Bitter Chocolate (17 page)

On August 7, 1960, Côte d'Ivoire became an independent nation, with Félix Houphouët-Boigny as its first president. Since the PDCI was willing to work closely with its former colonial master, France helped to ensure that there was no political opposition to the party during elections. The new constitution gave complete executive power to the president.

In order to appear representative, and to placate those who might cause him grief, Houphouët-Boigny included opposition
members and youth-wing agitators in his government. But window dressing notwithstanding, Côte d'Ivoire would be run more or less as a dictatorship under Houphouët-Boigny, with no free press, no opposition parties and no democracy. What the people got in exchange was the strongest economy in sub-Saharan Africa—what came to be called the African miracle. In Houphouët-Boigny's own words, “We must get down to work on the basis of discipline, which I hope will be freely accepted: but I will impose it if necessary because our country must succeed.”

Le Vieux was an autocrat with a vision. He literally put Côte d'Ivoire to work, encouraging rural people to convert all available land to grow crops, both for cash and for food. Virgin rainforests metamorphosed into cocoa farms overnight. He invited people from other West African countries to come and open up new territory—to make Côte d'Ivoire rich. In 1965, five years after independence, half of the labour force was classified by a government survey as made up of “foreigners.”

Few Ivorians objected to these outsiders being included in their miracle. The foreigners came from Mali, Upper Volta (later Burkina Faso) and Guinea, where crop failure and the encroaching Sahara Desert made them desperate for work. They were more than willing to do the hard toil while Ivorians moved to the cities to take advantage of more education and to seek employment as the clerks and petty bureaucrats serving the much more influential group of “foreigners” in the country—the French.

Unlike the situation in most of colonial Africa, French citizens came to live in Côte d'Ivoire by the tens of thousands, building luxurious neighbourhoods for themselves, complete with shopping areas where all the goods of Paris were available. They enjoyed the sprawling coastline of the Gulf of Guinea, with its glorious beaches, where they built themselves resorts staffed by young blacks eager to find wage-earning jobs.

The government's 1965 survey shows that eighty-five per cent of all managers in the country and eighty-one per cent of senior staff
were Europeans, while Ivorians filled almost the same per centage of junior clerical jobs. If Ivorians demonstrated any unhappiness with the imbalance of opportunities, the Houphouët-Boigny government quickly suppressed it. Preventative detention and deportation were common tools of the state. Freedom of speech was tolerated only when it was in support of the party.

France loved the economic liberalism of its former colony, coupled with its iron-fisted leadership. Houphouët-Boigny was rewarded with guaranteed markets and low-interest loans from European banks. This was the kind of post-colonial African Europeans and Americans longed for: an administrator who was firm with his own people but open to outside investment. Houphouët-Boigny became senior statesman more for the Europeans than for Africans (he maintained strong relations with the apartheid government of South Africa). He wore three-piece suits and a perpetual look of Zen-like serenity on his fleshy face, though a little furrow on his brow suggested a man always concerned with large matters of state. But he didn't neglect his people. The consummate benevolent dictator, he was rewarded by the obedience of his citizens and the generous support of his former adversary, the government of France. It was truly a miracle, entirely built on the world's endless appetite for chocolate.

Cocoa wasn't just an export crop. For its founding father, cocoa
was
Côte d'Ivoire. The backbone of Houphouët-Boigny's party was formed by rural cocoa growers and traders. Baoulé tribesmen still dominated the old cocoa-producing areas where Houphouët-Boigny was raised, but outsiders were opening up new frontiers throughout Côte d'Ivoire. In the countryside, a network of mostly Dioula people—Muslims from northern Côte d'Ivoire or the bordering states of Mali and Upper Volta—were the party bosses in each region, appointed by Houphouët-Boigny. While it was resented by some, especially Houphouët-Boigny's own Baoulé tribesmen, Le Vieux's patronage of the Dioula was shrewd. They were the most able cocoa farmers in Côte d'Ivoire,
and they had access to the itinerant labour from their home countries that was so necessary to the success of cocoa production. In addition, the Dioula shared a common religion with Muslim cocoa merchants and middlemen, increasingly French-speaking Arabic business tycoons from Algeria and Lebanon.

Houphouët-Boigny created a fixed price for cocoa beans, giving farmers a guaranteed income even when the market price was low. The state borrowed from European banks to make up the difference. Rural communities had purchasing power for the first time, and Le Vieux's most loyal and devoted followers were in the countryside. Even if France was still, essentially, running the show and Frenchmen had all the best jobs, this was the best country in Africa for its citizens. There was ample food and virtually no malnutrition.

Côte d'Ivoire was already well on its way to becoming the world's leading cocoa producer even before fires devastated much of the farming district of Ghana in the 1980s. It now took the lead, following in the steps of Mexico, Venezuela, the Portuguese islands and the Gold Coast. Le Vieux was determined to surrender that number one status to no country.

The great eighteenth-century thinker and writer Alexis de Tocqueville identified a volatile social phenomenon that came to be called the theory of rising expectations. Among its tenets is the idea that improved living conditions sharpen the appetite for more improvements delivered faster. People are rarely satisfied with the pace or the extent of progress. Such was the case with Houphouët-Boigny's economic miracle. Côte d'Ivoire's gross national product doubled within a decade of independence, but people wanted more, faster. Even dictatorships require a certain level of satisfaction among the oppressed, and Houphouët-Boigny's economic success depended on a motivated and contented society. Ivorians had full bellies, but they wanted better lifestyles. They resented the Dioula, who controlled the land in the regions, and they hated the French, who ran the commercial affairs of all their cities.

