Introduction^{Footnote 2}

How does comparison shape what we know? During the 1960s and early 1970s, it was in vogue among social scientists to study Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire together. One of the late twentieth century’s most well-known sociologists, Immanuel Wallerstein, declared the neighboring countries “a ‘natural’ opportunity for comparison.”^{Footnote 3} Yet several decades of scholarship have undermined the premise; nothing is natural in acts of knowledge production.

This article reveals the hidden history of the comparison’s construction, and how its optics shaped, at once, Ivorian self-hood and Africanist social science. I show that both Ivorian national identity and studies of Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire as a “natural” pairing took from the same source: a perceived temporal disjuncture between a Gold Coast/Ghana that is “ahead” and a Côte d’Ivoire that is “behind” on the linear march to modernization.

To do so, I focus on the “West African Wager,” a high-profile meeting between the leaders of Ghana (Kwame Nkrumah) and Côte d’Ivoire (Félix Houphouët-Boigny) that took place in Abidjan in April 1957. Before a distinguished crowd, Nkrumah and Houphouët placed a bet as to whose political strategy would reap more rapid rewards. Two of the most well-known political figures on the continent, they represented contrasting approaches towards African development. Nkrumah advocated for political sovereignty as a pre-requisite of economic independence. Appropriately, in April 1957 Nkrumah came to the wager as the first Prime Minister of independent Ghana. Houphouët instead maintained that formal independence would only undermine the ability of Africans to access the human and material resources necessary for development. At the time, Côte d’Ivoire was still a territory in the federation of French West Africa (FWA), and Houphouët was determined that it remain ensconced in a Franco-African political structure. The wager that the two leaders placed, then, was about which political and economic approaches would most efficiently lead to development, their shared goal. A decade hence, Houphouët declared, the winner would be judged.

Quickly, the bet took on dramatic overtones. Once political independence in Côte d’Ivoire became a foregone conclusion (by 1958), the polarization of the early independence period super-charged the stakes of the wager. No longer was the bet over what political form development should take, but rather whose postcolonial strategy would accrue greater success. The wager operated at multiple levels. As individuals, Nkrumah and Houphouët presented a compelling story of political rivalry.^{Footnote 4} Regionally, they headed opposing blocs, Nkrumah’s Casablanca group striving for a union of independent African states and Houphouët’s Monrovia group resisting the cession of sovereignty for pan-African integration. On the global level, the Cold War’s ideological contest washed the bet with its colors, transforming the two African leaders into standard bearers for socialist and capitalist development models. The wager had laid bare an axis alongside which African countries were obliged to position themselves. Fed by the ideological contests of the early 1960s, it came to represent an iconic moment of clashing geopolitical visions.

The 1957 wager thus emerged as a signal event in modern African history. Over time, it has also become a well-worn hook upon which social scientists have hung their comparative analysis. Yet the event itself has never been adequately historicized. Drawing on an exciting archival discovery, I argue that the wager was politically staged and strategically invoked as a primordial act of Ivorian national myth-making. By setting up Côte d’Ivoire as a competitor with Ghana, and himself as a rival of Nkrumah, Houphouët launched himself and his territory into the international spotlight. The same justifications for comparison that suited the needs of social scientists during the first decades of African independence could also fulfill the wishes of a skilled politician.

Comparison as Social Science

It was Immanuel Wallerstein who inaugurated the tradition of Ghana-Côte d’Ivoire comparative social science. In 1956, when he set off for his doctoral dissertation research, both countries were still under formal colonial control. By the time Columbia University conferred his degree in 1959, Ghana had become independent and Côte d’Ivoire was set to inaugurate its statehood the following year. Wallerstein’s thesis would be published, in 1964, with the title The Road to Independence: Ghana and the Ivory Coast.

