IN THE WAKE OF AMERICANIZATION
With very few exceptions, historians of American expansionism in the twentieth century have rarely anchored their investigations in Africa’s past, let alone inquired into the African ramifications of the rise of the United States as a global hegemon. Instead, Latin America, Canada, Western Europe, and Asia have customarily been the focus of much scholarship on the extension and ultimate globalization of US soft power.6 To a certain degree, this scholarly fixation has meant that the spread of the American dream and the faith in consumer capitalism on a global scale have operated within a certain, if narrowly defined, geography of market attractiveness, consumer behavior, and knowledge that American firms and marketers have mustered about the rest of the world.7
In contrast with such a view, this chapter offers that such a relatively marginal territory as Ivory Coast was not outside the purview and circulatory reach of American products after the Second World War. My aim is not only to track how the coming of American modernity was perceived by both colonial subjects and imperial rulers but also to pay close attention to the particular logics of subaltern engagements with Americanization in a colonial Francophone context. As will become apparent later, only then will we be able to ascertain whether the sociopolitical actions of the French administrators and their colonial subjects in the Ivorian territory merely replicated the disputation and populist politics that targeted the so-called “Marshallization” of postwar society in metropolitan France.
By dislodging Europe’s “old regime of consumption” and replacing its “ethics of distinction” with an ethics geared toward service, America’s market empire certainly proved itself to be, according to Victoria de Grazia, an “irresistible” force.8 Following the work of Kristin Ross, we have a better understanding of how Americanization and decolonization reordered metropolitan culture in postwar France.9 France’s dependencies and overseas territories were not spared the social and cultural restructuring that the rise of a hegemonic US emporium/imperium orchestrated throughout the world. From the postwar architectural ventures in Morocco’s premier international city of Casablanca to US cultural diplomacy in Southeast Asia, American informal imperialism, indeed, shied away from no barrier, except perhaps the various “curtains” of the Cold War. Even then, American policy makers and Cold War strategists sought to expand the reach of a US-dominated “Free World” and its irresistible consumerist ethics everywhere, even in kitchens in the Soviet Union.10
There is evidence that the coming of American consumer durables into colonial Ivory Coast predated the postwar rise of the United States as an international leader in the provision of cheap industrial products to the world.11 Still, the adoption or at least admiration of American consumption patterns by the Ivorian évolués occurred only after the Second World War, when rapid urbanization, consumer euphoria, and an oversupply of equipment made Ivory Coast a prime site for the expansion of America’s market empire in French West Africa. Such was the case because French residents in the territory had begun, despite lagging behind their peers in metropolitan France, to conspicuously display their newfound modernity in the form of imported refrigerators, cars, scooters, air conditioners, and other consumer durables.12
It 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