It was in this context that the newly elected député, Houphouët-Boigny (from Ivory Coast), convened a meeting in Bamako (French Sudan) in October 1946. With delegates from most of the territories of French-ruled sub-Saharan Africa, the Bamako convention eventually agreed on the creation of the Rassemblement Démocratique Africain (African Democratic Rally, or RDA).67
From its inception, RDA established itself as an interterritorial political movement whose aim was to unite all the democratic forces in sub-Saharan Africa in a common fight against the conservative backlash that came in the wake of the abolition of key colonial laws abridging the rights of colonial subjects. A coalition of African-led political parties, the RDA aimed to establish a genuine Greater France that the “first draft of the constitution had seemed to promise.” As Tony Chafer has suggested, these objectives are best “summed up as the political, economic and social emancipation of Africans within the framework of the French Union, based on equality of rights and duties.”68
To achieve this goal, the active support of the Parti Communiste Français (French Communist Party, or PCF) was crucial, especially in the formative years of the movement. French communists not only provided logistical assistance in the organization of the Bamako meeting but also gave the delegates protection against the reactionary retaliation that most of them faced at the hands of zealous local colonial administrators. The ideological and political training that the PCF’s affiliated Groupes d’Etudes Communistes (GEC) offered to RDA members in the various territories was instrumental for the ultimate survival of the budding nationalist movement. In Paris, the communists further consolidated their support by allowing RDA députés to form a parliamentary bloc with the communist representatives.69
For the RDA, the affiliation with the French communists was a double-edged sword. In the context of the PCF’s participation in the first postwar French government, the African nationalists enjoyed the protection of an influential metropolitan political movement that still enjoyed the favor of the French people, thanks to its role in the resistance against Nazi occupation.70 Such protection helped Houphouët-Boigny and his activists to build and maintain their organization with relative ease. However, when the communists were forced to leave the government in May 1947 because of the emerging global Cold War and their opposition to the Marshall Plan, the RDA—especially its Ivorian branch, whose nationalism hardly went beyond reformism within the frame of the French Union—suddenly found itself a most vulnerable target of the colonial lobby and its metropolitan associates.71
The best-structured and probably most active of all the RDA’s territorial sections in the late 1940s, the PDCI was the first political organization to experience the new painful reality. The most conservative elements of the French colonists in Ivory Coast, including white planters and the Catholic clergy, had long despised the local leadership of the Rassemblement Démocratique Africain, whom they wrongly identified as “closet communists” and the staunchest opponents to the colonial status quo.72 Having secured the recall of the rather liberal governor André Latrille in 1947, they moved against the unprotected RDA. The colonists’ first strike occurred in February 1949, when the newly appointed Péchoux arrested most of the PDCI’s leaders and charged them with instigating the partisan violence surrounding a political dispute in Treichville—the native quarter of colonial Abidjan. The following year, the brutal repression of anticolonial protests in various cities, including Bouaflé, Dimbokro, Agboville, and Séguela, resulted in the killing of at least sixteen people and the wounding of hundreds more. As if these casualties were not sufficient, the police arrested thousands of RDA sympathizers and numerous PDCI field secretaries. In violation of his parliamentarian immunity, the colonial authorities even contemplated the arrest of Houphouët-Boigny himself. However, the mobilization of his supporters dissuaded the police from carrying out this anticonstitutional plan.73
In the context of the unrest and rebellion in Indochina, Algeria, and Madagascar, the aim of the repression in Ivory Coast in the late 1940s was to nip in the bud the nascent anticolonial movement in French West Africa. Consequently, the first people to be hit by the péchoutage (as Governor Péchoux’s repressive methods came to be known by contemporaries) were local RDA fieldworkers and intellectuals, including the writer Bernard B. Dadié, who spent three years in the colonial prison of Grand Bassam. As in the case of Guinea, other activists were sent to the outposts of the French Empire.74
In the face of this colonial repression, the native population remained consistently proactive. From their mobilization to prevent the arrest of Houphouët-Boigny to the march of the Ivorian women on the Grand Bassam prison, via the active boycott of European consumer goods, the African population was always alert and ready to fight back.75 In spite of that, péchoutage proved victorious, at least in co-opting many RDA leaders. Indeed, while his colleagues were still in jail, Houphouët-Boigny was approached by various metropolitan officials in charge of French colonial affairs. The ensuing series of secretive discussions resulted in the RDA’s disavowal of communist rhetoric, disaffiliation (désapparentement) from the French Communist Party in 1950, and a partial, if uneasy, realignment of the PDCI with the colonial administration.76 Although nationalism in French-ruled West Africa did not die with Houphouët-Boigny’s decision, a move that key voices within RDA denounced as a betrayal, the disaffiliation episode triggered an open crisis in the ranks of RDA leadership and undoubtedly signaled a new political reality in Ivory Coast.77
With commercial agricultural output still on the rise and a colonial citizenry apparently cowed, the authorities began to envision Ivory Coast as the new El Dorado of French West Africa, a territory on its way to becoming the economic hub of France’s empire in the region.78 As early as 1951, Péchoux had prophesied that the completion of the FIDES-funded port of Abidjan would open “a wide window seaward,” the effect of which would be “rapidly felt over a vast hinterland.”79 He proved right in his prophecy. But the opening of the territory to a business world beyond the confines of the empire also meant that the competition to cash in the dividends of the “Second Pacification” would be more complicated—all the more so since foreigners were eager to tap into the Ivorian boom. Among these interested foreigners were the Americans, whose taxpayers’ money partly paid for the infrastructural transformation of the territory.
COMPETING FOR THE BONANZA OF POSTWAR PACIFICATION
American diplomats in West Africa had kept tabs on the political changes in postwar Ivory Coast. With their country having contributed financially to the FIDES program and, more importantly, seeing the United States as the moral compass of the capitalist world, they saw themselves as the purveyors of American economic vision and vanguards of US Cold War activism in the region. During the heydays of RDA’s militant activism, the diplomats repeatedly referred to Houphouët-Boigny as a communist leader, going as far as to blame the “noticeable” deterioration of the “economic conditions in Ivory Coast” on the député and his companions.80 In this light, the diplomats had no qualms about pointing fingers at RDA leaders as the agents who “clearly directed” the anticolonial riots that seized the territory in 1949. And when the nationalist organization broke its affiliation with the French communists a year later, the Americans not only credited it to Péchoux’s “handling of the communistic uprising in the Ivory Coast [which] probably destroyed considerable of the strength of the communistic movement in that territory,” but the US consul and his collaborators also sided with Houphouët-Boigny’s faction in the postdisaffiliation crisis that engulfed RDA thereafter.81
With this close monitoring of sociopolitical events in Ivory Coast and the larger French West Africa, the diplomats on post in French West Africa did not fail to notice the opportunities that came along with the conjuncture of the cash-crop revolution in the territory, especially in the wake of the completion of the harbor of Abidjan. As early as the first years of the 1940s, consular reports had noted that Ivory Coast hosted the greatest number of American businesses in French West Africa.82 During the war, the United States (along with Britain) became the prime destination for Ivorian cocoa beans.83 At the conclusion of