There were structural factors that lent ballast to the comparison. Both countries had overwhelmingly agricultural economies dominated by the same export crop, cocoa. Politically, they boasted centralized party-states with a strongman at the top. Geographically, both were relatively small territories covered by tropical forests in the south and drier savannah conditions in the north. These divides echoed religious and educational ones, as both territories had higher rates of (Western) education in the coastal south among majority-Christian populations and lower rates of education among predominantly-Islamic populations in the north. Ethnic and linguistic diversity characterized them both; Akan populations straddled the border between them. Compellingly similar, the two new nations had a key historical difference: Ghana had been colonized by the British and Côte d’Ivoire by the French. With such a constellation of variables, the pair offered tremendous comparative appeal.

It was a comparison, however, that went one-way. That is to say, it was structured on Ghana’s terms, with Côte d’Ivoire only legible in the matrix of association with its eastern neighbor. Wallerstein, when asked how he settled on the Ghana-Côte d’Ivoire pairing, replied (personal communication, 30 October 2017):

Ghana was therefore Wallerstein’s original object of study, with Côte d’Ivoire slotted in to afford a comparative perspective.

Aristide Zolberg, who published the first English monograph on independent Côte d’Ivoire, also came to his topic by way of Ghana. Or more precisely, by way of his advisor, David Apter, whose Gold Coast in Transition (1955) was a foundational work of Africanist study in the United States.^{Footnote 6} Apter sought a student who would develop, in the context of a former French colony, the ideas that he had set forth for the then-British Gold Coast. Zolberg, who was born in Belgium and lived until he was sixteen in exile in France, was the perfect graduate student for the job. When Apter suggested Zolberg head to Abidjan, Zolberg was utterly stumped. Albeit a native Francophone, he had never heard of Côte d’Ivoire.^{Footnote 7} What was true for Wallerstein was true for Apter’s student: the route to Abidjan in Anglophone academia seemed somehow to pass through Accra.^{Footnote 8}

Accra, that is, and Chicago. When Apter suggested Zolberg study Côte d’Ivoire, it was during the first year of Apter’s tenure at the University of Chicago. Indeed, Zolberg became the first graduate student sponsored by the University of Chicago’s newly-formed Committee on the Comparative Study of New Nations, whose founding members included, among others, David Apter and Clifford Geertz. In his memoir, Geertz would eulogize the New Nations Committee as a “formidable enterprise (…) a scholarly community with a style and a standpoint, something less than a school but more than a talking shop.”^{Footnote 9} Fully-funded by the Carnegie Corporation, the Committee’s explicit mission was to deploy universal categories in order to develop systematic comparison that would enlighten American policy with regard to the Third World.^{Footnote 10} It became the hub of the scholarly energies that would solidify the Ghana-Côte d’Ivoire pairing.

Philip Foster was another associated member of the Committee. His highly-regarded Education and Social Change in Ghana (1965), like David Apter’s work, was a pioneering attempt to apply the modern tools of social science to analysis of African politics and society. Foster explicitly focused on Ghana because he saw it as “a bell-wether for many of the other emerging African states” and argued that study of Ghana’s experiences would shed light on “the lot of many other countries, even outside Africa.”^{Footnote 11} Like Apter, Foster saw in Côte d’Ivoire a stellar candidate to extend the work he had done on Ghana. Between 1964 and 1966, he would co-write, with Rémi Clignet (an educational sociologist at nearby Northwestern), several articles that compared the two countries’ educational policies.^{Footnote 12} They would also, in 1966, publish a monograph devoted exclusively to the study of Ivorian education. The terrain was explicitly chosen to test “certain hypotheses” that Foster had developed by studying “the adjoining nation of Ghana.”^{Footnote 13} Ghana ever its neighbor’s metric.

In 1971, the efforts of the Committee on the Comparative Study of New Nations culminated in Perspectives on Modernization: Ghana and the Ivory Coast, a volume jointly edited by Zolberg and Foster, with an introduction penned by Wallerstein. The publication grew out of two previous meetings: a panel at the 1967 African Studies Association’s annual meeting co-chaired by Wallerstein and Zolberg and a two-day conference in March 1969 at the University of Chicago which was attended, prominently, by David Apter.

