My accounting book, I held it and I placed it at the foot of the eternal. He alone knows what I got and what I gave.

FELIX HOUPHOUET-BOIGNY,
FORMER PRESIDENT OF CÔTE D’IVOIRE

ALL THIS USED to be mango farms and savannah until the big church came, mango farms on the edge of a smoky village that looked just like all the other villages in the tropical heart of Côte d’Ivoire. Women pounded yams or fried bananas with chilli oil. Men and children clambered among the trees, lopping off ripe cocoa pods and piling them into wicker baskets. Families rose with the sun and slept with the dying of the fire, and everywhere was infused with the smell of chocolate.

In the village of Yamoussoukro lived a Baoulé chief who owned enough cocoa-growing land to run his own plantations. The chief had a son who he named Felix, a cheerful and industrious child who dreamed of becoming a doctor, and who, with his parents’ wealth and his own academic ability, stood every chance of succeeding. But it is the church, the one that appeared in 1989 like a grotesque slab of Renaissance Rome crashing into the African bush, that tells us more about the man Felix would one day become.

Into Yamoussoukro came architects, builders, stonemasons and marble-cutters. Heavy machinery squeezed along the narrow jungle roads. Smoke and dust mushroomed into the sky, and the bemused farmers stood and watched as the new church began to take shape.

The building was thirty-five storeys high with room inside for four football pitches and enough space in its gardens to land a Boeing 747. Its main dome was modelled on that of St Peter’s Basilica in Vatican City.

The walkways are crumbling a little now, weeds poking through the stone, beggars sleeping against Corinthian columns, but once inside, you are transported to a cool Renaissance interior where light streams through the towering stained-glass windows in a confetti of lilac and blue. The scrape of chair-legs echoes around the marble columns and gilded arches as the congregation take their seats. There is enough room for 16,000 worshippers, though rarely more than a hundred attend. As they pray, they are lit by the building’s spectacular centrepiece. It is a stained-glass window larger and more exquisite than all the rest, a rendition of Christ entering Jerusalem. Kneeling at His feet among the apostles, hands raised above his head in prayer and touching Christ’s robes, is the former president of the country.

*

It was the late 1920s and Felix Houphouet was dressed in white cotton trousers and a starched Parisian shirt, riding a bicycle through Abidjan. He was wearing a necktie too, just like the French administrators, neatly knotted and tucked into his cream buttoned blazer. It was a fiercely hot day but Houphouet was in high spirits. He had recently graduated from medical school, not as a full doctor – that wasn’t possible for a native living under French rule – but an African one. It was a shade short of the real thing, but a rare achievement nonetheless.

Houphouet pedalled along the wide clay streets of Abidjan, past the pink-faced Europeans in their pith helmets, and the new art deco buildings with Renault motorcars parked outside their gates. Some viewed their presence as a foreign occupation, but Houphouet saw it as the arrival of order and investment. He was a fortunate beneficiary of colonialism, a young doctor in a young town, embarking on a promising career.

His route took him through the port, where shirtless men hauled sacks of cocoa and coffee onto European steamers. Côte d’Ivoire was fast becoming the jewel of French West Africa, and Abidjan, set on a palm-fringed lagoon overlooking the Atlantic, was set to become its capital. The town was bustling with French bureaucrats. Exports were booming. Paris was a guaranteed customer, and French francs were rolling into Abidjan.

While the masses were confined to a lifetime in agricultural labour, the French saw merit in allowing a small elite of Ivoirians to lead relatively privileged lives. Felix Houphouet’s family had been permitted to keep their cocoa plantations, and their hereditary status as chieftains. Houphouet himself had been sent to the most prestigious boarding school in the region. It was all part of the delicate balancing act: keeping the intellectuals and tribal leaders compliant, without allowing them so much freedom they might start questioning the colonial order.

The French recognized Houphouet’s academic potential early on, and gave him a place at the renowned William Ponty College in Senegal, an academic hothouse offering lessons in Romantic poetry, ancient Greek, music and art, all conducted in refined Parisian French. Its intake was limited to a few dozen students each year, handpicked from the children of landowners and chieftains living in the French possessions of West Africa. Its purpose was to provide clever assistants for the French administrators, binding them seamlessly into the system, as a bridge into the indigenous communities. But Ponty was too good at its job. Its list of graduates reads like an A to Z of the nationalist leaders who would later challenge French rule: Hamani Diori, first president of the Republic of Niger; Modibo Keita, firebrand anti-colonist and first president of Mali; Mamadou Dia, first prime minister of Senegal; Maurice Yameogo, first president of the Republic of Upper Volta. Felix Houphouet had joined exalted company.

The meeting he was on his way to, riding his bike through Abidjan that day, was at the main hospital. He had decided to organize an amicale for his fellow African medics, a trade union to protect their labour rights from the French. It was low-level stuff, nothing like the kind of resistance organized by his fellow alumni from Ponty. This was an organization devoted to mundane issues like hours and working conditions. But in the eyes of the French, it amounted to political activity which had to be stopped before it escalated. Houphouet was suddenly moved on, to a lesser hospital in a small provincial town.

