is very difficult to quantify how many of these products were American-made, but given the Hexagon’s own reliance on US consumer goods in the immediate postwar period, it is quite plausible that some of these goods found their way into the dependencies. In their efforts to mimic the new French middle class, French residents in Ivory Coast used their access to the consumer products that the Marshall Plan had rendered available to distance themselves further from the colonial subjects.13 As it turned out, this imperial differentiation deepened the frustration of the Ivorian elite and ultimately prompted some of them to deploy a politics of triangulation by calling upon the United States to advance their own budding nationalist agenda. This development was made possible by the flow of foreign media images into the colony, exposing both metropolitan residents and colonial subjects to the marvels of postwar American modernity. Compounding this situation was the growing number of students who not only were ever more restive in the nationalist cause but also were drawn to the American cornucopia.14 The resulting conjuncture, in many ways, explained why the colonial authorities were so much afraid of what Benedict Anderson, in his history of the origin of Southeast Asian nationalism, has referred to as the “spectre of comparisons,” that is, colonial subjects’ comparison of the actions of their immediate overlords with those of other imperial powers.15
French fear that they might lose control over their colonial “wards” if the latter were exposed to Americanization was not misguided, at least if assessed against the backdrop of the decolonization saga in the larger French Empire. In Indochina, for instance, Vietnamese nationalists had not only deployed the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, but they also strategically used a number of tropes drawn from the annals of American history, such as the Declaration of Independence, to articulate their own aspiration for independence. The resulting Vietnam War certainly succeeded in convincing many French colonial authorities that America, whether “real” or “imagined,” posed a serious threat to continuance of French rule in the outre-mer. This was so because the mere presence of the United States even as transatlantic ally invariably acted as a force that threatened to dislodge French colonial dominance and its mission civilisatrice. At the same time, the very specter of the United States provided the colonial subjects with an alternative to French colonial modernity.16
Contemporary developments in Ivory Coast proved such an assessment to be on target. For example, the lawyer Kouamé Binzème, acting as the mouthpiece of the Syndicat des Planteurs et Eleveurs Africains de la Côte d’Ivoire, decided in the fall of 1948 to write directly to American Marshall planners to enlist their active support for what he anticipated would be the effective modernization of his country.17 Such action does not seem to conform to the conventional depiction of the Ivorian postwar elite, who have usually been posited as right-hand men of French colonialism and its exclusivist civilizing mission.18 In fact, even though Binzème was educated in the French system and was completing his law degree in a metropolitan French institution, he had come to see the United States as a modernizing force to be reckoned with. Accordingly, he arrogated himself with the task of initiating a partnership with the Americans. To be sure, such a move was an implicit critique of France’s colonial governmentality.
Born to parents from the wealthier Ivorian cocoa belt of the Southeast, Kouamé Binzème completed elementary school in Ivory Coast. He first worked as a clerk for a local merchant and later went to France for secondary education schooling. After securing a scholarship, he started his university training in legal studies in the 1930s. In 1935, Binzème returned to Ivory Coast to set up a newspaper, which did not run for more than a year. After this short-lived experiment, Binzème made his way back to France. He completed his law degree and soon came back home to become enmeshed in the postwar political and nationalist battles, which led to a confrontation with Félix Houphouët-Boigny and his political machine. It was in this context of political and nationalist upheavals that Binzème wrote to the managers of the Marshall Plan. While his aim was clearly to recruit the Americans for the socioeconomic development of Ivory Coast, Binzème’s attitude also confirmed the fear of the French colonial authorities regarding the subversive potential inherent in the rise of a comparative consciousness among France’s colonial subjects.19
FIGURE 2.1. Kouamé Binzème, circa 1951. Source: Amon d’Aby, La Côte d’Ivoire dans la cité, plate 3. Courtesy of Editions Classiques Garnier.
Binzème’s plan for the modernization of Ivory Coast was striking in more than one regard. From the outset, it boldly argued for an active participation of the United States in an Ivorian postwar development drive, almost to the exclusion of the French colonial state. As the lawyer put it himself, his program was informed by the “principle of partnership (association) between American capital and African labor.”20 Implicitly critiquing the French doctrine of colonial mise en valeur, which was more exploitative than beneficial to the colonial subjects, Binzème added that the Ivoiro-American partnership in the domain of development should, above all, “protect the integrity of indigenous natural resources” while it promoted, at the same time, “freedom, economic progress, and social betterment for the Africans.”21
The emphasis that Binzème put on the ideas of freedom and transnational capital, and ultimately his faith in American-style progress, as key ingredients to secure the welfare of the Africans certainly echoed the scripts of American modernization theorists and the fantastic public diplomacy that sold them to the world at large. Since the end of the war, US officials had pointed to their own example with the Philippines to demand that Europe’s colonial empires be dismantled. In their stead, American decision makers envisioned international cooperation, free trade, and the transfer of technology as the soundest means to achieve material progress for the “backward” peoples of the world. In contrast to European colonial developmentalism, which reportedly made “a living off of” colonial subjects, American postwar modernizers believed that “if we make it better for the other fellow, we will make it better for ourselves.” Informed by such reasoning, then, the United States inaugurated many institutionalized projects, including the famed Point Four Program, whose goal was to help train technicians, doctors, and social workers in the Global South.22
There is room to argue that the difference between US and European development visions was almost nil, especially if we trace their origins to nineteenth-century ideas of progress. Yet one should not miss the dissimilarities. Unlike their European counterparts, American planners tended to shun the massive presence of colonial bureaucrats to run the show. In a sense, it might have been the case that the modernization style of the US authorities in the global arena was only confirming an earlier astute insight that Argentinean writer Manuel Ugarte offered in the 1920s; arguing that in contrast to European colonial powers, the United States was an imperial hegemon that had strategically opted for a “system of annexing wealth, apart from inhabitants or territories, disdaining outward shows in order to arrive at the essentials of domination without a dead-weight of areas to administer and multitudes to govern.”23 Notwithstanding this fact, which most enthusiasts for Americanization did not see as a real problem, political entrepreneurs as diverse as Haile Selassie, Jomo Kenyatta, and Binzème saw a genuine opportunity in embracing the language and promise of US-enlightened developmentalism.24
Despite (or because of) its deployment of an American modernization trope, however, the Binzème plan actually appeared as a reappropriation of some of the programs that the Fonds d’Investissement pour le Développement Economique et Social (FIDES) had initiated in Ivory Coast. These included the industrial exploitation of strategic minerals such as manganese, iron, silver, gold, and oil.25 Still, in line with the FIDES program, Binzème hoped to mechanize Ivorian agriculture and forestry for a better exploitation of their resources.26 Against France’s protectionist policy limiting the importation of consumer goods into the outre-mer, Binzème solicited the “active collaboration” of American industries to meet the “unsatisfied needs”
