African Miracle, African Mirage. Abou B. Bamba

       Preface and Acknowledgments

      This book is about the not-so-distant past of Ivory Coast. It is an attempt to shed light on the political economy that informed how the country became an African miracle of sorts in the three decades that preceded the 1980s. It opens a window onto those years when agricultural production went up, deep-sea ports were constructed, hydroelectric dams were built, and an apparent welfare state was instituted; all of which left an impressive paper trail. Thereafter, the phenomenal economic growth of the country seemingly came to a halt, a situation that comforted the predictions of those who had early on argued that the spectacular growth of the Ivorian economy was built on shaky ground. At the current conjuncture where talks on a new Ivorian economic miracle abound, I want to provide a historical analysis that interrogates the past and moves the country’s international history beyond the familiar terrain of the Françafrique. This is achieved through a transnational history approach that attends to both local and global forces to understand the making and remaking of the so-called “Glorious Years” of Ivory Coast.

      From the outset, I want to make it clear that this is not a work in economics. Rather, I reflect historically on the larger “social life” of some economic ideas. In fact, the project of this book began as a doctoral dissertation in history. Its primary goal in that first iteration was to provide a theoretically informed historical critique of US-led development efforts in late colonial and postcolonial Ivory Coast. My initial inclination was to offer a typical bilateral history of the foreign relations between the United States and Ivory Coast over the latter’s modernization. But a new and creative look at the legacy of France’s colonial past in Ivory Coast, the US Cold War crusades, and France’s neocolonial projects in Francophone Africa soon turned the notion of a bilateral relationship between Abidjan and Washington into a dynamic triad and more.

      From this perspective, then, one of the issues that this project aimed to address and still relates to is the triangulated conceptualizations of development in Ivory Coast, the United States, and France. While the US perspective on these conceptualizations will be of prime concern, a look at the way Ivorian elite and French colonial bureaucrats and later coopérants conceived of the modernization of Ivory Coast will also be explored. In effect, given the historical French (neo)colonial presence in Ivory Coast, it was important to inquire into how France perceived US involvement in Ivorian development. Were there attempts

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