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MIGRATION AND THE ORIGINS OF ‘IVOIRIAN IDENTITY’

Between a single set of covers, Daouda Gary-Tounkara offers us two fine and intertwined studies. The first is an in-depth historical and sociological account of Soudanais/Malian migration to Côte d’Ivoire since the late nineteenth century, a topic surprisingly little treated in the scholarly literature.1 The second study is a thoughtful and nuanced exploration of the origins of the contemporary conflict in Côte d’Ivoire and how the presence of migrants – in this case mainly from the French colony of Soudan, but also from other French colonies such as Upper Volta (today’s Burkina Faso), Dahomey (today’s Benin), and Togo – contributed to the creation of an increasingly exclusionary Ivoirian national identity in the long twentieth century. Along the way, the author includes a short history of Malian government policy on migration since independence. Following the introduction, the three parts of the study treat successive historical periods, each of which is divided into chapters. A conclusion very usefully summarizes the successive phases in Malian migration to Côte d’Ivoire and the emergence of today’s sense of Ivoirian identity or ivoirité. The introduction sets the theoretical stage for the volume by taking on the concept of ethnic identity. Gary-Tounkara concurs with Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch that what the social sciences commonly call ‘ethnicity’ is but a modern stand-in for the essentialist notion of ‘tribe’ in the colonial era. An operational and more useful concept is rather ‘ethnic sentiment’, which is constructed and varies through time (p. 11). More concretely, he submits that migrants from the regions that make up today’s Mali were crucial, if inadvertent, players in the creation of an Ivoirian ‘ethnic sentiment’ or identity. The author opens with two explicit hypotheses: first, that after 1930 the Côte d’Ivoire supplanted Senegal as the most important destination for migration from French Soudan owing to the rise of cocoa production. Gary-Tounkara argues that, after 1950, when the deep-water port opened in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire became the most important destination for Soudanais migrants, even serving as a transit point for migration to Central Africa and Europe. The second hypothesis holds that Ivoirian unity was ‘constructed’ in opposition to the presence of ‘foreigners’, laying the groundwork for resisting the colonial administration and the independence-era government of Houphouët-Boigny, both of whom had encouraged immigration (p. 22). Part One (pp. 29–93) focuses on migration between Soudan and Côte d’Ivoire in 1903–28, mobility that the author submits was ‘both spontaneous and provoked’ (p. 29). He reminds us that people from the desert edge or Sahel had long migrated towards the forest regions in the south – as traders seeking cola nuts, salt, and other goods, or as slave-raiders. Whereas traders in the precolonial era had made their