Houphouët-Boigny's miracle was already something of a mirage. He was subsidizing the price of cocoa beans and attempting to win the hearts and minds of his citizens with massive public works projects, many of them laudable, some laughable, but all of them built with borrowed money. New roads, bridges and telecommunications systems made a modern state out of a colonial backwater. A small coastal fishing village—a swamp, really—called San Pedro was transformed when Houphouët-Boigny decided to turn it into one of the largest, deepest ports on the West African coast, almost exclusively for the purpose of shipping cocoa to the world. Before-and-after photos are astonishing: construction workers completely remade the coastal landscape, building a bustling commercial centre from a cluster of mud huts. Transport ships from Holland, France and America soon lined the harbour, ready to carry away millions of tons of beans to chocolate lovers everywhere. But the cost of the port created massive public debt.

Among Houphouët-Boigny's wackier projects was the Hôtel Ivoire. Built in the principal Ivorian city of Abidjan, the hotel became one of the ritziest operations in post-colonial Africa, a miniature city on the side of a lagoon. The hotel's casino and multiple restaurants, swimming pools and shopping plazas were for the exclusive use of Europeans (lest Ivorians became corrupted). There was even a
patinoire
, which Houphouët-Boigny boasted was Africa's only ice-skating rink. But the cost of keeping the ice frozen in a place where the temperature rarely dips below thirty degrees centigrade, and where the humidity is often eighty per cent, seemed the height of folly.

Abidjan itself became one of the most remarkable cities in the developing world, with bold modern buildings poking the African sky with their asymmetrical shapes and guzzling electricity to keep the hermetically sealed offices cool. The price of cocoa on the international market was on a constant roller coaster ride—all too often on the downslide—but it was the government,
not the farmers, who absorbed the losses. Côte d'Ivoire was deeply in debt long before Houphouët-Boigny began to build his final monument to himself, the basilica.

As cocoa and coffee prices nosedived in the late 1980s, Houphouët-Boigny was desperate to increase the value of his beans. Because Côte d'Ivoire was the biggest single cocoa exporter in the world, Le Vieux was deluded, as others had been before him, into thinking he actually had power in the marketplace. The world of commodities had changed drastically in a few decades, and a small country could exert very little influence on markets. World market prices were determined by commodities brokers who never saw a bean in their entire lives, along with a few powerful multinational corporations who had their own tactically managed stockpiles.

Houphouët-Boigny tried his best to manipulate the international cocoa trade but commodities investors and big cocoa companies seemed to have all the influence over the market. Finally, in 1987, the African miracle maker made his most desperate bid yet to save what was left of his country's wealth. He declared Côte d'Ivoire insolvent, unable to pay its massive debts—now totalling US$4.5 billion—and reneged on his debt repayment schedule. At the same time, Houphouët-Boigny blocked all shipments of his cocoa to international markets, a boycott he managed to sustain for two years. He literally shut down the economy of his country, and its government offices ceased to function. As documented in a bestselling book published in France in the 1980s,
La guerre du cacao: Histoire secrète d'un embargo
, the president launched a virtual cocoa war: Le Vieux against the giant multinational chocolate companies and the banks. In his final salvo, the president secretly secured a large grant from his former colonial masters in Paris in exchange for contracts awarding all of Côte d'Ivoire's beans to two giant French companies. It was high-stakes poker played with some of the most skilled gamblers on the planet.

It was the French media that exposed the secret arrangement, and the deal subsequently collapsed. With only one commodity propping up his entire economic miracle, Houphouët-Boigny's wager bankrupted the country even further. Farmers weren't paid, prices soared, local businesses withered. It was a total failure for Houphouët-Boigny and a complete victory for multinational cocoa companies, who had proven that even the biggest cocoa-producing country in the world couldn't push them around. What's more, the banks moved in on Le Vieux to make sure there would be no more reneging on payments. They had a new weapon to use on difficult countries such as Côte d'Ivoire.

It is generally accepted that the Bretton Woods delegates in July 1944 honestly intended the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to become benevolent forces in the post-war universe. It was a time of high optimism, an opportunity for men of vision and determination to create structures that would prevent a recurrence of the political and economic chaos of the preceding decades. Today, after more than a half-century of experience, benevolence is not a word that springs easily to the lips of clients of these two international financial institutions. Bullying and manipulative policies in the developing world have left a wake of disillusionment and bitterness, along with real economic hardship. The currents of anger run particularly deep in Côte d'Ivoire.

By the late 1980s, the World Bank and the IMF had evolved into the most powerful international institutions in history as they increasingly came under the sway of neo-liberal American monetary and foreign policy, devised in Washington D.C. and, often derisively, labelled “the Washington consensus.” Driven largely by the ideological vision of U.S. President Ronald Reagan and his economic advisors, and that of his political soulmate,
British prime minister Margaret Thatcher, the two institutions became instruments of a hard-line movement to impose rigid capitalist and monetarist policies on floundering Third-World economies—of which there were many, thanks to the mismanagement and corruption of autocratic indigenous leadership.

That the fiscal policies and economic programs imposed on client states were generally more beneficial to banks, treasuries and corporate officers of the developed world only deepened an already widespread cynicism in the struggling nations of Asia, Latin America and Africa. The IMF, and in particular the World Bank, whose leaders are chosen by Washington, were soon regarded as the henchmen of Reaganomics ideology. Liberalization was the buzzword of the day, driving the demand for an end to marketing boards, domestic regulatory agencies, protective tariffs, subsidies and any program that might compromise the “natural” dynamic of the global marketplace.