Instead of enjoying the privileged circles of Abidjan intellectual society, Houphouet found himself shuttling between small, unsanitary bush-villages in the far west of the country, close to the Liberian border. He moved again, to a similar job in the cocoa forests of the west, becoming a peripatetic doctor, and encountering people from many of the sixty different Ivorian ethnic groups. They had met no one like him before. He taught villagers how to discard their excrement in sanitary boxes, and the importance of keeping drinking water separate from raw sewage. They became healthier when Houphouet was around, and the local chiefs came to know and respect him.

It was during this nomadic phase that he met a young woman with royal heritage and a bloodline that crossed ethnic lines, a useful social tool in such a diverse country. Her name was Kady Racine Sow, whose mother was a princess in the powerful Agni tribe, and father a Muslim from a prominent and wealthy Senegalese family. Houphouet and she were married in 1929 at her ancestral hometown of Abengourou, set among the cocoa forests close to the border with British Gold Coast. He settled down there, raised a family, and showed little interest in politics.

But as Houphouet worked more closely with the agricultural labourers of the cocoa farms, he began to see disturbing signs of French oppression.

As a result of the Cadbury trial two decades earlier, most leading chocolate manufacturers had moved their production away from São Tomé to avoid further allegations of slave labour. They had chosen to relocate in British Gold Coast, just a few miles from the border town where Houphouet was based. He was in an ideal position to observe the effect the cocoa industry was having. The streets of Abengourou were busy with Ivoirian cocoa workers night and day, gathering in groups to smuggle themselves across the border. Tens of thousands were leaving their homeland. When Houphouet enquired why, he uncovered a system of French labour he had previously been unaware of.

The cocoa workers passing through Abengourou were members of work gangs that had been formed by rounding up and kidnapping young men from their villages. The French had seen it as an exercise in filling vital agricultural jobs, but had ended up herding unwilling young men onto buses, and transporting them to cocoa farms in the tropical forests. Once there, they were held in camps and fed just enough to keep them labouring in harsh conditions for twelve hours a day. They were paid nothing; all they received in return was food and shelter. The men were not allowed to leave. Nevertheless, many had managed to escape the camps at night and join the exodus to Gold Coast.

It was a form of slavery, and the French didn’t even bother denying it. When confronted by other European powers, they responded dismissively: ‘The regime of forced labour is an established fact,’ reported the French newspapers. Many politicians had no intention of stopping it. The benefits of cheap cocoa and coffee in Paris were one of the perks of running an empire in Africa. Instead, they promised to ‘reduce its drawbacks as much as possible and to give it an educational role’.1

It should have been enough to stir the embryonic nationalists into action and mobilize Ivoirians into a coherent protest group. But there was no tradition of organized resistance. Before the Second World War most potential agitators – no more than a handful of intellectuals – believed in the supremacy of Western civilization, and drew the battle lines along narrow and often selfish lines. They sought a greater role for themselves in political decision-making rather than the overthrow of colonialism. To many of them, much of Africa’s heritage was primitive, and needed to be replaced with a modern, Western way of life. It was an attitude encouraged by the French, protecting them as it did from any organized dissent. The French rewarded loyal aspirants with évolué status, as the Belgians had done with Patrice Lumumba in Congo. In the strictly hierarchical French structure, évolué could never reach the same heights as a French colonial, but the privilege offered entry to administrative positions in government offices. One step beneath évolué was another title that could be earned, that of citizen. Usually French Africans were considered subjects, because the French thought them unsuitable to share citizenship with the authentic, indigenous French. But between the wars, those with appropriate qualifications – in practice just a handful of already-privileged individuals – could be elevated to the status. By 1921, Côte d’Ivoire had just 308 citizens, and by 1936 there were only 2,000 in the entire federation of French West Africa.

Houphouet was évolué and would have lived off the fruits of forced labour just as the French had. At first, he was hesitant to protest about how his countrymen were being exploited. He did pen a scathing article in an Ivoirian socialist newspaper in December 1932, which he boldly entitled ‘They have stolen too much from us’, but he was afraid of falling foul of the French administrators, and published under a nom de plume. When change came, it was not from inside Côte d’Ivoire at all, but from the capital of the empire itself.

In Paris, left-wing intellectuals had become enraged by news of forced labour in the colonies, and were more passionate about African empowerment than many Ivoirians themselves. Paris was hot-wired to events in its colonies in a way that London, Lisbon and Brussels were not. The political direction chosen by voters in France would quickly feed through to their two African federations: French Equatorial Africa, which comprised Gabon, French Congo, Chad, French Cameroon and Ubangi-Shari (now Central African Republic); and French West Africa, a larger group of territories that included Côte d’Ivoire, Upper Volta (now Burkina Faso), Senegal, French Guinea, French Sudan (now Mali), Mauritania and Niger. In May 1936 the left-wing ‘Popular Front’ swept to power in Paris. It was a tripartite alliance dominated by the increasingly popular French Communist Party (PCF), and soon its progressive principles worked their way through to both African federations. It was as if a button had been pressed in the Champs Élysées, and the lights had come on in Abidjan.

