Côte d’Ivoire: The Conundrum of a Still Wretched of the Earth by Ademola Araoye (review)

In Côte d’Ivoire: The Conundrum of a Still Wretched of the Earth, Ademola Araoye presents a masterful analysis of the political history, civil war, and convoluted democratic transitions in the strategic Francophone West African state. Conceptually rooted in a post-Fanon interpretation of the wretched of the earth, the author argues that the narratives of nationalism versus imperialism, clan versus country, indigene versus citizen, traditional community versus transnational community, and democracy versus dictatorship—characteristic of post- independence Ivoirian politics—is essentially typical of the challenges of political development in many African post-colonial states, especially in the former French colonies where France, for strategic economic and cultural reasons, has remained unrepentantly imperialistic. Amplifying the issue of France’s interference, Ntongela Masilela, Professor of English and World Literature at Pitzer College in Claremont, California in his well crafted forward to the book stated that: “The deleterious effects of the stranglehold of French imperial domination on its former African colonies has arguably exceeded those of other European imperial powers, . . . The French foster the most virulent virus of ineptitude on the national bourgeoisie that inherited a neo- colonial state from their machinations” (p.xi). Araoye argues that the substructure of the Ivorian imbroglio was laid by the nature of the French colonial economy which was based on plantation agriculture, the skewed geo-demographic pattern of development it entrenched, and the French insistence on perpetuating their neo-colonial interests in the country through active involvement in both the domestic and “intermestic” political struggles and processes. The French colonial plantation economy which was largely based in the Christian- dominated southern part of the country created a continuous migration of labor from the neglected Muslim-dominated northern region to the south. A large number of migrant laborers from neighboring West African countries, especially Burkina Faso in the north, took advantage of the cycles of post- independence cash crop boom in Côte d’Ivoire and the existence of vast transnational ethnic communities (e.g. the Mossi and related tribes) straddling northern Côte d’Ivoire and Burkina Faso to flood Ivorian territory, where they mostly worked as farm laborers in the north. The prolonged migratory push of casual labor from ethno-religious communities based in the north to southern Côte d’Ivoire, on the one hand, and the two generations of massive migration from different West African countries (notably Burkina Faso, but also to a lesser extent, Mali, Liberia, Senegal and Nigeria), on the other, had far-reaching consequences. These dynamics significantly altered the demographic structure of Côte d’Ivoire, ultimately impacting democracy, citizenship, ethnicity, conflict, and the struggle for power between the various factions of the ethno- national elite. After the demise of the first Ivorian post- independence President Houphouet- Boigny, whose prolonged paternalistic and overly pro-French hegemony (1960–1993) concentrated power around his South- Eastern ethnic Bauole community, a number of political elites (including conservative nationalists, radical neo-nationalists, as well as pro-American and pro-French imperialist agents), most of whom were hitherto alienated from the national power game, rallied their ethnic communities to join the struggle to acquire state power and reorder the political agenda for the particularistic interests of their ethnic constituencies. This virulent struggle to “appropriate the state,” as the author argues, further fragmented the political elites, politicized and dysfunctionally instrumentalized the state military forces, and spurred a range of ethnic armies and militia groups who all joined the fray in what became a regionalized civil war. Most significantly, the struggle to dominate the political space incensed the imperial powers with vested strategic interests (especially France) who actively took and switched sides with the local and transnational (subregional) forces in accordance with the logic of how they could best interpose, protect, defend, and advance their interests. Between December 1993, when President Boigny...