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 the hostilities, American importers also developed an interest in 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