Colonial appointments had always been distributed among French political parties according to the balance of power within a government coalition. Now, reformist French officials flew in to replace the old. The Côte d’Ivoire novelist Bernard Dadié, a graduate of William Ponty College, described the impact of the Popular Front on the country:

Relationships between Europeans and Africans seemed to become more cordial, more human. Europeans and Africans stood side by side in all public gatherings, on May 1st at the Governor’s Ball, etc.

Where, previously, ethnic identities had been buried, and Ivoirians forced to assimilate themselves into French culture, now they were encouraged to go out and rediscover their tribal roots. There was an explosion of interest in heritage and African culture. The Ivoirian intellectuals who had been scattered around the country now saw a chance to set up interest groups in major towns, quickly merging them with others to form large regional societies. Some had thousands of supporters, and their leaders became influential figures with whom the French administrators would need to consult. Trade unions sprang up, rapidly covering every conceivable type of employment. People joined several societies simultaneously: ethnic, leisure, regional, city and trade.

Houphouet’s people, the Baoulé, formed one of the largest and most powerful groups: the Union Fraternelle des Originaires de Côte d’Ivoire, the Fraternal Union of Native Ivoirians. Competition for its leadership was strong, representing, as it did, a block vote of tens of thousands of people.

But it was a society of cocoa farmers that promised to dominate the charge for power, influence and prestige. Whoever led such a group would cut across all ethnicities, attracting support from hundreds of thousands involved in Côte d’Ivoire’s most important export. But there were squabbles among the chiefs about who should be in charge, and in the end the French stepped in and ran the cocoa union themselves.

*

In the dry season of 1939, Felix Houphouet was summoned to his ancestral home. His older brother had died, and he was to inherit the chieftainship, together with the family’s cocoa plantations. There he stood in his blazer and tie, hanky neatly folded in his breast pocket, tailored French waistcoat buttoned over his fine cotton shirt, about to embark on his new role as chef de canton, the chief of thirty-six villages. He was thirty-four years old, with four children and a quietly devoted wife. The future on offer was the peaceful, plentiful, family life of a plantation owner in the fertile Ivoirian tropics. But Houphouet saw there was something missing. The chieftainship was no longer a symbol of power and status. Fifty years of colonialism had reduced it to little more than an administrative role, helping the French collect taxes and recruit labour. He felt deprived, cheated of his inheritance. It was hardly oppression in the way his countrymen were experiencing, but it stirred a desire to wrest back from the French some degree of political control.

Before he could begin to apply himself to finding a role in one of the new societies, events in French Africa were overtaken by those 3,000 miles away in Europe: the outbreak of the Second World War.

On 22 June 1940, ten months after the war began, France was defeated and partitioned under the terms of the armistice at Compiegne. German forces occupied the north and west, including Paris. Italy took control of a small zone in the southeast, and the French retained just the south, the nominally Free Zone, headed by Marshal Philippe Pétain from his new capital, Vichy. The question now arose: who would control France’s many colonies around the world?

At the start, the job fell to the Vichy regime, and Pétain, a Nazi collaborator. The swing to the right in Vichy France was projected in enlarged form on Africa. Vichy colonial officials reinforced systems of near-slavery in its colonies that the Popular Front had been dismantling. Africans were now compelled to produce quotas of commodities like cocoa and coffee. They were forcibly removed from jobs in indigenously run plantations, and transported to European-owned farms instead. Houphouet struggled to find the labour necessary to keep his plantations afloat. More significantly, he and other members of the African elite had their privileges removed. They were no longer évolué or even citizens, but liable to be conscripted as common African subjects, working in labour gangs themselves.

All this had the effect of forcing the African elite to identify with the masses. The hierarchical system of which they had been part had gone, and so, too, had their respect for their colonizers. The French were no longer invincible.

At the same time, General Charles de Gaulle escaped to London and set up his Free France government-in-exile, to fight alongside the Allies. De Gaulle began expanding his army, the Free French Forces (FFF), and French West Africa became a major recruiting ground. The colonies were forced to choose sides, either fighting for Vichy France or for de Gaulle. On several occasions the two armies fought each other, African against African, proxy armies risking their lives for reasons that few of them could have understood. De Gaulle’s FFF took Gabon in the Battle of Libreville in November 1940, with the general personally overseeing the attack from French Cameroon and later travelling north to Chad, from where he hoped to launch attacks against the Italians occupying Libya. By the end of 1940, Free France had seized control of all French Equatorial Africa, and two years later it had French West Africa too, including Côte d’Ivoire. Once again, the spirit of liberal reform returned to the country, and Felix Houphouet seized the moment.

