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African Miracle, African Mirage by Abou B. Bamba asks why the postcolonial boom years of the mid-century Ivorian "miracle" never quite became self-sustaining. Instead, the economic boom culminated in what the author labels a "mirage" propped up by "growth without development." The author offers several interconnected explanations that emphasize two different kinds of transnationalisms: transnationalism from "above"—or transatlantic (Franco-American) and tripartite (Franco-American-Ivoirian) relations and economic diplomacy—and transnationalism from "below," through the actions of Western-educated development scholars, among others, who were helping to frame the epistemology, discourse and, ultimately, practice of a modernist development model on the ground in Ivory Coast.
Bamba also explores how existing theories of postcolonial economic (under)development do not sufficiently explain the waning of Ivory Coast's so-called "Thirty Glorious Years." The author responds to previous scholars such as dependency theorists, world systems theorists and Marxists, who tended to underemphasize the agency of those on the ground. In so doing, Bamba also problematizes assumptions about the importance of French neocolonialism. Bamba's book argues that the conventional wisdom overstates France's role as the (only) key player in economic diplomacy, development policy and geopolitics in Francophone Africa. What is obscured is the importance of Cold War geopolitics and tripartite relations that cross the Atlantic. Indeed, by focusing more specifically on the "dubbing" and diffusion of "American-inflected" regional development policy and practice by French scholars, policymakers and development experts (by way of the Tennessee Valley Authority), the author paints a vivid and well-documented picture of the Ivorian quest for modernist development outcomes against the backdrop of French-American...