Bitter Chocolate (16 page)

The church's construction was commissioned and lovingly supervised by Côte d'Ivoire's founding father and long-term
president Félix Houphouët-Boigny, who is referred to as “Le Vieux”—literally meaning “The Old Man,” but signifying something more beatific. He wanted this tribute to the Virgin Mary built at any cost, and it's still difficult to learn the final price tag. Estimates are that it ran to US$300 million before completion. Labourers had worked on the project twenty-four hours a day for several years. Most of the construction was done in strict secrecy. The architect was an Ivorian citizen of Lebanese descent, but all the artisans and craftsmen were foreigners, and portraits of the chief designers—all French—are incorporated into one of the stained glass tableaux, along with God's humble servant, Houphouët-Boigny, featured at the feet of Christ.

Aside from the fifteen hundred Ivorians who worked on the building and grounds, the basilica's creation had almost nothing to do with the people of Côte d'Ivoire, except that they paid for it—not just at the time of construction but for years afterwards. The church was financed, according to the president, through a “deal with God” but more accurately through massive amounts of foreign funds that Houphouët-Boigny was able to borrow based on the country's substantial cocoa stock. At the time of completion in 1989, the bottom had fallen out of the price of cocoa and Côte d'Ivoire was spiralling down into economic chaos. But that had no effect on the extravagance of the project. Our Lady of Peace Basilica represents everything that Le Vieux was all about: it's a monument to his ego and political success—both enormous—and to his close relationship with both the mother church and France, his political patron.

Yamoussoukro, Côte d'Ivoire's capital city, where the basilica stands, is also mostly make-believe—a modern metropolis commissioned by Houphouët-Boigny and built upon the site of Ngokro, a tiny village that was Le Vieux's birthplace. It's also where his body is now interred in his massive former palace, a complex surrounded by five kilometres of protective walls, plus an artificial lake with real crocodiles. To drive through Yamoussoukro
(and one must drive because, unlike in almost all other African cities, nothing is within a comfortable walking distance) is to enter a surreal world. Six- and even eight-lane roads are completely free of vehicles. On one afternoon, the only car I saw in a stretch of over ten kilometres was a single taxi containing two men from China on their way to a Chinese–Côte d'Ivorian joint venture project.

In the tradition of Bournville in England, Hershey in Pennsylvania, and even Montezuma's ancient Aztec capital, the city of Yamoussoukro is a monument to paternalism, megalomania and chocolate. But unlike those other places, Yamoussoukro has little to do with the people who live there. All important government buildings are on the outskirts of town; the president's monument to himself is off limits to the public; the alligator lake is smothered with tangled water vines; the highways lead nowhere useful. Sunday mass at the basilica is presided over by middle-aged white priests from France who give communion to the few hundred faithful scattered among the pews who bother to make the trip out into the woods. But then, chocolate has nothing to do with Ivorian lives, either. Nor does the history of how their country came to be called Côte d'Ivoire or how it came to be the largest single producer of cocoa beans in the world.

Félix Houphouët was born to a prominent family of landowners in 1905—a year after France had declared Côte d'Ivoire a part of its West African colonies. Houphouët trained as a doctor, but though he was able to work as an assistant, or auxiliary as the position was called, he could never be a full-fledged licenced practitioner in the French colony as an African. In the 1930s, he gave up medicine to work on his father's cocoa farm. Enjoying the privileges of his established family, part of the influential Baoulé clan, he became chief of his home district and quickly came up against the colonial authorities.

In 1885, the continent of Africa had been divvied up among the European empires at a conference held in Berlin. King Leopold's enterprises in Congo had unleashed a frenzied rush for ownership of the resource-rich “dark” continent. German chancellor Otto von Bismarck called the European powers together to discuss how they could share ownership of Africa in an orderly, gentlemanly fashion, avoiding the messy conflicts usually associated with competing interests. Bismarck wanted clear-cut rules and good manners to prevail. Britain laid claim to the Gold Coast and Nigeria in West Africa, plus large swathes of territory from Cairo to Cape Town. France grabbed the rest of West Africa, from Algeria to Côte d'Ivoire, or Ivory Coast (named after the commodity of most interest to colonial merchants). Belgium's King Leopold already had Congo; Germany, Portugal and Italy gobbled up whatever remained.

The artificial borders established at the Berlin Conference defined territories according to imperial interests, but they also divided kingdoms and millennia-old connections between regions and the diverse populations of Africa. Tribes could find half their members under one colonial administration, half under another. Even relatives could be ruled by different European governments. No regard was given to the effect these arbitrary divisions would have on native people. The rationale of empire was subordination of lesser places and peoples to the needs of the colonial masters.

West Africans didn't make things easy for the French colonials. Côte d'Ivoire resisted occupation for years, delaying France's plans for resource extraction. As a result, for much of the first half of the twentieth century, France was playing catch-up with her competitors, chief among which were British interests in the Gold Coast and Nigeria. Great Britain also had the advantage of better port facilities on the Gulf of Guinea.

Though both the French and the British seemed to understand little about the growing conditions of their territories, the
skill of African farmers, coupled with the enterprise of colonial merchant houses, as well as the exploding demand for tropical products, were making the West African countries along the Gulf of Guinea among the most valuable of the African colonies. In the decades after 1920, crop exports from the Gold Coast and Nigeria increased nine hundred per cent; those of French West Africa grew by well over a thousand per cent.