Along with seven other Ivoirian landowners he created an independent agricultural union. It was to be called the Syndicat Agricole Africain, the SAA, and it appealed for members across the country. The French reformist administrators thought the SAA so important that the new French governor himself sponsored the idea, and helped to launch it.

Tens of thousands flocked to join. Previously voiceless young men and women sensed the possibility of an end to forced labour. It was Houphouet’s good fortune that the agricultural lands of Côte d’Ivoire were concentrated around his home region, where the Baoulé people dominated. They became the dominant ethnicity among members of the SAA. As the only Baoulé on the list of candidates to be the union’s leader, it couldn’t have been a simpler exercise. Houphouet was a shoo-in.

In just two years, the SAA became the largest mass movement in Côte d’Ivoire. Houphouet was savouring the public adulation and his proximity to political power. By now, a series of land deals had made him the wealthiest indigenous cocoa grower in the country. His profile grew quickly, as he visited supporters and delivered speeches all over Côte d’Ivoire. His members’ list became so extensive that the French asked to use it as the basis for the country’s electoral register. The SAA had branches in every village, members in every farm. Felix Houphouet became the most well-known Ivoirian in the land. This newly created trade union with its novice leader was the embryonic stage of Côte d’Ivoire’s single-party authoritarian state.

THE FRENCH COLONY OF MIDDLE CONGO JANUARY 1944

There were people climbing trees, white-shirted men holding on as if they had been blown there by the warm equatorial winds. Others were leaning from windows or crowding on the grass slopes outside Brazzaville’s legislature, wheeling and waving as the troops marched by. French soldiers led the way in their pith helmets and khaki uniforms, Africans followed behind wearing traditional kufi hats, bayonets pointing proudly to the sky.

Charles de Gaulle had arrived for an historic conference. He saluted his troops, shook hands with rows of dignitaries and strolled confidently into the chamber. The leaders of Free France were indebted to the men and women from the colonies who had helped fight for liberation, and they had pledged a new deal for their possessions in Africa. The Brazzaville Conference was to start the process of limited self-governance. In each colony, there would be elections, with French and African citizens allowed to vote, but initially, only a small number of African subjects. It was no accident that the conference was opened with the firing of a gun.

The colonies would still be very much under French control, but Africans would have some say in their own affairs. Most significantly, Brazzaville agreed that each colony would elect a representative to serve as a delegate in the legislature in Paris. It was something the British and Belgians had never considered, and effectively made French colonies satellite constituencies. Houphouet knew exactly what he needed to do.

His first target was Abidjan city council. No one could run alone; they needed to submit a slate of candidates like a political party, consisting of nine citizens and nine subjects. Most of Houphouet’s rivals chose a mixture of Europeans and Ivoirians for their list. Others selected members of a single ethnic group. Houphouet decided that both approaches were doomed to failure. Instead, he called for whites to be banned from the election altogether, and submitted a list of candidates from several different ethnic backgrounds, a broad coalition of Côte d’Ivoire tribes and foreign Africans.

The Europeans withdrew in protest. Houphouet’s Ivoirian rivals realized that, by narrowly appealing to just a single ethnicity, they had miscalculated the public mood. Most of them withdrew too. It left Houphouet’s Bloc Africain almost alone in the field, and his party won with a landslide. But the real prize was up for grabs two months later, a seat in the National Constituent Assembly, the parliament in Paris that would draft the constitution for the new Fourth Republic.

France was in a state of post-war turmoil. One hundred and fifty thousand people had been detained on suspicion of collaborating with the Germans. Women who had taken German soldiers as lovers were shaved and paraded through the streets in front of jeering crowds. Some were set upon by lynch mobs. There was bitter debate about how to deal with the captured leaders of the Vichy government and the thousands of paid officials who had worked under German occupation: policemen, teachers, civil servants. De Gaulle, by now the embodiment of France, was responsible for imposing a centralized, unified state.

He headed a provisional government (GPRF), comprising an uneasy tripartite alliance between the French Communist Party (PCF), the French Section of the Workers International (SFIO) and the centre-right Popular Republic Movement (MRP), which was loyal to de Gaulle. But it was the PCF that had been steadily increasing in popularity and influence. During the war, communists had dominated the Resistance movement, organizing guerrilla groups and carrying out many daring political assassinations. Buoyed by its prominent role, the PCF had enjoyed a surge in membership, rising to more than a million in 1945. Initially, many of its supporters wanted to launch a revolution in France as soon as the Germans were defeated, but PCF leaders, on instruction from Stalin, chose to be part of the provisional government instead. De Gaulle was suspicious of them from the start and gave them only a very limited role. This was going to be an extremely bumpy ride.

It was de Gaulle’s job to transform the provisional government into one that was democratically elected. The elections of October 1945 would take place across the whole of the French empire, including French territories in Africa. In Côte d’Ivoire, Houphouet was busily preparing.

