African Miracle, African Mirage. Abou B. Bamba

outre-mer. In fact, even though French scholars were among the inventors of “race” as an anthropological category in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, French political and cultural elites came to shun discussion of race in twentieth-century France. Rather, they claimed race was an American problem. This myth of a color-blind France attracted many African Americans to the Hexagon.⁴⁰ Yet a racialist unconscious haunted French society as a whole, which was revealed at the time of France’s embrace of US technoculture. If anything, the claim that social conditions in the overseas territories were closer to the United States (because of the presence of blacks) than metropolitan France betrayed the belief that race indeed mattered to some French decision makers. Already in their discussion of what telecommunication equipment to procure in the US, colonial authorities in France observed what they believed was a similarity in land-use patterns between certain American southern regions and Africa.⁴¹

      Yet it was in their observations on housing and hygiene that the racialist unconscious became obvious. Revealingly, one administrator claimed that the existence of blacks in the American South made it imperative for the productivity missionaries to visit this part of the United States. Another administrator suggested that the mission on overseas equipment would have to study both the “adaptation of whites to special living conditions (in terms of housing, climate, and interactions with backward [peu évolué] natives) and training as well as adaptation of a backward labor force to mechanized work.”⁴² Implicit in these recommendations was the belief that African Americans shared the status of corps d’exception with France’s colonial subjects in Africa. Furthermore, by insisting on a study of interactions between blacks and whites in the United States, the French colonial administrators suggested that successful race relations were part and parcel of the modernization package.⁴³

      Not all colonial authorities had to make the transatlantic voyage in order to be exposed to American developmental know-how. Sometimes they could have their share of American modernity mediated through Paris. For instance, at the end of the mission on gold mining, Mr. Philippe asked various French overseas institutions to let him know the number of copies of the final report they would need. Many of the institutions in charge of the outre-mer, including the Haut Commisariat d’AOF and the Office de la Recherche Scientifique Outre-Mer (ORSOM), responded promptly.⁴⁴ In other instances, American development missionaries carried out the reverse voyage overseas to train French colonial managers. For example, the Mutual Security Agency (MSA) sent a US cotton geneticist to French Africa, while another American expert was lent to French colonial authorities to train them in American techniques of mechanical rice harvesting.⁴⁵ Despite the suspicion of some colonial administrators, a number of French institutions in charge of overseas affairs actively sought this type of cooperation. Such was the case of ORSOM, which not only asked for the delivery of American scientific equipment and documentation to its various laboratories but also proposed to send its own technicians to the United States while it anticipated hosting American experts at its overseas facilities in Africa.⁴⁶

      At the level of implementation, French colonial administrators translated American modernization precepts into the terms of a rejuvenated pacte colonial. Burying the industrialization projects that Vichy had intended for the outre-mer, postwar leaders and planners soon resuscitated the stale notion of pacte colonial, that is, a policy of economic complementarity between the metropole and the colonies that confined the latter into the provision of raw materials. In the minds of most postwar modernizers, what mattered, after all, was increased sectoral productivity within the framework of the imperial (and international) division of labor.⁴⁷ As he gave his blessings for the sending of French productivity missionaries to the United States, Jean Monnet emphasized the extractive activities of the overseas territories, including the colonial dependencies in French West Africa.⁴⁸ With Marshall Plan (and later MSA) money channeled through FIDES, French authorities rehabilitated, for instance, the irrigation project of the Office du Niger as it was envisioned in the 1920s.⁴⁹

      Even though they were heirs to the emerging American modernization paradigm, and perhaps because of these very filiations, many FIDES projects entrenched the status quo as they unduly gave technopolitical power to French colonial bureaucrats and experts to act as the “mandarins of the future” for the Ivorians. In the end, then, the novelty of American-inflected developmentalism was more a rhetorical prowess than anything else.⁵⁰ The story of postwar development of mass housing in Ivory Coast exemplified this situation. At the same time, it underlined the limits of a state-led modernization scheme that failed to take stock of the agency of common people.

      PUBLIC HOUSING AND THE LIMITS OF DUBBING

      The First World War had opened many windows for the circulation of American housing and urban modernity to Western Europe, a trend that was further amplified with the onset of the Marshall Plan program and its effort to reconstruct Europe after the Second World War. In postwar France, the appropriation of American modernity in the housing sector was most visible in the use of breeze blocks, plywood, and vacuum-packed concrete. Except for passing comments, the colonial ramifications of this Americanization have not always been adequately appreciated.⁵¹ Yet as American modernity began its transatlantic voyage, it invariably dropped anchor on the shores of colonial metropolises. In the context of the flagging French Empire of the 1940s, such anchorages came through the mediation of the young French civil engineers, architects, and urban designers who were increasingly imbued with Taylorist dreams and Corbusean ideas regarding the advantage of concrete masonry units, mass-produced housing, mechanization, and ultimately the modern functional city.⁵²

      In late colonial Ivory Coast, the deployment of American technological innovations and building techniques was carried out by individual architects such as Daniel Badani and Henri Chomette, who left their distinctive marks on the urban and architectural landscapes of Abidjan and other Ivorian cities.⁵³ In 1952, Chomette’s firm was contracted to build the Immeuble Clozel, which experimented with high-rise housing in the Ivorian capital.⁵⁴ Incorporating both African motifs and indigenous construction materials into his work in order to minimize cost, the architect and his associates utilized concrete and steel to erect numerous buildings in the country, making sure their projects were forward-looking and functional—a choice not unlike those of many of their contemporaries in metropolitan France. Such rejection of the backward-looking style of the beaux arts and adoption of concrete monumental structures were best epitomized in the construction of the Hôtel de Ville in Abidjan (see fig. 2.2), which the Bureau Chomette completed in 1956 to the general acclaim of reviewers.⁵⁵

      French postwar colonial modernizers also recirculated American technological and building construction ideas by applying them to the development of public housing projects. In the face of urban explosion in the colonies in the aftermath of the war and fearing the spread of anticolonial discontent among the populace, the colonial authorities reorganized the Office des Habitations Economiques (Bureau of Low-Cost Housing, or OHE) in 1946—which provided Ivory Coast and the other territories with their own OHE branches. This was followed up with the development of a housing policy for the masses: the improvement of living conditions in rural areas, a crackdown on excessive rents in cities, the establishment of housing credit institutions in view of “reinforc[ing] the housing demand of employed urban residents,” and, in the case of Ivory Coast, the creation in 1952 of the Société Immobilière d’Habitation de Côte d’Ivoire (SIHCI).⁵⁶

      Despite the implementation of these measures, few Africans could afford to pay for the new houses because of their exorbitant prices and the complexity of the procedure involved in getting a loan from the housing credit institutions.⁵⁷ It was in this context of failure to deliver on the promise of modernity that Kouamé Binzème and a number of the French-educated African elite promoted and ultimately established in 1949 the Habitat Africain—a credit union whose goal was to help the Africans acquire cheap and decent housing.⁵⁸ Anticipating even some collaboration of sorts with SIHCI, the managers of Habitat Africain requested a credit line of 10 million francs from OHE/Ivory Coast; however, it was denied.⁵⁹ Although Habitat Africain went ahead to build numerous housing units using some of the American innovations and techniques (e.g., cinder blocks, plywood, and concrete) that had