drift of the Rassemblement Démocratique Africain (RDA). Having come to intellectual maturity in the era when negritude and Marxism among France’s colonial subjects were in vogue, they viewed Houphouët-Boigny’s policies as backward. Although they did not leave the party, key members of this educated elite were active in building a political base so as to control decision making within the PDCI.100 By the late 1950s, a number of the Ivorian intellectuals were tactfully disputing the political economy that informed Houphouët-Boigny’s vision of capitalist development. If some of these opponents used a cultural nationalist approach to lay claim to an alternative future for Ivory Coast, others did not hesitate to mobilize Marxist rhetoric to voice their criticism of the good life that the Ivorian leader was proposing to the masses. While they did not produce any social scientific discourse as elaborate as the treatises of the emerging dependency theorists, their opposition suggested that development was more than a matter of increasing the productivity of an economy.101
. . .
The story of late colonial development in Ivory Coast thus reiterates the agency of the Africans. Whether they were peasants, migrants to the cities, or belonged to the cadre of educated elite, these local actors incessantly appropriated the terms of postwar modernization and, in the process, threatened to exclude the colonial state in its implementation. The correspondence of Kouamé Binzème with the American Marshall Plan managers is quite illustrative in this regard. Having realized that much of the French modernization performances were a dubbed version of American practices, the lawyer figured that getting rid of the mediation of Paris was the right course of action. Although it is not clear how the Americans responded to Binzème’s appeal, his very action bespoke of the opening of a new chapter in the Ivorian strategy for development: the era of decolonial thinking (vis-à-vis France) and proactive triangulation to get a better deal on modernization.102
Self-conscious of the decline of their own power, French colonial authorities attempted to control events in the territories under their rule as they sped up colonial development projects or reappropriated the US-inflected modernization drive. These efforts notwithstanding, the coming of the Pax Americana opened new spaces that helped the French colonial subjects triangulate their dreams and expectations of modernity. This was all the more so because the brave new world of the American Century subtly displaced the older mission civilisatrice that had so long justified the French presence in West Africa and other parts of Greater France. Perhaps no instance better typified this imperceptible displacement of French hegemony than the slow decline of Paris in the management of local affairs in the outre-mer.
Still, the charm of the politics of dubbing that the French colonial authorities enacted should not be lost on us. While the outcome of the translational ploy was illusory, the effort at cultural translation itself suggested that development, whether informed by mise en valeur or modernization theory, was never a ready-made recipe. Posited as a process as much as an end, it appeared that modernization was the terrain where competing social actors engaged with one another so as to establish a certain understanding of development. Thus when independence came in August 1960, not only were the Americans eyeing Ivory Coast as a potential anchor for a beachhead strategy in France’s outre-mer in West Africa, but there were signs that the Franco-American cold war over the country would not subside. Even more, it was clear that Houphouët-Boigny’s dream of turning Ivory Coast into a showcase of capitalist, if authoritarian, modernity would have some internal opponents whose loyalties remained hard to secure.
PART II
The Decade of Development
3
(Re)Framing Postcolonial Development
In a world turned upside-down, Fama had inherited an honor without the means to uphold it, like a headless snake.
—Ahmadou Kourouma, Suns of Independence (1968)
FROM THE PREVIOUS CHAPTERS, it should be evident now that late colonial development in Ivory Coast was never a bounded experience. The search for a renovated developmental governmentality, the rise of the American Century, and the global reach of international institutions all set people, ideas, and funding on the move within and across the French Empire. The coming of independence in 1960 did not alter the nature of this dynamics of postwar modernization and its fantastic goal of increasing the productivity of the Ivorian agriculture-based economy. The demands of postcolonial nation building amplified the magnitude of such an already transnational process. In this chapter, I suggest that any deeper understanding of modernization in postcolonial Ivory Coast must broaden the spatial focus of the analysis and move beyond the Françafrique paradigm. Of course, such an approach does not imply a total rejection of the insights that activist/scholar François-Xavier Verschave and others have brought to bear on the shady workings of Franco-African relations. It does mean, however, that the story of the intimate rapports between African and French decision makers must contend with the narrative of Africa’s embeddedness in a larger world.1
One crucial way to look at this embeddednes is to explore what I call the postcolonial geopolitics of knowledge production and, in the case of the thinking that informed the official Ivorian modernization drive, its Eurocentric exclusion of any African epistemology regarding the quest of the good life. In a sense, if Claude Lévi-Strauss’s mid-century observation, that “what the ‘insufficiently developed’ countries reproached the others with is not so much that they have been Westernized, but that they were not quickly given the means to Westernize,” captured any truth, it was maybe to reveal the narrowness of postwar development thinking; that the ultimate problem of postcolonial development in many regions of the Global South was the rather dominant belief, among many independence leaders, that Euro-American bureaucratic rationality was the way to organize the various postcolonial polities, especially if real progress was to be achieved in the task of nation building.2 In this light, what was at stake in the various Africanization drives that came in the wake of decolonization was less the deep structure of Euro-American governmentality than the spectacularity of indigenization performances. It was less the Eurocentric moral economy of governance that mattered than who was holding the reins of political power. It was as if, as Ahmadou Kourouma poetically put it in the late 1960s, the power that came in the wake of independence was “like a headless snake,” a clout with no consequential attribute.3
Africanist epistemologists and other philosophically minded scholars have aptly criticized this as a predicament that obstructed a genuinely African emancipation. We shall further see below that the Franco-American struggle over the direction of Ivorian development planning, and especially the treatment reserved to local Ivorians in articulating a postcolonial vision of modernization, amply supports such assessment.4 Beyond this point, what emerged in the mid-1960s as a key parameter in the competition between France’s Office de la Recherche Scientifique et Technique Outre-Mer (ORSTOM) and other research firms for the control of Ivory Coast’s development planning was the importance of epistemic memories—a concept I employ to denote the memories that typically come through remembrance of past scientific practices and their attendant truth-claims. While the idea builds on Valentin Mudimbe’s notion of the “colonial library” as the body of knowledge on Africa that was put together by European colonial administrators, missionaries, anthropologists, and other social scientists, the concept of epistemic memories suggests a more dynamic approach to the production of knowledge as it puts into relief the agency of knowledge producers as a group of individuals engaged in a particular type of politics.5
This chapter elaborates on these issues of epistemology and politics, highlighting along the way that the United States, as a potential source of developmental assistance, was never off the radar of the Ivorian decision makers. It shows that both the geopolitics of expertise and the eventual French dubbing of American-inflected modernization theory in the form of planification