It was now that his earlier legwork in the SAA came into play. The agricultural union provided him with a ready-built electoral machine that reached into every household in the country. Agents of the SAA were effectively his campaigners, visiting remote villages with loudhailers and proclaiming Houphouet the candidate of unity. His entire adult life had been spent, inadvertently, acquiring connections for this very moment. His medical work in the bush had brought him influential supporters among the chiefs. He had the powerful Baoulé already won over. Then there were his wife’s people in the east and his Muslim father-in-law’s clan scattered throughout the country. Houphouet was almost miraculously well placed.

His chief rival, Tenga Ouedraogo, was from the north of the colony, Upper Volta, a region that had little in common with the south, and would eventually become an entirely separate country, Burkina Faso. That had the effect of unifying southerners behind Houphouet, rather than running the risk of being led by a man from a distant and unfamiliar place. There are photographs of Houphouet from the time, beaming and waving from the rooftops of various buildings, hundreds of shining faces staring up at this diminutive, articulate African, from their tin-roofed shacks. They had never seen anyone like him: an African in a white man’s suit, educated, eloquent, overflowing with confidence, and asking to be their voice among the white faces of the Paris legislature.

Nevertheless, the result was extremely close, the only vote in Houphouet’s life that was still in the balance until the moment the polls closed. After he failed to achieve fifty per cent in the first round, a second ballot was required. On 4 November 1945 came the announcement that Houphouet had won, with 50.7 per cent.

During the wild celebrations that followed, he decided to take a new name. ‘Felix Houphouet’ was not resonant enough. He needed something a little more flamboyant, more in keeping with his remarkable success. So he added ‘Boigny’, a word that, in his native language, means ‘battering ram’. Felix Houphouet-Boigny set off for Paris in November 1945, a moneyed but unworldly Ivoirian, plunged into a freshly liberated city. Edith Piaf was performing on the Champs Élysées, there was jazz, experimental theatre, and now Houphouet-Boigny was taking his seat among the men of empire. He was also entering a world of political instability, an assembly bandaged together by the need for unity, through which old wounds would soon start bleeding.

Victory in those elections had gone to the communists, with the PCF winning 26.1 per cent of the vote. They would rule in a tripartite alliance, together with the socialists and the MRP, all of whom agreed on de Gaulle as head of state. But the general’s distrust of the communists manifested itself again. He refused to give them any important government ministries, saying that he couldn’t work with politicians who were ultimately being run by Moscow. The alliance managed to stagger on for a further three months, but then de Gaulle dropped his bombshell. He resigned on 20 January 1946. France was plunged into a constitutional crisis.

This was Felix Houphoeut-Boigny’s introduction to the politics of the metropole. But he wasn’t going to be put off his stride. He had come to Paris with one purpose above all others. It was to become the stuff of folklore in Côte d’Ivoire. People still sing songs about it today.

While the French were effectively leaderless, and assembly members were trying desperately to draft a constitution, Houphouet-Boigny tabled a bill to abolish the use of forced labour in the colonies. It was supported by the communists and by the other African delegates, and in the febrile circumstances of the time neither a debate nor a vote was required. Instead it was rubber-stamped as a decree, and the ‘Houphouet-Boigny Law’ was passed.

The ecstatic celebrations that followed were not confined to Côte d’Ivoire. Forced labour had become a brutal fixture in other French territories too – in the rubber plantations of French Guinea, and the salt mines of Senegal – and now it was over, thanks to Felix the Battering Ram. He had eliminated the hated symbol of colonial rule, and, in doing so, created a legend around himself overnight. Other decrees granted at the same time brought about the abolition of the indigénat, the harsh system of arbitrary justice in the colonies, and also opened the way for the establishment of African political parties. But it was the Houphouet-Boigny Law of 3 April 1946 that earned the Ivoirian leader the gratitude that would sustain him in power over the next five decades. For many years, people in Côte d’Ivoire believed that if Houphouet-Boigny wasn’t returned to office, then the system of forced labour would return.

‘When politics began,’ explained one of his colleagues years later, ‘Houphouet said he would do everything to eliminate this barbarous practice. We didn’t know whether he could do it but he kept his word. Since then, I have followed him blindly and I shall continue to do so as long as he remains faithful to this principle.’2 That was fifteen years after Houphouet’s law was passed.

In Paris, the political turmoil continued. A first draft constitution was defeated in a national referendum. New elections were required, just seven months after the first, and Felix Houphouet-Boigny triumphed on a scale normally associated with absurd dictatorial fixing. On this occasion it appeared to be more or less genuine. Under the banner of his newly formed political party, Parti démocratique de la Côte d’Ivoire (PDCI), the man who had ended slavery managed to unite the whole country behind him, taking ninety-eight per cent of the vote. The fixing would come later.