The 1960s was thus a period of tremendous intellectual activity around the Ghana-Côte d’Ivoire comparison by a small group of specialists who came to see the latter through the lens of the former.^{Footnote 14} Following Perspectives on Modernization, the flurry of scholarship around the comparison died down, reflecting general disenchantment with modernization theory. A perceived temporal disjuncture between the two countries structured this prolific social science output. Peering from the heights of Accra, the academician cast about for a suitable parallel. Throughout, Côte d’Ivoire was pitched as a foil to Ghana’s story, a Ghana-in-progress. Wallerstein had affirmed the pairing a “natural” one. But what if the very comparison that shaped this social science had purposefully been manipulated?

The West African Wager

Analysts have misunderstood this key moment in the era of African independence. It is generally portrayed as an event in which both leaders are equally implicated, reported to have taken place but never adequately historicized.^{Footnote 15} The origins of the encounter remain unexamined. How, actually, did this remarkable wager come about?

An archival discovery in an unexpected place divulges the wager’s hidden history. The convention amongst analysts interested in the bet has been to cite documents found in the French colonial archives in Aix-en-Provence. Recently, the “crossed gazes” of colonial officialdom have led to the realization by historians that “indirect colonial archives” can shed light on extra-imperial territories.^{Footnote 16} In this case, a six-page memo found among French diplomatic records regarding independent Ghana challenges the inherited narrative of the wager.^{Footnote 17} Corroborated by Ghanaian newspaper reports, this document reveals that Houphouët-Boigny deliberately engineered the encounter. Like any true act of political theatre, it was brilliantly staged.

Agency for the wager is often ascribed directly to Nkrumah.^{Footnote 18} But this is a story in which the Ghanaian is only indirectly the star. While he may have adapted to the circumstances, they were not of his making, nor was the wager of political consequence for him. Ghanaians were more upset about the circumstances of his departure than the events that took place abroad. The tactician of the wager, and for a long time its beneficiary, was one Houphouët-Boigny.

- Waging the Wager

On Friday 5 April, Nkrumah’s airplane touched down at the Port-Bouët airport in Abidjan. The enormous crowd that had been gathering since early morning rushed forth. Cries of “Freedom!” and “Ghana!” drowned out the formal honors music emanating from the military band that the French government had organized for the occasion. Women clad in brightly-colored Ghanaian independence cloths danced in welcome as drummers filled the tarmac with their rhythms.^{Footnote 41} The crowd was in such a frenzy that Nkrumah and his entourage (including the Ministers of Housing and Public Works, who, it can be inferred, were last minute additions to the travel party) had difficulty making it to the cavalcade of official vehicles awaiting them. “Charming disorder,” as Sékou Touré, also present at the airport, described it.^{Footnote 42} French motor police surrounded the open car in which Nkrumah rode with Houphouët, the better to be seen by the eager public lining the streets.

From Port-Bouët, the motorcade made its way to Cocody, “a new suburb, where each house is more modern than the next.” Nkrumah was taken to one of the biggest new villas, where a guard of honor, “dressed in splendid red,” kept diligent watch (a far cry from the discretion Nkrumah had been seeking). Streams of visitors stopped by to leave their greetings for the new premier, some laden with gifts of goats, chickens, and ivory carvings.^{Footnote 43} The power of Nkrumah’s celebrity was undeniable. Houphouët, ever savvy, would be quick to convert the Ghanaian’s mega-wattage in his favor.

The following day, Saturday, a lunch reception was held at Côte d’Ivoire’s magnificent, and brand-new, Territorial Assembly. It was a grand affair: about sixty Ivorian RDA delegates, representatives of French West Africa including Côte d’Ivoire’s Governor Ernest de Nattes, and notables from the Ghanaian, French, and Ivorian communities of Abidjan were in attendance. The press was there, too, including correspondents from Le Monde, West Africa and the Daily Graphic. All told, more than one hundred distinguished guests were present.

