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AEGIS European Conference on African Studies
11 - 14 July 2007
African Studies Centre, Leiden, The Netherlands
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Nationalism, autocthony and modernity in Ivory Coast.
| Panel |
61. Autochtony, citizenship and exclusion - struggles over resources and belonging
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| Paper ID | 103 |
| Author(s) |
Cutolo, Armando
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| Paper |
No paper submitted
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| Abstract | In the mid-1990’s, Ivory Coast has witnessed the birth of a new ethno-nationalist ideology, the ivoirité. In the political competition caused by succession to president Houphouët-Boigny, academics and intellectuals close to Henry Konan Bedié (president ad interim until 1995 elections) conceived of ivoirité as a tool for the political fight against Alassane Ouattara, formerly prime minister and principal rival of Bedié in the forthcoming elections.
Ivoirité was built around a concept of citizenship based on the rhetoric of autochthonous origins, in relation to what had been labelled, by its ideologists, as the “problem of foreigners” in Ivory Coast. As an ideology of citizenship, it had among its explicit objectives the definition of an “Ivorian” identity and the defence of its sovereignty, represented as threatened by a number migrants –foreigners- that had reached the proportion of almost one third of the population of the country. In the same years, and in the context of social tensions created by political competition and economic crisis, different communities started to claim their ivoirité through a plurality of discourses. Autochthony, historical anteriority of settlement, pretended essential links between a specific ethnic, religious or cultural identity and the construction of the Ivorian national identity, were all used in the political arena, giving birth to what could be called a folk-anthropology of citizenship.
The aim of the paper is twofold: 1) to unveil the colonial origins of the categories of identity displayed by the ideology of ivoirité. 2) to show how the concept of autochthony, as it has been used in Ivory Coast, must be seen as a product of the local form of modernity, i.e. as the product of a new biopolitical conception of citizenship.
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