At my Abidjan hotel in January 2000, Pascal was keen to reassure me that his country was not spiralling towards conflict. ‘We are not like our neighbours. As Ivorians, we are proud that we are a stable country. We have many problems, but we shall never be like them.’
At the time, Abidjan, the commercial capital of Ivory Coast, was a nervous city. Three weeks before, on 24 December 1999, soldiers loyal to General Robert Guei had deposed the president, Henri Konan Bedie, in a coup d’êtât.
Nevertheless, Abidjan seemed peaceful enough. The risk of violence came from poverty-driven crime in Treichville or Adjame: two suburbs separated by Le Plateau, a startling edifice of skyscrapers and conspicuous wealth, and the centre of business for the world’s largest cocoa producer. Such threats as there were to the city’s stability lay less in military conflict than in the perennial issue of deprivation amid pockets of relative plenty.
For decades, Ivory Coast had been a magnet for economic migrants from across West Africa, drawn by abundant employment opportunities and a climate of relative tolerance. Many of the country’s inhabitants came originally from Liberia, Mali, Burkina Faso and Ghana, and had lived in Ivory Coast for generations, considering themselves proud citizens of what had become their country. They formed the backbone of Ivory Coast’s agricultural workforce.
But in the 1990s, falling world cocoa prices and currency devaluations cast a shadow over the Ivorian economy. In this climate Bedie, who’d come to power in 1993, had put the demonisation of northerners and foreigners—he made little distinction between the two—at the centre of government policy. Known as ‘ivorité’, the policy openly favoured those residents who could claim a ‘pure’ Ivorian heritage—defined as having two ‘purely’ Ivorian parents.
In a country where up to 35 per cent of the population claimed an immigrant heritage, such policies were hugely divisive. It became commonplace to speak of an Ivory Coast divided between the largely Muslim north and Christian south.
Bedie’s rule was widely viewed with unease, as a distasteful echo of the xenophobia that had destroyed so many of Ivory Coast’s neighbours.
Thus the December 1999 coup—Ivory Coast’s first—was viewed as a worrying sign, but rationalised as a necessary corrective measure. Three weeks later, things had settled down, soldiers were nowhere to be seen and the upheaval caused by the coup was experienced only in highly localised areas. The remainder of the country remained calm.
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