Houphouët spoke first. Curiously, the “die was cast” before Nkrumah even replied.^{Footnote 44} Houphouët acknowledged that though Ghana’s recently-minted sovereignty was “truly tempting,” he had to tell Nkrumah, “frankly, that we have chosen another experience (…) that of the Franco-African Community.” Close cooperation with France, Houphouët wagered, would more rapidly contribute to the “human and social emancipation of Africa” than Ghana’s outright independence. Nkrumah, who agreed that he and Houphouët were “in pursuit of the same goal,” namely the rapid development of their respective territories, underscored that they had chosen “different means [to achieving it].”

Witnesses of the event report Nkrumah’s passion and even fury as he delivered a “veritable defense speech [‘plaidoyer’] for the independence of African peoples.”^{Footnote 45} Ghanaian attendees, who were dressed, as was their new premier, in fabulous kente cloths, cheered him on. But no text survives of Nkrumah’s improvised oration. The only recorded version we have is that translated into French by the High Commissioner’s diplomatic counselor, who deliberately “rounded out a lot of sharp edges.”^{Footnote 46} At the conclusion of Nkrumah’s speech, whose provocations had been lost in substance if not in style on the majority of the Francophone audience, Houphouët declared that, “a bet had been opened.”^{Footnote 47} In ten years’ time, the world could judge the results.^{Footnote 48}

Meanwhile, Houphouët and Nkrumah had the entire afternoon to get through. Alluding to his lunchtime remarks, Houphouët took Nkrumah on a tour of the development projects that French financial and technical capacity had made possible in Abidjan. Without the metropole, argued Houphouët, Africa could not modernize. Accompanied by Abidjan’s Director of Public Works, M. Dillier, the two leaders toured the deep port of Abidjan and the Vridi Canal that had catalyzed the Ivorian economy after its construction in 1951.^{Footnote 49} In Plateau, the city’s commercial district, Nkrumah first learned about the railway that connected Abidjan to the interior of FWA, terminating at Ouagadougou.^{Footnote 50}

Of particular significance was the next infrastructure landmark: the Félix Houphouët-Boigny bridge that linked Plateau and Treichville – the city’s historic “French” and “African” quarters – and which had not yet been opened to the public. Riding alongside the bridge’s namesake, Nkrumah became the first official guest to make the crossing, charged with symbolism of Houphouët’s “bridging” two worlds.^{Footnote 51} Arrived at Treichville, “enthusiasm knew no bounds,” as Ghanaians living in Abidjan – drawn largely, it should be remembered, by the economic possibility of the city’s thriving port – gathered to cheer their new head of state.^{Footnote 52} The tour had had its effect. So impressed was Nkrumah by Abidjan’s infrastructure, that he later asked Renner to invite Dillier for a meeting in Accra to discuss opening a canal at Assinie (Figure 1).^{Footnote 53}

Figure 1.

From right to left: Kwame Nkrumah, Félix Houphouët-Boigny, and M. Dillier (Abidjan’s Inspector of Public Works). They are Touring the Port of Abidjan in a Launch. Source: “P.M’s Triumph in Abidjan,” Daily Graphic, 8 April 1957.

The following morning, Nkrumah left for Kankan in the company of Touré. He returned Saturday, 13 April, when it was his turn to offer a lavish luncheon in thanks for his stay in French West Africa. Afterwards, Nkrumah headed to Grand Bassam where the Ghanaian community had organized a libation ceremony in his honor. Chief Augustin Kouassi welcomed Nkrumah at the Hotel Pariba. Dressed all in white, Nkrumah addressed the rapturous crowd in Nzema, mounting a commanding image of himself as pan-African savior who eschewed the colonial territorialism epitomized by Houphouët’s politics.^{Footnote 54}

A visit to the museum and a private dinner at the Governor’s residence formally closed Nkrumah’s visit. The morning of Sunday 14 April found him back in Accra, having concluded the one and only trip he would make to Abidjan as premier. Referencing the grandeur of Nkrumah’s tour, and perhaps hinting at its surprise genesis, one of Nkrumah’s entourage dryly observed that though the trip was intended as a private one, “the reception was such that it was difficult to imagine what would have happened if it had been a state visit.”^{Footnote 55}

The Rise and Fall of Akan Studies

We have thus seen how, in 1960s American social science and in the construction of Ivorian selfhood, comparison with Ghana was a key means by which Côte d’Ivoire was rendered visible. This third section examines how the comparison changed over time, as fortunes on either side of the border waxed and waned.

