A significant contribution to the study of the relations between the United States and African Francophone countries....Bamba's conclusion eloquently casts a different spotlight on the causes of the rapid economic success of Ivory Coast. He offers new insights into the `miracle' that was previously always attributed to the wise strategy of Houphouet-Boigny...A noteworthy contribution to literature on Ivory Coast. ... Read more This book is a worthy contribution to the growing literature on development policies in the 1960s and 1970s. For specialists outside of Africa engaged with development ... African Miracle, African Mirage deserves attention as a way of making comparisons. ... this could be an effective textbook in graduate courses on postcolonial African history and the history of development. Drawing on historical documents and oral histories in Ivory Coast, France, and the United States, Bamba's book challenges conventional understandings of development in postcolonial Francophone Africa.
Kim Y Dionne What is innovative in the book's point of view ... is its emphasis on the penetration, in the postwar years, of American ideas and development processes, creating a competitor with France for the control of the country. Abou Bamba shows that rather than accepting a subordinate economic relationship to France, leaders of the Cote d'Ivoire sought to play foreign powers and investors off against each other. Looking in detail at development projects, he makes an important and revealing contribution to the growing field of development history.
Frederick Cooper, author of Africa in the World: Capitalism, Empire, Nation-State Show Less