A French constitution was finally agreed in October 1946, transforming the French empire into the more inclusive French Union. But immediately, Houphouet-Boigny and his fellow African delegates became concerned that a powerful lobby of French businessmen, the Marchés Coloniaux – a group of French merchants and landowners – were trying to arrest any further meaningful reform. Houphouet-Boigny could see that African delegates were still the poor relation, marginalized in the assembly, their voices hardly heard. He organized a conference in Bamako, French Sudan, to discuss how best to unify the myriad nationalist parties across French Africa. The aim was not to achieve independence – the majority didn’t feel they were ready for that – but to insist that their people received equal rights. The conference agreed on the creation of a huge anti-colonial, pan-African political movement that stretched across all French African possessions. Called the Rassemblement Démocratique Africain, the RDA, it became an umbrella organization, its members retaining their old political parties but operating under one name for the purpose of creating a unified block in the French assembly. This was an alarming move in the eyes of some French politicians, who saw the RDA as a dangerous nationalist group that might turn militant. At the helm was Felix Houphouet-Boigny. With the constitution now in place, there was one further set of elections, in November 1946, for seats in the first parliament of the Fourth Republic. Houphouet-Boigny stood under the RDA banner, and the party secured ten seats, enough to be taken seriously as a potential coalition partner in the heavily fragmented French chamber.

Nothing could be achieved in French politics without becoming part of an alliance. Positions on committees were awarded according to the size of each political group, and Houphouet-Boigny aligned his RDA with the only party prepared to support him, the French Communist Party. He could hardly have been more out of place. Here he was, a landowning capitalist and one of the wealthiest politicians in the chamber, sitting with representatives loyal to Stalin’s Cominform and the idea of proletarian dictatorship.

Houphouet-Boigny’s ambitions were now pinned on his ability to keep his head above water in the turbulent political currents. In May 1947, the tripartite alliance that had survived since the days of the provisional government finally collapsed. With the influence of the communists on the wane, the RDA needed new allies.

Freed from a marriage of convenience with the communists, Houphouet-Boigny was in his element, circulating among members of the assembly, schmoozing potential partners in the smartest Parisian restaurants and bars. He made a name for himself as a gifted deal-maker who could tease compromise from even then most obdurate of opponents. And then, in 1956, came the breakthrough.

As parties coalesced into workable blocks, Houphouet-Boigny forged an alliance with the small Democratic and Socialist Union of the Resistance (UDSR), a party with the same number of seats as his own, and led by the young François Mitterrand. The UDSR had, in turn, manoeuvred itself into partnership with the centre-left coalition of the Republican Front (RF), and the RF was the party of government. One month after the elections, in February 1956, Houphouet-Boigny was rewarded for his support by being made a government minister.

It was an astonishing achievement. Across the Atlantic in the United States, segregation was still very much in place, overtly in the South and more insidiously elsewhere. In Montgomery, Alabama, civil rights activist Rosa Parks had just been arrested for refusing to give up her bus seat to a white passenger, and here was Houphouet-Boigny helping to run a white colonial government. It was the highest office any African had achieved in France and he was still on the rise. He became minister of health, and a member of the French cabinet.

In neighbouring Gold Coast the British were watching with bewilderment. The nationalist leaders fighting for independence there had been treated as seditious criminals. Several had been in and out of jail for years. One was, of course, Kwame Nkrumah, who became the first prime minister of newly independent Ghana in March 1957, the year after Houphouet-Boigny had become a minister in Côte d’Ivoire. Nkrumah soon became something of a nationalist prophet, with a generation of leaders beating a path to his door, Robert Mugabe and Patrice Lumumba among them. But Houphouet-Boigny regarded him as a hot-headed Marxist who had achieved independence at breakneck speed.

Nkrumah decided to drop in on Houphouet-Boigny, on his first foreign trip as Ghanaian leader. We can imagine the two men, translators and advisors in tow, meeting in the Ivoirian’s hardwood study. Houphouet-Boigny, immaculate as ever, moderate in tone, always looking for agreement. Nkrumah, irascible, fiercely intelligent, never conceding an inch. Nkrumah believed political change was the priority – in Africa’s case, decolonization – and that economic prosperity would follow. Houphouet-Boigny argued that decolonization was unnecessary for now, that there were benefits to be had from French rule. He insisted a country should build its economy before going it alone.

The two men discussed the issues at length, and then rose from their chairs and agreed on a wager. Each bet that their country would be better off in ten years’ time than the other. ‘Let us undertake this experiment in absolute respect for the experiment of his neighbour,’ announced Houphouet-Boigny, ‘and in ten years’ time we shall compare the results.’3 The pair shook hands, and parted.

*

Houphouet-Boigny immersed himself in the Parisian high life. He was photographed beside his friend, the justice minister François Mitterrand, white silk scarf knotted flamboyantly, trilby in hand, footmen helping him with his heavy coat. There were cocktail parties, lavish meals, visits to the theatre. He purchased properties around the capital, and spent more time in France than at home. But the winds of change sweeping across British territories had also reached those of the French. Many were no longer content living under colonial rule, albeit with democratic tweaks. Only self-government would do – a complete break with Paris. When change came, it was through France’s most bloody colonial conflict.