The early 1970s was the era of Ivorian triumphalism. Riding the wave of “one of the highest economic growth rates in the world,” the state undertook massive investments in infrastructure development and prestige projects (like the luxurious Hôtel Ivoire which boasted one of the continent’s first ice skating rinks).^{Footnote 71} Echoing this hubris, a monograph published in 1974 by a student of Zolberg’s warned readers that “[c]onclusions derived from the Ivory Coast case may be historically out of phase when applied to other states, but they will apply in the near future [emphasis added].”^{Footnote 72} Côte d’Ivoire was now the regional pace-setter. The story of Côte d’Ivoire’s “overtaking” of Ghana’s lead was dramatic enough to seep into the popular press, whose superficial treatments of the comparison crowned Abidjan the clear victor.^{Footnote 73}

It was not just Ghana that looked shoddy in comparison with its western neighbor. Côte d’Ivoire’s success was the outlier in a region which, a decade after the high hopes of independence, was suffering chronic political instability, economic hardship and the erosion of civil society and social services. This did not look like the linear progress that the modernization theorists had expected to see. What had gone wrong?^{Footnote 74}

Disillusionment with the signature methodology of the 1960s had set in; by the early 1970s, Chicago’s New Nations Committee – aorta of the Ghana-Côte d’Ivoire comparison – had been dissolved.^{Footnote 75} Skepticism about the “naturalness” of the pairing emerged, and the very categories deployed to compare the two countries were called into question.^{Footnote 76} Radical critiques of neo-colonialism by authors such as Samir Amin and Walter Rodney were altering the questions asked by social scientists.^{Footnote 77} What if the wager, rather than being won or lost in West Africa, had been decided by actors in Europe and North America?^{Footnote 78} Moving beyond Africanist studies, it was, interestingly, Immanuel Wallerstein, who would mount the most expansive challenge to modernization theory upon the 1974 publication of the first volume of his World Systems theory opus.^{Footnote 79} Evident in the work of scholars such as Rodney and Wallerstein was a turn to deeper history to understand the present.^{Footnote 80} The historical shallowness of 1960s social science scholarship now seemed inadequate to understand global inequalities. A new category, more satisfactory than the nation-state approach, would have to emerge to account for modernization theory’s blind spots. That category would be Akan studies.

At the same time that modernization theory was floundering, Ivorian economic success had created the conditions for an explosion of anthropological research on Ivorian cultures by a young generation of promising French scholars.^{Footnote 81} One of these, Emmanuel Terray, in Côte d’Ivoire on a coopération contract, helped found the University of Abidjan’s Institut d’Ethnosociologie (IES), which functioned for decades as a successful center of high-level scholarship.^{Footnote 82} After Terray’s forced departure, the IES was led by Claude Pairault until, on 30 June 1973, an Ivorian, Georges Niangoran-Bouah, took up the directorship.^{Footnote 83} The Ivoirisation of a key post at the University of Abidjan – long dominated by French faculty – signaled an important development.

Niangoran-Bouah believed passionately that it was the task of Africans to conduct scientific research on their own societies.^{Footnote 84} As a scholar who had struggled to “re-become African” after his Parisian education, Niangoran-Bouah, the son of a “mixed” Akan couple, looked to what he saw as his historical roots.^{Footnote 85} Now the head of the IES, he was in a position to alter the metropolitan orientation of one of the University of Abidjan’s most prestigious structures.^{Footnote 86} And just as Houphouët in the 1950s had inherited a political landscape influenced by the Gold Coast model, in the early 1970s, the most vibrant example of scholarship by and about Africans was to be found at the University of Ghana-Legon (and, in particular, the Institute of African Studies).^{Footnote 87} Research at Legon, Ivorian academics admitted, “had taken a large lead, especially in the domain of Akan studies” when compared to the University of Abidjan’s “weak organization.”^{Footnote 88} Among intellectuals, Ghana’s “aheadness” still held regional sway.

