African Miracle, African Mirage. Abou B. Bamba

Guéré/Wè (western region), the Bété (midwestern region), and even the Baule (central region).⁵⁸ And this was not lost on the many contemporary colonial social scientists who had flocked into the rural areas of Ivory Coast in their mission to study the natives. As early as 1939, pioneering French Africanist Henri Labouret had underlined the significance of African farmers in the production of cocoa beans in the territory.⁵⁹ After the Second World War and within the context of calls for expanded socio-anthropological research on the Africans, such knowledge was increasingly shared by French and other foreign observers. For instance, in the mid-1950s, the budding ORSTOM geographer Hubert Fréchou recognized that while white planters seemed to keep better outward-looking cocoa and coffee plantations, it was the African smallholders who produced the majority of the Ivorian exported crops. Through the latter days of French colonial rule, the idea that Africans were the pillars of the Ivorian agricultural boom was consistently reaffirmed by colonial social scientists.⁶⁰

      Despite the knowledge that African farmers were producing much of the export commodities, the economic policies that colonial bureaucrats enacted discriminated against indigenous planters. During the war, for instance, much of the credit disbursed to subsidize agriculture was kept by white planters. In addition, not only were some African planters victimized by labor roundups to work on white plantations, but most of them were sold agricultural equipment at much higher prices compared to their white competitors. To exacerbate the situation, native commodity growers received a decisively lower price for their products.⁶¹ It was in this context that African planters, including Félix Houphouët-Boigny, set up in 1944 the Syndicat Agricole Africain (African Planters Union, or SAA), which soon became a platform for anticolonial political actions in Ivory Coast during the remainder of the war.⁶² In the aftermath of the war, SAA activism grew more militant even as the French Empire transformed itself into a relatively liberal transnational polity. To be sure, this situation set the stage for the appointment of Laurent Péchoux as a new governor whose mission was to crack down on radicalism and to prepare the territory for a “second colonial occupation.”⁶³

      FASHIONING THE TERRITORY FOR TAKEOFF: PÉCHOUTAGE AND ITS AFTERMATH

      In the context of a relative liberalization of the political space that came in the wake of the Allies’ victory during the Second World War, associational life became widespread in the French colonial possessions. Soon thereafter, a number of local nationalist leaders created political parties and increasingly adopted Marxist-Leninist rhetoric to denounce continued European rule and exploitation. In Ivory Coast, the Parti Démocratique de Côte d’Ivoire (Ivory Coast Democratic Party, or PDCI) was the leading political organization to carry out such denunciation. Emerging from the same social milieu as the SAA, it soon mobilized other segments of the Ivorian population, and during the elections for the Constituent Assembly succeeded in having Houphouët-Boigny elected to the Palais Bourbon in late 1945.⁶⁴ There, with other African parliamentarians, the planter now turned politician immediately sponsored many laws affecting the daily lives of the Africans, including the suppression of both the indigénat (February 1946) and the travail forcé (April 1946), as well as the extension of citizenship rights (May 1946) to all the colonial subjects living in France’s overseas territories.⁶⁵

      Alarmed by these seemingly liberal developments, the French colonial lobby and their metropolitan backers met during the summer of 1946 in Douala (Cameroon) and later in Paris to come up with plans to regain control of colonial affairs. The colonists’ rearguard resistance partly paid off, as they first succeeded in having the proposed constitution of April 1946 rejected. They effectively replaced the proposal with the schizophrenic constitutional arrangement of the Union Française (French Union). Under this new constitutional legal frame, Africans were certainly granted some civil and political freedoms. Yet the law restricted the self-governing status and other rights that the “native” elites were seeking for their respective territories.⁶⁶ It was in this context that the newly elected député, Houphouët-Boigny (from Ivory Coast), convened a meeting in Bamako (French Sudan) in October 1946. With delegates from most of the territories of French-ruled sub-Saharan Africa, the Bamako convention eventually agreed on the creation of the Rassemblement Démocratique Africain (African Democratic Rally, or RDA).⁶⁷

      From its inception, RDA established itself as an interterritorial political movement whose aim was to unite all the democratic forces in sub-Saharan Africa in a common fight against the conservative backlash that came in the wake of the abolition of key colonial laws abridging the rights of colonial subjects. A coalition of African-led political parties, the RDA aimed to establish a genuine Greater France that the “first draft of the constitution had seemed to promise.” As Tony Chafer has suggested, these objectives are best “summed up as the political, economic and social emancipation of Africans within the framework of the French Union, based on equality of rights and duties.”⁶⁸

      To achieve this goal, the active support of the Parti Communiste Français (French Communist Party, or PCF) was crucial, especially in the formative years of the movement. French communists not only provided logistical assistance in the organization of the Bamako meeting but also gave the delegates protection against the reactionary retaliation that most of them faced at the hands of zealous local colonial administrators. The ideological and political training that the PCF’s affiliated Groupes d’Etudes Communistes (GEC) offered to RDA members in the various territories was instrumental for the ultimate survival of the budding nationalist movement. In Paris, the communists further consolidated their support by allowing RDA députés to form a parliamentary bloc with the communist representatives.⁶⁹

      For the RDA, the affiliation with the French communists was a double-edged sword. In the context of the PCF’s participation in the first postwar French government, the African nationalists enjoyed the protection of an influential metropolitan political movement that still enjoyed the favor of the French people, thanks to its role in the resistance against Nazi occupation.⁷⁰ Such protection helped Houphouët-Boigny and his activists to build and maintain their organization with relative ease. However, when the communists were forced to leave the government in May 1947 because of the emerging global Cold War and their opposition to the Marshall Plan, the RDA—especially its Ivorian branch, whose nationalism hardly went beyond reformism within the frame of the French Union—suddenly found itself a most vulnerable target of the colonial lobby and its metropolitan associates.⁷¹

      The best-structured and probably most active of all the RDA’s territorial sections in the late 1940s, the PDCI was the first political organization to experience the new painful reality. The most conservative elements of the French colonists in Ivory Coast, including white planters and the Catholic clergy, had long despised the local leadership of the Rassemblement Démocratique Africain, whom they wrongly identified as “closet communists” and the staunchest opponents to the colonial status quo.⁷² Having secured the recall of the rather liberal governor André Latrille in 1947, they moved against the unprotected RDA. The colonists’ first strike occurred in February 1949, when the newly appointed Péchoux arrested most of the PDCI’s leaders and charged them with instigating the partisan violence surrounding a political dispute in Treichville—the native quarter of colonial Abidjan. The following year, the brutal repression of anticolonial protests in various cities, including Bouaflé, Dimbokro, Agboville, and Séguela, resulted in the killing of at least sixteen people and the wounding of hundreds more. As if these casualties were not sufficient, the police arrested thousands of RDA sympathizers and numerous PDCI field secretaries. In violation of his parliamentarian immunity, the colonial authorities even contemplated the arrest of Houphouët-Boigny himself. However, the mobilization of his supporters dissuaded the police from carrying out this anticonstitutional plan.⁷³

      In the context of the unrest and rebellion in Indochina, Algeria, and Madagascar, the aim of the repression in Ivory Coast in the late 1940s was to nip in the bud the nascent anticolonial movement in French West Africa. Consequently, the first people to be hit by the péchoutage (as Governor Péchoux’s repressive methods came to be known by contemporaries) were local RDA fieldworkers and intellectuals, including the writer Bernard B. Dadié, who spent three years in the colonial prison of Grand Bassam. As in the case of Guinea, other activists were sent to the outposts of the French Empire.⁷⁴