By 1958 the French grip on its most promising source of oil – Algeria – was weakening, at the hands of the nationalist guerrillas of the FLN, the Front de Libération Nationale. Twenty-five thousand French soldiers had been killed. The death toll among Algerians was 900,000. International pressure to find a peaceful solution was intensifying, and the global consensus was that Paris must grant immediate independence. But France’s national assembly was in no state to make any decision, even with world leaders breathing down its neck. Without de Gaulle the whole chamber had become a political marketplace of fast deals and fleeting alliances that had left the country paralysed by indecision. Watching from Algiers, exhausted, short of supplies, and on the brink of defeat, French army commanders decided to take matters into their own hands.

On the night of 13 May 1958, a group of officers led by General Jacques Massu seized control of Algiers from their own French civilian governors, and announced that they were taking over the country until General de Gaulle came out of retirement to reclaim his presidency. If it didn’t happen, Massu warned, then he and his co-conspirators would employ ‘Operation Resurrection’, a military takeover of Paris. There was outrage in the metropole, and among the communists in particular. But the majority of French politicians saw no alternative.

By the end of the month, de Gaulle was back in control, and announced there was to be an important referendum on 28 September 1958. All French colonies in Afrique Noire – sub-Saharan Africa – would vote to decide on their future relationship with France. They could remain a partner under a watered-down French Community, a little like the British Commonwealth, or they could choose to break all ties and become independent. Houphouet-Boigny rushed back home to make sure his electorate didn’t embarrass him. There was only one choice and that was a ‘Oui’ vote. He wanted to stay as close to France as possible, and in order to ensure it happened, his authoritarian tendencies were about to surface for the first time.

Driven in an open-top car, through the humid streets of Abidjan, he arrived at a sports stadium to address a crowd of 40,000 people. Anyone planning to vote the wrong way in the referendum, he told them with great sweeping gestures, would be given twenty-four hours to leave the country. If they remained, they would be jailed. There were, he announced, plenty of examples in history where civilized countries had needed to do the same. America had rightly purged its communist troublemakers in the early 1950s. Russia had needed to silence its bourgeoisie.4

The vote never really looked in doubt, but the scale of the victory pointed to heavy rigging and intimidation. The ‘Oui’ vote was carried by 99.9 per cent. Out of an electorate of 1 million, only 225 people had voted against Houphouet-Boigny.

But world opinion was shifting irreversibly against colonialism. Eighteen months after the referendum, with the French all but defeated in Algeria, and European powers gradually handing back their possessions across Africa, the momentum had moved decisively towards decolonization. The sun was setting on French Africa, whether Houphouet-Boigny liked it or not. De Gaulle travelled around his colonies in 1960, lowering the tricolour and renouncing French sovereignty. If it were any consolation to Houphouet-Boigny, he was in a strong position to win the planned presidential election and become the first leader of the newly independent Republic of Côte d’Ivoire. He didn’t want to take any chances, though, and insisted he must stand unopposed.

A few weeks later, the presidency secured, he gave French reporters a tour of his plantations and the swamps where he fed crocodiles around his vast acreage of land, and reminded them that he wanted to be regarded as a man of the people. ‘Posterity is not consecrating me as the first president of Côte d’Ivoire,’ he told them with a smile, ‘it is consecrating me as the first peasant of Côte d’Ivoire.’5

*

All the villages had brass bands. That’s what struck them, that these remote communities in Côte d’Ivoire had bands, marching bands like British mining towns, with polished instruments and crisp white shirts and proud musicians puffing their cheeks. Even the smallest village had its own, to parade at Easter and Whitsun and whenever else they got the chance. No matter how poor they were, they would save and invest in an instrument. Judith and Philip Chapman had recently arrived from Britain, along with a wave of French expats, and were welcomed by musicians and dancers at their modest rural home in Agboville, a town so isolated that a letter from England took six weeks to reach them.

At independence, most former African colonies saw an exodus of Europeans, but not Côte d’Ivoire. Not only did Houphouet-Boigny encourage French government officials to stay, thousands of newcomers flocked to France’s most successful former possession, lured by Houphouet-Boigny’s low taxes and business incentives. He wanted to maintain his ties with Europe wherever he could. The Chapmans saw their role as bringing enlightenment. They were Methodist missionaries.

Philip Chapman was a minister: tall, bespectacled, with an unexpected streak of mischief. As he settled into their modest new home, he was relieved to discover that some of the tankers that delivered water to outlying communities sometimes delivered wine too. On his way to a service, he would hear the haunting sound of band practice drifting through the forest, but the music was sometimes drowned out by the scream of chainsaws. In those early days, the French timber industry was hard at work bulldozing kilometre-long tracts of woodland. Houphouet-Boigny’s new administration quickly saw a business opportunity. No contract would be granted without passing through government officials first, and signatures cost money. In Congo and Zimbabwe the Ministry of Mines was the most sought-after department in government, because of the opportunities it presented in diamonds. In Côte d’Ivoire, the Ministry of Water and Forests was a favourite, with its officials overseeing timber production. But it still didn’t compare with the Ministry of Agriculture, the department that controlled the cocoa industry.

