A geographic region on the west African coast and since 1960 an independent republic, Côte d’Ivoire.
The Portuguese named the Ivory Coast in the fifteenth century because of the enormous amounts of ivory used in the area. Like many other European explorers of the fifteenth century, the Portuguese were fascinated by the supposed wealth of Africa. Other European marine forces followed the Portuguese in the search for the treasures of Africa.
This Eurocentric name concentrates on the main export of the region and remained the name of the French colony and later of the independent state of Côte d’Ivoire. Similarly, other regions in West Africa were named “Gold Coast” (the area that consists of contemporary Ghana and was also the British colonial name of the region), “Slave Coast” (an area that includes parts of modern-day Nigeria, as well as Benin and Togo), and “Grain Coast” (contemporary Liberia). Indeed, trade relations with coastal West Africa were set early in the fifteenth century by the Portuguese, and revolved around gold, ivory, and spices. However, from the sixteenth century onward, the chief demand was for slaves.
The area of the Ivory Coast was inhabited by different groups, some of which (notably the Mandé, the Kru, and the Akan) wandered to the area—which was outside the influence of the medieval Mali and Ashanti kingdoms—in search of gold and cola nuts for the trans-Saharan trade, as early as the sixteenth century.
Kingdoms
Monarchical structures of regimes began to appear by the mid-eighteenth century. Five prominent kingdoms dominated the area of the Ivory Coast. Four kingdoms were founded by Akans: Abron, Baulé, and the Anyi kingdoms of Indénié and Sanwi. The Jola and the Senufo established another kingdom: the Kong kingdom.
The kingdoms’ economies were based mainly on agriculture (among the products were maize, plantains, bananas, pineapples, limes, pepper, and cotton), but they also maintained trade relations northward, considering themselves the southernmost outreach of the Saharan trade. Unlike major centers of trade, the kingdoms were isolated from influences of northern cultures. However, to the north of the kingdoms, the Hausa converted to Islam as early as the fourteenth or fifteenth century (when Bontuku was supposedly founded), as a result of their connections with the Muslim empires of Sokoto (and earlier, with Timbuktu). The internal parts of the Ivory Coast region were a link between the trade in the Sokoto and Timbuktu areas and the internal, southern kingdoms, especially in cola nuts, but also in gold and other commodities.
Until a late 1999 coup, Côte d’Ivoire was West Africa’s most stable and prosperous country, as revealed in this busy 1959 market scene in Agboville. It remains the world’s largest exporter of cocoa. (Library of Congress/Photo Information, Ivory Coast)
The geography of the region of the kingdoms to the south consisted mainly of the dense woods and a treacherous coastline. Consequently, contact with the Europeans before the nineteenth century was also sporadic. In 1687, the French established a mission and a trade station in Assinie, which was the first European settlement in the region. During the seventeenth century, the French traded guns and other goods for gold and ivory. The trade in ivory proved itself profitable. However, the demand for ivory was so high that the population of elephants in the region was decimated and, with it, the trade in ivory.
By the eighteenth century, the French abandoned the outpost in Assinie. Trade in ivory was almost extinguished by the eighteenth century. For the French, the conditions on the coast, including endemic yellow fever in their settlements, prevented the foundation of a permanent settlement, and a decision to desert Assinie was made in 1704, while Grand Bassam was deserted in 1707. As a result, the Ivory Coast was little affected by the flourishing slave trade of the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries.
It was only after the slave trade became illegal, in the mid-nineteenth century, that the French decided to colonize Côte d’Ivoire. In 1842, the French signed a treaty with a few coastal groups, which enabled them to control Assinie and Grand Bassam. During the 1850s and 1860s, the French assumed to sign trade treaties with local leaders, sometimes by coercion or deceit, which ensured the French control on the posts and provided for trade privileges, in return for annual payments to the local rulers of the coast area. Despite their unwillingness to adhere to the agreements, the French maintained them to strengthen their control on West Africa, because of the rivalry with the British for control of the region. However, after the Franco-Prussian War (1871), the bankrupted France gave a European merchant, Arthur Verdier, control over the area of Grand Bassam, in the hope of maintaining future control of the area.
