People & Culture

Cote d'Ivoire's oldest border is not a border at all but a change in the land itself: a line running roughly east to west where the dense, humid forest of the south gives way to open savanna in the north. Almost everything about how this country's peoples settled, traded and organized themselves for a thousand years traces back to that split. The forest sheltered smaller, more dispersed societies who cleared land village by village. The savanna, open and crossable, carried the long-distance trade routes, the horses and the Islamic scholarship that linked West Africa's interior to the wider world. The region was peopled in waves from several directions: Kru-speaking groups settling the southwest, Mande speakers arriving from the north and west, and Akan speakers pushing in from what is now Ghana, each finding a niche defined by that forest and savanna geography long before Europeans knew the coast existed. It was the savanna that produced the region's first great state. In the early eighteenth century Seku Watara, a Malinke warrior and trader, founded the Kong Empire in the north, built not on farming but on protecting and taxing the caravan routes that moved gold, kola nuts, salt and cloth between the forest zone and the trading cities of the Sahel. Kong's merchants were Dyula, Mande-speaking Muslim traders who had been settling towns such as Bouna, Bondoukou and Kong itself since the fourteenth century, and who built mosques and schools alongside their warehouses. Bouna, founded slightly later by a ruling family that had come from Dagomba, grew into a second centre of the same network, so that by the eighteenth century the northern savanna held a chain of Muslim trading and scholarly towns bound together more by commerce and faith than by any single throne. South of that world, in the forest and along its edge, the story is one of arrivals from the east. In the middle of the eighteenth century a succession crisis tore through the Asante kingdom after the death of its ruler, and a faction of Akan people broke away and moved west into what is now central Cote d'Ivoire. Oral tradition names their leader as Abla Pokou and tells it as a single dramatic crossing: her people trapped on the wrong bank of the Comoe River, and the queen sacrificing her own son to the river spirits so the waters would part and let her people through, with the name Baoule itself said to come from the phrase meaning the child is dead. That is legend, told and retold as the founding story of the Baoule people, and it should be received as legend rather than as a recorded event. What the historical record does support is the underlying migration: an Akan group leaving Asante territory amid a real succession conflict and settling between the Comoe and Bandama rivers, where they built a kingdom that later broke into smaller chiefdoms. Other Akan groups from the same wave of departures moved further south and east and founded kingdoms of their own, Indenie and Sanwi among them, ruled by Agni chiefs whose descendants at Krindjabo kept a distinct royal identity long after these states became French protectorates, distinct enough that Sanwi tried to secede from an independent Cote d'Ivoire as late as 1969. In the north and northwest, the Senufo and Malinke held the savanna towns and farmland, organized less around kingship than around institutions such as the Senufo Poro society, a system of initiation that structured age, knowledge and authority across generations. The coast tells the opposite story from the interior. Sixteenth and seventeenth century European traders named this stretch of shoreline for its principal export, ivory, just as they named the coastline further east the Gold Coast for its gold and the Slave Coast for its captives. But naming a coast for a commodity did not guarantee European settlement, and here the coastline itself intervened: the shore was mostly straight and surf-battered, lacking the sheltered natural harbours that let Portuguese, Dutch, English and French traders build the fortified posts that came to dot the Gold Coast. Without harbours, without the deepwater anchorages that made large trading stations viable, the stretch that became Cote d'Ivoire stayed a place ships passed rather than a place they built on, remaining a marginal and largely ungarrisoned coast well into the nineteenth century and spared the density of slaving infrastructure that marked neighbouring shores, even as the trade in people continued to move through it in smaller volume. French conquest, when it came in the late nineteenth century, moved inland from that thin coastal presence and met its hardest resistance not on the coast but in the savanna, from Samori Toure. A Malinke military leader and Muslim cleric, Samori had built an empire stretching from Guinea through Mali into what is now northern Cote d'Ivoire, and in 1897 and 1898 his forces destroyed the old Kong Empire and made Kong itself his new capital, resisting French columns that had already taken most of the western Sudan. French forces captured the town of Sikasso in May 1898, and Samori withdrew his weakened, famine-thinned army toward the Liberian forest. On 29 September 1898 a French detachment under Captain Henri Gouraud surprised his camp at Guelemou, in what is now Cote d'Ivoire, and took him prisoner. He died in exile in Gabon two years later. With Samori gone, France consolidated its colony under the indigenat, a legal code that stripped Africans of ordinary judicial protection, permitted arbitrary punishment