The Africans (40 page)

T
HE
I
VORY
C
OAST
AND
G
UINEA
in West Africa share many things, among them a common border. Both countries are former French colonies, both have had but one president, both have recognized the importance of agricultural development, both have enjoyed political stability, both are struggling to reach shared goals of economic growth, individual dignity and national self-reliance, and both were born as nations in the same era, the Ivory Coast in 1960, Guinea in 1958.

Back in the dying days of colonialism, Guinea was the rich child of the French family and was, most agreed, destined to become the wealthiest nation in black Africa. It was Africa’s leading banana exporter, and its verdant farmlands fed much of French-speaking West Africa. Its earth held one-third the world’s known bauxite reserves, more than two billion tons of high-grade ore, and enough diamonds and gold to fill a dozen Fort Knoxes. Its three major rivers offered great potential for hydroelectric development, and its capital, Conakry, a tidy white-washed little town perched on Tumbo Island and surrounded by blue ocean, attracted thousands of French tourists. The beaches were lined with palms, the restaurants were
staffed by chefs from Paris, and a deluxe room in the seaside Hotel de France cost no more than a bottle of inexpensive Chablis.

The Ivory Coast had no such good fortune. Its heavy surf, treacherous harbors and lack of minerals discouraged the early European settlers who pushed on east and established their forts on the Gold Coast (now Ghana). The dense forests of the southwest were virtually impenetrable, and the dry red earth of the north yielded little except dust. At the end of World War II, the Ivory Coast had a one-crop economy, coffee, which accounted for two thirds of its exports, and a capital, Abidjan, with a small expatriate population and 20,000 African residents who lulled away the tropical days in their mud huts, seldom bothering to even catch a fish for dinner in the nearby lagoon. The Ivory Coast, everyone thought, was destined to join the line of international beggars.

But the predictions were wrong. From the first day of independence, the Ivory Coast and Guinea set off on divergent roads, the former pursuing a capitalistic course heavily influenced by France, the latter a radical philosophy—“Marxism in African clothes,” President Sékou Touré called it—under the sponsorship of the Soviet Union. In each case just one man—the president—was responsible for deciding the path his country should take toward national self-reliance. Those decisions made more than twenty years ago have produced dramatically different results. They offer a fascinating insight into the role of ideology in the Third World and into the power of a single man to determine the fate of his nation for generations to come.

President Félix Houphouët-Boigny of the Ivory Coast is an uncommon figure amid the tumult and violence of Africa, speaking with a soft, reasoned voice, forgiving those dedicated to his downfall (even those who have tried to kill him), telling his people, “We must go slowly, my children, for we are in a hurry.”

A devout Catholic who never drinks or smokes, Houphouët-Boigny wears black homburg hats and three-piece suits and meets secretly with South African leaders, believing that dialogue solves more problems than diatribe. He has a great fondness for France—dividing his summers between an apartment in Paris and an estate in Switzerland—and he disdains the radical rhetoric that has become so characteristic of African politics. He welcomes Western journalists, issuing visas to all who apply, because, he says, the Ivory
Coast has nothing to hide. Which, in fact, it doesn’t: not one execution has ever been carried out in the Ivory Coast since independence and the country doesn’t even hold a single political prisoner.

Félix Houphouët-Boigny (the name Boigny means “the ram”) was born in 1905, the son of a wealthy Baoule chief. He made his way through the French colonial education system, studying medicine in Dakar, Senegal, and became a respected public health official and prosperous planter before entering politics in 1944. That year he created the Ivory Coast’s first agricultural union, which later became the forum for planters demanding minimum prices for coffee and cocoa crops, denied them by the colonial regime’s discriminatory laws.

At the end of World War II he went to France for the first time, as the Ivory Coast’s representative in the Parlement. Within a few years he had become a minister in the government of Prime Minister Guy Mollet, the first African colonial to hold a cabinet post in a European government. As late as 1959, the year before independence, he was still declaring that the Ivory Coast was not ready for nationhood. “Perhaps my grandchildren …” he said.

But he returned home and immediately ensured his popularity by abolishing the single most hated feature of colonial rule, a labor law that allowed the French planters to conscript workers from any village in the country. He may have been in France all those years (1946 to 1958), but his heart remained in Africa; although his debts to France were great, he probably never made a presidential decision—including the expulsion of the Russian embassy from Abidjan in 1969—that was designed to please the French rather than to benefit the Ivorians.

Houphouët-Boigny competed successfully with the French on their own terms. He mastered their colonial system and he learned how to use the European. Despite what his critics say, he didn’t sell out to France; he simply used France’s resources—money and people—for his country’s betterment and he did it at a relatively small cost to the Ivorians.

It is a mark of Houphouët-Boigny’s confidence that he does not surround himself with the symbolic trappings favored by other African presidents. He doesn’t wear a leopard-skin cap or carry a fly whisk or wave a white handkerchief. He doesn’t display his Africanism on his sleeve because, in competing with the French and succeeding, he has no hangups about the Europeans or the Africans. He knows precisely who he is.

Houphouët-Boigny is a short, stocky man in his mid-seventies, respectfully called Le Vieux (The Old Man) by his countrymen. If he appears out of step with mainstream Africa, as he often does, it raises some questions about what beat Africa is marching to. For Houphouët-Boigny has presided over a country that has enjoyed the fastest, steadiest growth of any non-oil producer in sub-Sahara Africa (except South Africa). The African backwater has become the African miracle, and passengers landing at Abidjan’s gleaming, air-conditioned international airport often shake their heads, thinking they must be debarking on the wrong continent. As the saying goes, Abidjan is very nice and very convenient to Africa.

From its modest beginnings it has grown into black Africa’s most luxurious metropolis, as clean and orderly as it is modern. Pastel-shaded office buildings soar twenty stories high, superhighways carry trucks laden with export produce to the port, the elegant shops and bustling markets are awash with goods, the restaurants are perhaps the best in all Africa. Abidjan even has its own Club Mediterranée and its own artificial-ice skating rink (the only other one is in South Africa) and a booming tourist industry that pumps many million francs into the economy each year.

Of course, skating rinks and $80-a-day hotel rooms may be fine for the visiting Westerner, but they don’t mean much to the underpaid resident Ivorian. Indeed, the skeptics are quick to scoff at the Ivory Coast, saying its rapid growth is superficial, that its prosperity is dependent on the continued presence of French nationals, that development dollars have been concentrated in the cities, not the countryside. Their suspicions were heightened in 1982 when, for the first time since independence, the country experienced zero industrial growth. Just as alarming, the foreign debt was growing and students were openly questioning whether democracy was possible in a one-party political system. But the Ivory Coast had still moved lightyears ahead of its neighbors. Even in the villages, a traveler sees telecommunications lines and paved roads and running water and tin roofs for the one-room huts. They are the milestones by which progress in rural Africa is judged.

Largely because the Ivory Coast has avoided political adventurism and shunned hefty expenditures on defense and wasteful projects, the country has been able to devote 20 percent of its budget to education, and school attendance has risen from 22 percent to 55 percent since independence; literacy is a remarkably high 60 percent, more than twice the continental average.

The country’s gross national product—the sum of all goods and services produced—has tripled since 1965. Palm-oil production has increased sevenfold, making the Ivory Coast the world’s largest producer. Per capita income has jumped from $70 to $1,000, the highest of any non-oil producer in Africa (except for South Africa and the Seychelles), making the country so well off that it is not even eligible for United States’ developmental assistance.