The Africans (41 page)

Most significantly, the Ivory Coast has been one of the few African countries that has been able to expand and diversify its agricultural sector, the lifeblood of its economic gusto. Coffee production, for example, has tripled, although coffee’s share of export earnings has fallen from two-thirds to one-third. The dry northern quarter of the nation is now a major sugar producer; the forests of the southwest have been conquered and harvested for timber export; the lowlands of the swampy, sweltering south have been transformed into plantations that have made the Ivory Coast Africa’s leading exporter of bananas and pineapples; a canal has been cut through the sandbanks and lagoons to create an excellent artificial harbor at Abidjan. The Ivory Coast, in short, has done what every African country talked about doing in 1960 but which none, with the possible exception of Kenya, managed to accomplish.

Houphouët-Boigny, who calls himself the nation’s “No. 1 Peasant” but lives in regal fashion, admits privately that he took a calculated risk back in the sixties. Instead of being caught up in the nationalistic fever of the day, he opened his doors to foreign investors and expatriate residents with laws that imposed few restrictions on transfer of profits and capital. He resisted the temptation to industrialize, believing it more important to develop the country’s agricultural resources first, and then to concentrate on providing efficient ports, good roads, communications and power.

To Africa’s new breed of young, radical leaders, Houphouët-Boigny is an anachronism. He is too French, too bourgeois, too paternal to suit the mood of the 1980s. He is not, in their parlance, a revolutionary, yet what he accomplished is nothing less than a revolution, a fundamental change in his country’s socioeconomic structure. It is a revolution in which no one died, and no one had to go into political exile. And to those who call him a neocolonist and to those who denounce his use of palaver instead of power, he replies huffily, “Nobody more than I, and no people more than the Ivorian people, aspire more toward peace through dialogue. I have given every proof of this and at a great risk.”

Consider these examples of conciliation and compassion, all but
unheard of in Africa: in 1961 a group of army officers arrested for plotting a coup were startled to receive daily visits from the president they had tried to overthrow. H.B., as his friends call him, sat on their steel bunks hour after hour, trying to convince them that their judgment was flawed. All were eventually released. Five years later Houphouët-Boigny released three former cabinet ministers and ninety-three others who had been convicted of trying to assassinate him in another coup attempt. He reduced the death sentences of ten others involved in the plot to six years in prison. One of those sentenced to death was Jean Baptiste Mockey. H.B. released him, befriended him, attended his daughter’s wedding and later made him minister of health.

When university students went on strike in 1977, Houphouët-Boigny didn’t call out the army, as most African presidents are wont to do in similar situations. He spent three days talking with the students, hearing their grievances, urging them to return quietly and proceed with their education, which they did.

The composition of the country’s population also offers some telling evidence of the political and economic atmosphere in the Ivory Coast. Unlike many African countries from which thousands of nationals have fled to escape repression and poverty, as many as one quarter of the Ivory Coast’s 8 million people originally came from other African nations. Most are laborers who immigrate for several years to build financial nest eggs, working in the factories and forests and plantations, where they can earn perhaps $800 in a single season. When they drift back home, to the millet fields of Mali, to the idleness of Guinea, or to the overgrown cocoa plantations of Ghana, they carry with them radios and shirts and cans of cooking oil, goods often unavailable at any price in other African countries.

From the inland Sahelian countries of Upper Volta and Niger come the cattle herders, moving with their animals along the shoulder of the roads toward the Abidjan slaughterhouses. They gather in the flat, treeless plains near the international airport, the gleaming Abidjan skyline in the distance, bulldozers and dust all about as ground is prepared for new factories and new office buildings and new roads. They have made this journey of hundreds of miles because their cattle will fetch a higher price and be in greater demand in the Ivory Coast, and gathered there, among their milling, restless cattle, they talk of money. Given the opportunity, almost everyone in Africa is a capitalist.