France was mainly interested in cocoa and coffee from Côte d'Ivoire, but the French came smack up against the old problem of labour. For reasons the colonial barons could never quite grasp, Africans did not want to work for them, especially without compensation. The solution was an old one as well. The French introduced laws that forced Africans to toil on their cocoa plantations. France imposed a poll tax on all its colonial subjects, one that could be paid only in French currency, and the only way to earn the currency was to work for the French.

Ivorian farmers, such as Houphouët's family, grew their own cocoa, but they had to compete with French colonial landowners for access to hired farm labourers. Migrant workers, the backbone of cocoa farm productivity, were available first, and often exclusively, to the French. If that wasn't enough of a competitive advantage over the homegrown venture, the French instituted a two-tier price structure that gave more money per pound to French-produced beans than to African ones.

Félix Houphouët might have lived out his life in obscurity as a modestly successful farmer in colonial Africa if he hadn't been spurred into politics by these discriminatory French policies. In 1944, he launched the Syndicat Agricole Africain (African Farmers Union), a rather elitist organization of indigenous landowners who wanted access to the same recruited manpower. He was supported by the African governor of the region, who was seeking a better deal for African cocoa and coffee producers and who also wanted limits to the political influence of a number of racist colonists (many of whom were pro-Vichy fascists).

When France resisted the union and continued to favour French farmers, the Syndicat Agricole Africain (SAA) attacked the farm-conscription policies implemented by the French to coerce Africans into working their plantations. In later years, the union would be celebrated for liberating West Africans from forced labour, though that had hardly been Houphouët's original intention.

Europeans had many theories about how best to “manage” their colonial populations, all reflecting their credo that imperialism was a kind of moral crusade. The British pontificated on the “White Man's Burden,” the French on
la mission civilisatrice
and the Germans on
Kultur
—all of which were about bringing civilization and enlightenment to people who were considered semi-formed and living in darkness. No matter how noble-sounding the mission, the colonists were profoundly bigoted both in theory and practice, even as they were under pressure, by human rights activists of their time, to reform.

To demonstrate its post-war enlightenment, France allowed its first colonial election in 1945: fourteen African candidates vied for one seat in the French Constituent Assembly. With support from the SAA and his Baoulé tribesmen, Félix Houphouët-Boigny (he added Boigny to his name when he entered politics; in the native language it means “irresistible force”) was successful, and he became a sitting member of the French Parliament.

In Paris, Houphouët-Boigny aligned with the French left, and in particular the French Communist Party, which supported his call for the emancipation of Africans. Houphouët-Boigny's Parti Démocratique de la Côte d'Ivoire (PDCI) was progressive in a number of areas wildly popular with Africans: it called for rights to full citizenship, plus access to health care, education, roads and farm modernization. Running in elections in the late 1940s, the PDCI received unprecedented public support—Houphouët-Boigny won his first election for the French assembly in 1945 with fifty per cent of the popular vote; he won re-election with
ninety-eight per cent—and began to use its power and influence to harass the colonial government.

Economic conditions in Africa spiralled down in the post-Second World War period as the empires channelled all resources into rebuilding their own countries. Wartime wage and price controls were lifted, and the price of commodities from Africa plummeted. By then the system was stacked against primary producers anyway. Brokers in London and New York had perfected their techniques for manipulating supply and demand. Prices bottomed out, to their own advantage and to that of their buyers—the chocolate companies. At the base of the cocoa chain, African farmers were earning less and less for their beans while paying ever-increasing prices for the pesticides and herbicides required for the European-imposed farming techniques.

In 1949, the PDCI finally provoked Ivorians to take to the streets to protest deteriorating economic conditions. Colonial empires, including France, had been forced to fight intransigent tribes in the early decades of settlement, but popular civilian demonstrations of this size were unheard of and a threat to colonial authority. French troops put down the insurgencies with brutal force, killing an unknown number of protesters (the official count was fifty-two) and arresting as many as three thousand—though Houphouët-Boigny used his diplomatic immunity as a member of the French assembly to escape incarceration. Houphouët-Boigny's party and his personal strength only became stronger.

As word travelled in Africa, Houphouët-Boigny's support base broadened from his own tribe and region to include a wide cross-section of Ivorians of all ethnicities and then to include other French colonies. The farmer's union—the SAA—was developing into a pan-West-African rally and was threatening French hegemony throughout West Africa. France fought Houphouët-Boigny both in the street and at the ballot box, giving wide financial and
political support to selected opposition parties and making it legally impossible for those without colonial support to organize.

Houphouët-Boigny was not by nature a revolutionary but rather a businessman. He enjoyed power, and he wasn't about to move his PDCI party underground. He also feared that France would do less, not more, to help develop Côte d'Ivoire if the militancy continued. In 1950 he made a pragmatic tactical manoeuvre—a complete political U-turn from radicalism to moderation. He renounced all connections to the French Communist Party (he claimed the link had never existed in the first place) and made it clear that his intentions were to work closely with the colonial administration. He put forward his policy plainly: “A new page has been turned. On it, let us write a resolution to make Africa the most splendid and the most loyal territory in the French union.”

Houphouët-Boigny's deference to Paris paid large dividends. Côte d'Ivoire received preferential treatment in the French colonies, with protected markets for its cocoa and coffee and access to large amounts of French aid. By 1956, Houphouët-Boigny had managed to become the first African to hold a ministerial portfolio in the French government. While many of his supporters considered him a sellout, Houphouët-Boigny—the “irresistible force”—saw himself as the champion of his people. His close ties to the French administration meant that European businessmen went to Côte d'Ivoire to court his patronage, and he soon became the darling of the colonial merchant class.