Since the early 1970s, Niangoran-Bouah had sought to broaden the conventional definition of who could accurately be classed as “Akan.”^{Footnote 89} His ideas clashed with Ghanaian scholar Adu Boahen, who maintained a “rigid interpretation” of who (and where) “Akan” denoted. In response to Niangoran-Bouah, Boahen had developed a classification system to distinguish the “pure” Akan from their “impure” brethren.^{Footnote 90} Niangoran-Bouah’s disputed Boahen’s notions of Akan “purity,” arguing for an expansive definition that included the Baoulé and lagoon areas of Côte d’Ivoire.^{Footnote 91} His was an intellectual project to inscribe Ivorians into a regional legacy of power, which had historically radiated from the Ashanti heartland. Extending the net of “Akan” societies to include Ivorian peoples would bind modern-day Côte d’Ivoire to this historical prestige.

In January 1974, the debate between Niangoran-Bouah and Boahen was conducted live, at a major, week-long conference in Bondoukou, an Ivorian town just five kilometers from the Ghana border. The conference, now all but forgotten, was a ground-breaking moment in the decolonization of African studies. The event grew out of contacts cultivated by researchers based in Côte d’Ivoire who had travelled to the Accra to discuss their work on Akan societies with Ghanaian scholars.^{Footnote 92} Betraying Niangoran-Bouah’s perspective, the conference was titled, “The Shared Populations of Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana.” Its mission, explicitly, was to “reconstitute the lost unities,” introduced by “artificial borders.”^{Footnote 93} Co-sponsored by the Universities of Abidjan and Ghana, the conference allowed researchers from Francophone and Anglophone traditions of scholarship to come together to interrogate a shared, precolonial history. Teams of translators – including American graduate students doing their fieldwork at the University of Abidjan – facilitated the exchanges.^{Footnote 94} A second conference, held in Kumasi, Ghana, the following year, would mirror the Ivorian meeting.

No further inter-university conferences took place. I suspect that the University of Ghana, whose financial straits had reached dire levels, was unable to continue the momentum.^{Footnote 95} Yet the legacy of these conferences has had lasting, if unexpected, effects. In the early 1980s, an American graduate student, Raymond Silverman, discovered the thick tomes of the conference proceedings in the library at Legon. Silverman, who was studying a historic community now divided by the political frontier, was impressed by the possibility of scholarly dialogue across national borders that the conferences represented. A few years later, during a conversation with anthropologist Judith Timyan, Silverman brought up the 1970s conferences. Both agreed that reestablishing a dialogue between scholars working on Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire would be a valuable enterprise. The result, in 1988, was the founding of the Akan Studies Council (ASC).^{Footnote 96}

The effort was unsustainable. Insufficient interest on behalf of French and Ivorian colleagues particularly plagued the initiative. In 1993, the ASC was re-constituted as the Ghana Studies Association. Like the scholarship of the 1960s, the nation-state had been reasserted as the relevant category of analysis (this time around, its component parts would be thoughtfully questioned). Unlike that earlier scholarship, connection to Côte d’Ivoire appeared less and less relevant for students of Ghana, as the pendulum had swung back in the latter’s favor. Indeed, an assessment of the wager, published in the same year as the Ghanaization of the Akan Studies Council, declared a “Reversal of Fortune.”^{Footnote 97}

Houphouët’s canny move to measure Côte d’Ivoire alongside Ghana suffered, at least for the moment, retrenchment. The decision to Ghanaize the ASC was taken at the 1993 African Studies Association meeting, held in early December. It was a meaningful historical coincidence. The last day of that 1993 ASA conference, 7 December, was the day of the Ivorian statesman’s passing.