without trial, and underwrote decades of forced labour conscripted for roads, railways and above all for the cocoa and coffee plantations the French were carving into the forest zone, a system that reached its harshest years in the 1920s and 1930s and that Ivorians experienced as slavery in all but name. It was a planter, not a soldier, who ended that system and then led the country to independence. Felix Houphouet-Boigny, a Baoule chief and cocoa farmer, founded the Syndicat Agricole Africain in 1944 to organize African planters against the privileges French settlers enjoyed in labour and land. Elected to the French National Assembly two years later, he authored the 1946 law abolishing forced labour across French Africa, an achievement that made him a continental figure before Cote d'Ivoire was its own state. He carried that standing into the presidency at independence in 1960 and held it for more than three decades, building his rule on the same crop that had made him a planter's champion. Under Houphouet-Boigny, Cote d'Ivoire became the world's leading cocoa producer, its economy growing fast enough through the 1960s and 1970s to earn the label of an Ivorian miracle. That miracle ran on land and labour drawn from beyond its own borders: liberal land laws and open recruitment pulled hundreds of thousands of migrants from Burkina Faso and Mali into the cocoa belt, workers who cleared and planted much of the forest zone's plantation economy and whose descendants, generations on, would find their claim to land, and eventually to Ivorian nationality itself, contested in ways that shaped the crises still to come. Houphouet-Boigny spent part of that cocoa wealth on Yamoussoukro, his home village, which he built into a planned capital crowned by the Basilica of Our Lady of Peace, consecrated in 1990. Its footprint of roughly 30,000 square metres makes it larger than St Peter's in Rome, and its dome rises well over 150 metres. The true construction cost was never officially disclosed, and published estimates still range from roughly 300 million to 600 million US dollars, a spread that is itself part of the building's story: a monument whose exact price its own patron never confirmed. The stability of the Houphouet-Boigny years did not survive him. In the 1990s his successor, Henri Konan Bedie, promoted the concept of ivoirite, an ideology of authentic Ivorian identity used to disqualify his chief rival, Alassane Ouattara, from the 1995 and 2000 elections on the grounds of foreign parentage, a charge that fell hardest on northerners and on citizens descended from the very Burkinabe and Malian migrants the cocoa economy had drawn in. The years that followed saw a rebellion split the country between a government-held south and a rebel-held north from 2002 to 2007, and then, after a disputed presidential runoff in November 2010 in which both Laurent Gbagbo and Ouattara claimed victory, months of escalating violence that became open conflict in early 2011 and ended with Gbagbo's capture in Abidjan that April. Historians and human rights investigators broadly agree on this sequence of events. What remains genuinely contested is the apportionment of responsibility for the worst violence of 2010 and 2011, which forces committed which atrocities and in what numbers, questions that outlived the fighting and moved into courtrooms without full resolution. None of that history is behind glass here. Grand-Bassam, the old colonial capital east of Abidjan, is a UNESCO World Heritage site precisely because its commercial quarter, its administrative buildings and its N'zima fishing village still stand side by side much as they did when the town governed the colony. Comoe National Park in the northeast and Tai National Park in the southwest, both World Heritage sites in their own right, protect the savanna and rainforest that shaped the old trade routes and the Senufo and Dan homelands respectively. Around the Ebrie Lagoon, villages such as Tiagba still stand on wooden stilts over the water, much as lagoon communities have for generations. In the far west, the mountains around Man hold the sacred forests and mask traditions of the Dan, where certain masks never leave the forest and certain dances, performed on stilts, are still built around initiation and harvest rather than around an audience. Abidjan itself wears its layered history openly, the Plateau district's towers rising over the same lagoon that fishing communities have worked for centuries, a skyline built on the wealth the cocoa economy generated. And inland, Yamoussoukro's basilica still stands over a town far smaller than the monument built to crown it, the single clearest structure this country's twentieth century produced. A visitor moving through this history should hold a few things in mind rather than ask them out loud. The crises of 2002 and 2011 are within living memory for most adults here, and for many families they are not history at all but an unhealed injury, so it is worth listening more than asking. Questions of origin, ethnicity and who counts as authentically Ivorian carry a political charge in this country that they do not carry in most others, a direct legacy of ivoirite, and a casual question about someone's name, region or parentage can land as something far heavier than curiosity. And practically, photographing military installations, government buildings, bridges and the port areas of Abidjan and San Pedro is restricted and enforced, so keep the camera down around anything official until you are certain it is not.