Abstract
This chapter examines how the évolué and media trope contributed to the construction of masculinities in Abidjan amid civil war and sustained economic decline. It uses ethnographic fieldwork and interviews with political propagandists, or orators (orateurs), for former President Laurent Gbagbo and mobile street vendors (vendeurs ambulants) in Abidjan from 2008 to 2009, supplemented by visual analysis, to demonstrate how underemployed Abidjanais men asserted economic agency, and accordant registers of public value and self-worth, outside of wage labor. The chapter also demonstrates how marginalized Abidjanais men, even as they fail to achieve breadwinning masculinity, remain committed to patriarchal tenets that uphold the structures of racial capitalism and the generalized subordination of Black men within it. By situating the study within the narrative arc of racial capitalism, the chapter establishes how, far from indicating a novel formulation of African masculinity in late capitalism, orators' and vendors' struggles to assert dignity, value, and success were contiguous in conflict and character with those faced by Black men since slavery and colonialism.
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