Ivorian exotic wood and robusta coffee beans. American economic intelligence had been monitoring the increasing share of Ivorian economy vis-à-vis the overall export-import trade of French West Africa (see fig. 1.2), to which Ivory Coast contributed an average of 95 percent of the region’s exports and 26 percent of its imports from the United States. In this context, the American diplomats were rather eager to push for a larger American share in Ivorian foreign trade.84
The Americans were not, however, the only party interested in tapping into the bonanza of the postwar economic boom in Ivory Coast. With the knowledge that there was a big market for tropical produce in the United States, a number of French businesses active in the colonial trade began to explore the expansion of their commercial activities into North America. Capitalizing on the opportunity offered by the Marshall Plan’s productivity missions program, many businessmen and commercial agents based in Abidjan, including Jean Abile-Gal, Olivier de Vigan, and Henri Tardivat, visited the United States in an effort to study the American market for tropical products. Like the key members of the French colonial patronat, others dreamed of joint ventures with US companies to further expand their own operations.85
FIGURE 1.2. Ivorian share of the foreign trade of French West Africa. Data source: Territoire de Côte d’Ivoire, Inventaire économique de la Côte d’Ivoire, 89.
It was in this context of mutual (and competing) transatlantic bidding to exploit trading opportunities in Ivory Coast, the persistent fear that communist activism was not entirely dead in the territory, and especially the anticipation of the “new importance which [Abidjan’s] port will have when the canal has been fully opened to ocean going traffic,” that the American consul general in Dakar began planning to open a consulate in Abidjan. In early 1951, the American diplomats requested the opening of the consular post.86 Anticipating such a new post, the Department of State asked for appropriation from the Congress, ostensibly pointing to the conjuncture of the global Cold War in West Africa. However, the French promptly denied the US request because the colonial bureaucrats—using the frame of the other cold war—feared that Washington might use the post to push for undue trade openings.87
Although the French authorities rejected the American request, presumably to protect French commercial interests, the projection of US power into France’s star territory did not wane. In fact, mobilizing a proven method used by Marshall planners whereby survey missions were reportedly sent overseas to “systematically map out the resources and opportunities” in the colonial dependencies of European powers, a number of US institutions began sponsoring research trips to Ivory Coast and other territories in French West Africa.88 Among these was the Ford Foundation, which launched a program of fellowships for the study of emerging countries in 1952. While the Ford area study program for the African continent largely focused on British Africa, a few of the institution’s funded researchers opted to work on France’s African dependencies, including Ivory Coast.89
Crowning the mounting American fascination with the Ivorian colony was the publication and circulation of a number of articles in scholarly and popular circles, all of which emphasized the significance of the territory.90 In the context of this construction of Ivory Coast as a cosmopolitan tropical frontier to be tapped, the Department of State was forced to renew its efforts to have an American consulate in Abidjan. Already in 1955, Washington had reiterated its request for a consular post in the Ivorian capital, but lack of adequate funding prevented the Department of State from following up on the issue.91 The need to have a second American consulate in French West Africa proved more pressing thereafter as Dakar became burdened with diplomatic and economic as well as administrative red tape. As a result, an American consulate finally opened in Abidjan in 1956, with Parke Duncan Massey as its first consular officer.92
Even as the French and the Americans competed to harvest the fruits of the Ivorian postwar boom, other interest groups had emerged to vie for a legitimate share of the earnings of the cash-crop revolution. They included prominently the Syrian-Lebanese merchants and Ivorian economic entrepreneurs who were recruited among the members of SAA (smallholder farmers and relatively big African planters) and the adherents to the Syndicat des Planteurs et Eleveurs Africains de la Côte d’Ivoire—a rival planters union fostered by Kouamé Binzème and his Comité d’Action Patriotique de la Côte d’Ivoire (CAPACI). Deploying the rhetoric of “national liberation” and social justice to enhance its position in the changing Ivorian sociopolitical landscape, this autochthonous group eventually emerged as a distinct historical force in the political economy of development in Ivory Coast.93
Indeed, in the wake of the transnational nationalist upheavals of the 1950s, the African planters began to buy out many of the white planters of cocoa and coffee, some of whom were uncertain about the implications of a worldwide drive toward decolonization. This Africanization of sorts of the Ivorian plantation economy was all the more possible since an increasing number of white planters were moving their operations into pineapple and banana cultivation, but also because African employees on cocoa and coffee farms were leaving their (white) employers to create their own tree-crop plantations, attracted as they were by the steady prices of cocoa and coffee on the international market. Although French, Lebanese-Syrian, and even African cash-crop traders and middlemen continued to cheat some African planters, the emerging class of local planters was expanding the margins of its profit.94
Perhaps nothing demonstrated this better than the fragmentation and income differentiation among the cash-crop farmers of agnatic lineages in West-Central Ivory Coast. The amplification of the “treasure economy” (économie du trésor) among cocoa growers of southeastern Ivory Coast in the closing years of the colonial era could also be seen as another sign of this new deal.95 We shall see later that such seemingly conspicuous consumption was not the only way that the African planters used their profits. More significantly, some of them strategically would demand that Americans become associated with the development of their resources. To be sure, such a willful transnational gesture put additional pressure not only on US-French cooperation at large, but also on Franco-African relations in the territory.
. . .
The decades that followed the end of the Second World War were determinant in transforming Ivory Coast into a stellar colony—a new status that allowed the territory to displace the hegemony of Senegal in French West Africa. In addition to the impacts of the FIDES infrastructural projects that equipped Ivory Coast with new roads, bridges, airfields, and a deep-sea harbor in Abidjan, the work of the colonial scientists of ORSTOM was instrumental in boosting the postwar agrarian economy of the colony. More importantly, however, it was the African-led cash-crop revolution that laid the foundations of the phenomenal growth that occurred in Ivory Coast in the aftermath of the war.
Convinced as never before that the metropole needed the overseas territories to speed up the reconstruction of France, the French colonial authorities developed new mercantilist economic practices intended to foster what has been aptly called a “second colonial occupation.” But in an era that was seen as the “American Century,” the French had to contend with a constant competition from the United States, which saw itself as guardian of free market capitalism.96 The bid of the African planters and nationalists to increase their share of the postwar bonanza threatened to further complicate the Franco-American struggle to cash in on the Ivorian boom. The next chapter will elaborate on this rivalry, delving into the strategies that the French deployed to counter the perceived menace of Americanization and the persistent demands, from within and without, for opening up the West African territory.
2
Triangulating Colonial Modernization
