Ivory Coast, African Miracle, African Mirage argues that Ivorian leaders wittily contested the hegemony of Paris by appealing to the United States to become involved in targeted areas of the Ivorian politics of development. While they never pushed for a dramatic break from the former colonial power, Houphouët-Boigny and his companions also repeatedly wooed Washington to provide development assistance. These overtures to the Americans created triangulated relationships whose frictions, together with the structure of the world system, opened and shut many possibilities for the Ivorian post/colony.36
Using a multiarchival and international history approach, African Miracle, African Mirage revisits these frictions along with the contested trajectory of Ivory Coast’s modernization up to the early 1980s. Focusing on the multi-stranded interactions among Ivorians, French, and Americans, the book narrates the course of the unusual, if short-lived, success story of an export-led economic growth in Africa. In the study, I attempt to complicate and explain historically why the Ivorian economic miracle of the 1950s and 1960s turned into a mirage by the late 1970s. The book also inquires whether the Ivorian failure to modernize along the path drawn by modernization theorists was really due to the inherent fragility of the national economic system. Should part of the blame be put on the shortsightedness of the local bourgeoisie, as suggested by dependency theorists? If this is the case, what role did US support of the autocratic Ivorian regime play in the unfolding of the Ivorian miracle? What role did common Ivorians, especially farmers, play in this fantastic story of modernization gone awry?
In tackling these questions, this work breaks new ground in the study of development in Africa and, especially, in Francophone West Africa’s leading country. Samir Amin’s seminal opus on capitalism in Ivory Coast had concluded in 1967 that an Ivorian economic miracle was unsustainable; in fact, it was a classic case of “growth without development” since foreign capital and extrinsic factors were the driving engine of expansion.37 This thesis would have a lasting impact on subsequent discussions on the merits and demerits of the Ivorian model. Not only did the Ivorian government itself try to engage the Aminian ideas, but other scholars also came up with their own readings of the economic experience of Ivory Coast. For instance, in a frontal rebuttal of Amin’s fundamental claim, Henrik Marcussen and Jens Torp argued in 1979 that Ivory Coast was well on its way toward self-sustained development. Writing almost a quarter of a century after the Egyptian Marxist economist’s initial pronouncement, John Rapley also challenged both Amin’s conclusions and the very premises of his argument. Analyzing data he collected during fieldwork in Ivory Coast in the 1980s, he offered that “Ivoirien capitalism is healthy and dynamic.” Taking the counterpoint of Amin’s thesis, Rapley claimed that “the growth of capitalism in Côte d’Ivoire [Ivory Coast]—which nobody questions, even if they often doubt its prospects—would arguably not have occurred had it not been for Ivoirien capital.”38 Other analysts and scholars, including experts at the World Bank, Elliot Berg, Bonnie Campbell, Yves-André Fauré and Jean-François Médard, Moustapha Diabaté, and a new crop of young social scientists, have participated in (and continue