Comparison in Crisis

Being “modern and model” is hard to keep up. In 1978, the World Bank published a report entitled “The Challenge of Success,” which warned, presciently, that Côte d’Ivoire’s impressive economic growth would be difficult to maintain.^{Footnote 98} Nevertheless, the country’s sense of self was buoyed by the persistent struggles of its neighbors. In 1984, a journalist could still conclude that, “whatever the Ivory Coast’s remaining shortcomings, it has won ‘the great wager’ with Ghana.”^{Footnote 99} By the end of the twentieth century, that verdict was increasingly under fire.^{Footnote 100}

Long-term economic decline has thrown Ivorian self-image into crisis. Michael McGovern relates pointed indicators of Côte d’Ivoire’s fall from grace: GDP per capita (adjusted for purchasing power parity) in 2004 that is one-half what it was in 1978 and a “precipitous drop” of eighteen spots on the UN’s Human Development Index between 1990 and 2006.^{Footnote 101} Today, Côte d’Ivoire no longer appears the wager’s unqualified “winner.” Recent comparisons – not least by Ivorians themselves – put Ghana decidedly back on top.^{Footnote 102} Indeed, a half-century later, it is clear that “the outcome of the famous wager (…) depends on when one makes the assessment.”^{Footnote 103}

The wager was an early manifestation of Houphouët’s strategy to fashion Ivorian national identity in relation to the country’s neighbors. As Côte d’Ivoire stumbled economically, that contradistinction took on an ominous edge. Ivorians began to perceive differently the tremendous migration to Côte d’Ivoire, which had been encouraged under conditions of prosperity, but now helped provoke a xenophobic discourse around ivoirité (Ivorianness). First proposed as a term in a 1974 poem, ivoirité only took on its full valence in the 1990s, following Houphouët’s death and the succession struggle that ensued.^{Footnote 104}

Georges Niangoran-Bouah, whose interest in ethnic classification we have already encountered, was one of ivoirité’s principal exponents. Locked in a struggle with Adu Boahen to expand notions of “Akanness” during the flourishing 1970s, by the hard times of the 1990s he was working to restrict access to ivoirité.^{Footnote 105} In 1996, then Director of Cultural Heritage at the Ministry of Culture, Niangoran-Bouah published a list of the founding ancestors present in 1893, “at the moment when Côte d’Ivoire was born.”^{Footnote 106} However, his conception of ivoirité encompassed more than simply ancestral origins. One of the four criteria for being a “pure Ivorian” [ivoirien de souche], he argued, was to have “the same lifestyles (culture and civilization).”^{Footnote 107} For him, ivoirité evoked a sophisticated way of being in the world that migrants from surrounding countries did not possess. Houphouët’s formulation of Ivorians as “modern and model” is evident in Niangoran-Bouah’s ethno-nationalist conception, which maintains a clear distinction between the behavior of the Ivorian and the other. The xenophobia that characterized discussions around ivoirité in the mid-1990s generated a real social pressure to distinguish oneself from the migrant. Recent studies by anthropologists Sasha Newell and Mike McGovern demonstrate how this relational national identity has taken root in contemporary Côte d’Ivoire.

Newell explores how Ivorian youth “bluff” modernity, seeking to prove themselves the “right” kind of Ivorian in a context of profound anxiety about who that is. “The central act of identity production for Abidjan’s young men,” writes Newell, is “a display of the cultural mastery of the symbols of modern identity, differentiating them from ‘untrue’ Ivorians incapable of making such distinctions.”^{Footnote 108} With economic recession eroding youth’s access to the “real” goods of modernity, the capacity to “bluff” it has itself become an attribute of authenticity. Though reconfigured, and sometimes “counterfeit,” being “modern” persists as being Ivorian.

McGovern, writing about Côte d’Ivoire’s civil conflict in the early 2000s, asks why the antagonisms “failed” to break out into full-scale war. He sees the internalized element of “model” in Ivorian self-image as the vital break on mass violence:

The insights of Newell and McGovern affirm, in the ways that Ivorians have come to understand themselves, the resilience of Houphouët’s political vision. To embody ivoirité is to demonstrate a sophistication that is supposedly beyond the reach of your neighbors. It is in this sense that the wager between Houphouët and Nkrumah was a foundational act of Ivorian national identity. Comparison with Ghana made Côte d’Ivoire.