While Houphouët-Boigny was the force that gave the Ivorians
their opportunity for growth, France was the strength that enabled them to capitalize on it. France provided the capital and the manpower that transformed the Ivory Coast, and today Frenchmen are everywhere, their numbers and influence overwhelming. More than 50,000 French nationals live in the Ivory Coast, five times the total at independence. The World Bank estimates that they hold 80 percent of the jobs in those occupations that require a university degree. French businessmen control up to 40 percent of the investment in the Ivory Coast’s industry and 50 percent of its trade (although the agricultural sector remains in Ivorian hands). Six hundred French soldiers provide the backbone of the Ivory Coast’s external security, thus necessitating little more than token defense spending by Houphouët-Boigny, and French civil servants play key decision-making roles in every governmental ministry. If you walk through the ministry of planning and development, you will find that the minister and his two or three top deputies are African and the janitors are African, but almost everyone in between is French. In other African countries, Europeans are no longer permitted to fill jobs that Africans are capable of handling; in the Ivory Coast, there are French bartenders, French maître d’s, French store clerks.

Their presence rankles many young Ivorians, particularly those with education who cannot find jobs. They contend that the Ivory Coast is in a constant state of tutelage, that despite the impressive statistics the country is still dependent on foreign labor, foreign investment, foreign technicians, foreign markets for its crops. If the French pulled out of the Ivory Coast tomorrow, the country would collapse. The resultant turmoil would not be on the magnitude of Angola’s when the Portuguese left overnight, because the Ivory Coast has developed a monied, propertied, educated class of capable people. But still, without the French, there would be no Ivory Coast miracle.

There are some other problems as well. Corruption is widespread, the gap between rich and poor is very large, and because education is free and in the hands of expatriate teachers, it costs at least twice as much to educate an Ivorian child as it does a child in the neighboring countries. All of this could make Houphouët-Boigny vulnerable. But the one issue the opposition could seize on is the French presence. A skillful propagandist could blame any national shortcoming on it and probably muster the support of the Ivorian majority. One other potential problem: Houphouët-Boigny has not groomed an heir apparent, and if he dies in office, there could be a leadership vacuum and a resultant struggle for power.

Houphouët-Boigny dismisses the skeptics, particularly those critical of the French presence, saying, “If I could have twice as many Frenchmen as we have to help us build the Ivory Coast, I would take them.” Given the striking progress his country has made, the nation’s “No. 1 Peasant” answers his critics with a single suggestion: Look at the economic and political stagnation that imprisons neighboring Ghana, Upper Volta, Mali, Liberia and Guinea, and consider the alternatives.

The flight from Abidjan to Conakry, capital of next-door Guinea, covers 700 miles and brings you back to a more familiar Africa. The little airport terminal is stuffy and dirty, and scattered alongside the runway are the rusting skeletons of six DC-4s (once used by Air Alaska), which the United States gave Guinea nearly twenty years ago. The Guineans flew them until they ran out of spare parts or crashed, then junked them at the airport.

Throughout most of the 1970s, Guinea was as isolated from the Western world as Albania, Having escaped numerous attempted coups, including an invasion by Portuguese mercenaries in 1970, President Touré had shut his country’s doors to concentrate on internal security and what he called the “mental development” of his people—a euphemism for training the uneducated masses to think as one and to see the world as he wanted them to see it. For years no tourists came to Guinea and all non-Communist journalists were declared
personae non grata
. Nevertheless, every four or five months I used to write Touré from Nairobi on Los
Angeles Times
stationary, requesting a visa. The first eight letters went unanswered. Then, much to my surprise, I received a reply one April morning from his minister of foreign affairs saying that yes, of course, President Touré would be pleased to receive me anytime. The letter had been sent via surface mail rather than air mail, and had taken four months to reach me. Its unspoken message was clear: Touré wanted to end his seclusion from the West and my newspaper was to be his initial sounding board.

To arrive in Conakry, after having breakfasted that morning on fresh-baked croissants and strong French coffee in one of Abidjan’s sidewalk cafés, is to turn back the calendar fifty years. The. narrow, potholed road from the airport to town winds past the dingy De Donka Hospital (where bedpans are routinely emptied out the windows), past decaying French plantations where trees grow in the living rooms of abandoned manor houses and local villagers collect overripe mangoes that have fallen to the ground, past rows of empty
shops, their doors hanging at crazy angles on broken hinges. The state owns everything in Guinea, and in the government’s largest department store, Nafyaya (meaning “plentiful”), there is nothing for sale except some Chinese shaving brushes, some pineapple juice and a few boxes of macaroni. The cold-cut counter, covered with an inch of dust, is empty and unrefrigerated. At one end of the store, which is as big as a basketball court, there is a picture of Fidel Castro, and at the other there is a banner saying: “To Suffer is to Succeed.”