The success of economic activity along the coast motivated European interest in the interior, especially along the Niger and the Senegal Rivers. In the case of France, private individuals, like Verdier, were central to the trend and made independent policy decisions without direct intervention from Paris. While expanding his businesses on the coastline, Verdier sent a delegation to explore the Niger River basin in 1887. The French government sent a similar delegation to the interior the same year. The two delegations successfully negotiated treaties (separately) with the dominant groups in the interior and in 1889 joined forces and declared the southern region a French protectorate.
Colonization
In 1893, Côte d’Ivoire was declared a French colony, and the political system was changed from a loose system of administration on different kingdoms into a firmer, authoritarian style of regime. The French encountered difficulties in promoting their sovereignty, because of uprisings by the local population, especially the Boule.
During the second half of the nineteenth cen tury, the settlements developed into small towns: Grand Bassam on the coast, Assinie in the east, and Grand Lahou, Sassandra and Tabu in the west. Grand Bassam in particular became the trade center of the colony, as well as the seat of the administration and judiciary. Modest means of transportation (a train) and dockland were built.
In 1908, the French turned Grand Bassam into the main post of the colony. Abidjan, the present capital of Côte d’Ivoire (in the vicinity of Port Bouet, or Little Bassam), became the starting place for the trains heading for the rail to the palm oil and rubber-producing regions. Rubber and mahogany were exported from the colony, mostly to England. Further investment in the infrastructure was carried out after World War I.
Another main development was economic. By the end of the nineteenth century, the West African export transformed from a system based on slaves to one based on agricultural produce and minerals. The French designated Côte d’Ivoire (along with several other colonies) to provide France with cash crops. In the Ivory Coast, the beginning of the economic transformation was marked by the beginning of the cultivation of coffee (1909) and cocoa (1912), which would later become the chief export product of Côte d’Ivoire. Like the gold mines, coffee plantations were maintained under European control through concessions and merchandise sold to European elements.
In 1932, France united two colonies—Côte d’Ivoire and its northern neighbor, the colony of “Upper Volta” (today the independent republic of Burkina Faso). After World War II, infrastructure and economy developed further, making the colony the most profitable for the French in West Africa. The territory was made part of the French Union in 1946. The northern border of the colony remained unsettled until the French established it in 1947 and separated Upper Volta from Côte d’Ivoire. In 1958, residents of Côte d’Ivoire voted to become an independent republic within the French Community (an organization that links France and its former colonies and which replaced the French Union).
However, while maintaining their control over the population, the French colonial labor policies, and the discrimination of local farmers in favor of European settlers, created bitterness and aggravated the natives, especially small-scale plantation cultivators. A movement for the abolition of colonial labor recruitment policies, the African Agricultural Union, was founded in 1944, and it gradually became an anticolonial movement, although its original goals were to improve conditions under the colonial framework.
The African Agricultural Union transformed itself into the Democratic Party of Côte d’Ivoire. Since those who constituted the founders of the party—the cultivators—have had an interest in maintaining good economic relations with France, even after Côte d’Ivoire was granted independence in 1960, its economy was still very much linked to that of France. Western coffee and cacao conglomerates upheld their control over the country’s economy, which became dependent on global prices for the two commodities. The independent Republic of Côte d’Ivoire, under the au tocratic leadership of Félix Houphouët-Boigny, began its first steps as one of the richest nations in postindependent sub-Saharan Africa. However, much of the wealth remained in the hands of a relatively small elite group of small bourgeoisie and cultivators, and the administration is plagued with corruption.
Tamar Gablinger
See also: Cacao; Coffee; Slavery.
Bibliography
Ajayi, J.F. Ade, and Michael Crowder, eds. History of West Africa. Vol. 2. New York: Columbia University Press, 1974.
Hopkins, A.G. An Economic History of West Africa. New York: Columbia University Press, 1973.
Lynn, Martin. Commerce and Economic Change in West Africa: The Palm Oil Trade in the Nineteenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.
Zartman, I. William, and Christopher Delgado, eds. The Political Economy of Ivory Coast. New York: Praeger, 1984.
Zolberg, Aristide R. One-Party Government in the Ivory Coast. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1964.