The entire foreign community in Guinea numbers only 350, so there’s not much need anymore for the amenities to which Conakry was once accustomed. Only one restaurant of note remains, Petit Bateau, but diners must bring their own bottled water and order their meals a day in advance so the proprietress has time to shop for food in the outdoor market. Trash litters the streets and the trees that once lined the boulevards are dying, but no one seems to notice, or if they do, they apparently don’t mind; everyone is very laid back in Guinea. There is no bustle or sense of urgency or feel of movement. Life is a sun-bleached blur of unchanging conformity.

On my second day in Conakry, word was passed to me through the American embassy that my request for an interview with Touré had been granted; I should be at the presidential palace promptly at 4
P.M
. A little after 6
P.M
., acknowledging me with a nod, President Touré emerged from his residence, cigarette in hand, a white cap perched jauntily on his head. He is a big, vaguely handsome man, and he walked with long, hurried strides down the stone steps, his eyes moving constantly, catlike, absorbing everything.

At the base of the steps, near his sporty Renault sedan, Touré paused. His entourage of cabinet ministers and other aides paused too. An honor guard snapped to attention, a bugler sounded his salute, and eight security men kicked the starter pedals on their big BMW motorcycles. The backfires filled the courtyard like claps of thunder.

The cavalcade moved out of the palace grounds with Touré at the wheel of the lead car and me squeezed in the backseat between two bodyguards. Along the streets the peasants stood three deep, applauding this man they had learned to respect and fear. Touré responded with waves of his white handkerchief, his eyes ignoring the road ahead until an aide reached over to steady the wheel. “He is a better president than he is a driver,” a bodyguard whispered to me.

The horns of many ships flying Guinean and Russian flags blared in anticipation of the presidential visit at the nearby port. Suddenly
Touré made a quick, unexpected turn to the left. His motorcycle escort, unprepared, sped off in the wrong direction. Touré chortled with mischievous delight. His aides laughed too. For these were relaxed times; Guinea was ending its repressive, Marxist ways and looking for new friends and new directions.

Ever since 1958, longer than any other black head of state in postcolonial Africa, Touré has ruled Guinea like a boot-camp sergeant, crushing his enemies, organizing his people into 2,500 cells known as village councils, sacrificing all for the revolution he believes one day will lift his country from the bondage of poverty, ignorance, apathy and disease.

So far, visible accomplishments are few, but Touré—an uncompromising and scrupulously honest former union leader once known as
l’enfant terrible
of French West Africa—has, for better or worse, done it his way, and in doing so has managed a remarkable feat: he has survived.

“I don’t know what people mean when they call me the bad child of Africa,” Touré says. “Is it that they consider us unbending in the fight against imperialism, against colonialism? If so, we can be proud to be called headstrong. Our wish is to remain a child of Africa unto our death.”

I had submitted a list of fifteen questions to one of Touré’s aides prior to the presidential interview that had been scheduled after the port inspection. The aide went over each question carefully.
What have been the benefits of your relationship with the Soviet Union?
I had asked. “Irrelevant,” the aide said, crossing the question off the list.
What economic changes do you envision as a result of the recent rebellion against you by the marketplace merchants wanting to set their own prices, free of state control?
“Disrespectful,” the aide said, his pencil active again.
How would you compare the progress Guinea has made since independence with that made by the Ivory Coast?
“Immaterial,” the aide said. Finally seven questions were approved for submission to the Clairvoyant Guide, as the president likes to be called, and I was seated next to Touré on an old blue sofa in the palace reception room. The entire cabinet and a film crew from the government’s television station had been summoned—a normal procedure in Africa—and were gathered around us. All eyes were on me. I flicked on my tape recorder and prepared to ask the first question.