Philip Chapman’s church services were held in a simple hut with benches and gas lanterns, after which he would sit with a bowl of goat stew and breathe in the aroma of cocoa drying in the sun. ‘The smell of riches,’ the farmers would say, and for the first five years of independence it was just that. Côte d’Ivoire’s economy grew faster than any in tropical Africa: a remarkable 11.5 per cent a year. The growth rate was outstripping many in Europe. For a country without oil or diamonds, it was unheard of. The boom was down to a combination of good harvests, and well-organized farming, and was also reliant on strong world markets for cocoa and coffee. It was the start of what would become known as the ‘Ivoirian Miracle’. But there was hardly a moment for Houphouet-Boigny to enjoy it.

A pattern was establishing itself in post-independence Africa, and it involved violent upheaval and coups. In Congo, Patrice Lumumba had been abducted and murdered. In Togo the new prime minister had been assassinated. And now, in February 1966, his socialist neighbour in Ghana, Kwame Nkrumah, had been overthrown while he was abroad. It was hardly the way Houphouet-Boigny wanted to win his wager, but he allowed himself a moment of wry satisfaction, no doubt. The Ghanaian president never returned home, and chose to live in exile in Guinea Conakry, where he became so paranoid about assassination that he fled to Romania to live out his final days.

Now Houphouet-Boigny was worried there might be some in his own party who wanted rid of him. There seemed to be evidence stretching back before independence, when some communist-inspired members of his PDCI saw him as the imperialist’s chief lackey on the continent, an Ivoirian who had morphed into a Frenchman and was preventing the formation of a true nationalist movement. In 1959 Houphouet-Boigny had been at his family home in Yamoussoukro, enjoying the refined calm of his plantation house, when a terrified gardener entered holding the body of a dead black cat. He had discovered it buried in a shallow grave somewhere in the grounds with something sinister attached to its body. Around the animal’s head was tied a picture of Houphouet-Boigny, a cat in a human mask. It could only indicate one thing: an attempt to kill him using black magic.

Houphouet-Boigny spent some time making a meal of the whole episode, calling it the complot du chat noir, the plot of the black cat, and seeming to relish being at the centre of a sinister mystery. Then he changed tack and his mood darkened. He had found the culprit, he announced. It was his second-in-command in the PDCI, John-Baptiste Mockey, the party’s secretary general. Mockey stood in for Houphouet-Boigny when he was away, and now he was an assassin? The population pictured him lingering around the leader’s house with a dead animal, a spade and a box of magic potions. But the truth was less arcane.

Mockey was the most popular politician in the party: smart, charismatic and urbane. Houphouet-Boigny had been terrified he would mobilize his supporters on the communist wing of the movement and usurp him. The cat had provided a convenient excuse. As if to confirm as much, Mockey wasn’t put on trial, but banished to Israel to become ambassador. Three years later, he was invited back to Abidjan to head the Special Security Court, the body established specifically to put suspected coup-plotters on trial. The whole black cat business was apparently forgotten.

The possibility of a plot became a little more credible in April 1963.

Without warning, Houphouet-Boigny rounded up 200 alleged conspirators as they arrived in Yamoussoukro for a PDCI conference. Many of them were senior figures in the party: cabinet ministers, youth-wing officials, and some of his own personal aides. They represented a sizeable portion of the party hierarchy. The defendants were taken to the president’s compound and held incommunicado while an investigation was carried out. Eighty-six of them ended up being put on trial in front of a Special Security Court that was set up behind closed doors in Yamoussoukro. The plot had apparently been uncovered six months before, and was ideological in nature. It was said that the communist-inspired youth wing of the party had been planning to have Houphouet-Boigny arrested so that the PDCI could follow a Marxist–Leninist path.

The problem was that these stark political differences within the only legal party in the country, the PDCI, were never going to go away. It was all part of a healthy democratic debate, but this wasn’t a healthy democracy. Forty-four of the defendants were sentenced to hard labour for periods ranging from five to twenty years, seven to hard labour for life, and thirteen received the death penalty.

Four months later, in August 1963, there was another wave of arrests, relating to the same supposed plot. This time, Houphouet-Boigny alleged that the conspirators had been receiving outside help from the Ghanaian ambassador working on behalf of his Marxist president, Kwame Nkrumah. The suspects included six cabinet ministers and five founders of the PDCI who had also been serving on the security courts. Now they were hauled in front of their own former court officials as defendants. To add to the surreal nature of proceedings, the head of the court was John-Baptiste Mockey, fresh back from Israel. Nineteen jail sentences were handed down, and six death sentences.

In the end, none of the death sentences from either trial were carried out, making Houphouet-Boigny appear a magnanimous and forgiving leader. Many of the jail terms were commuted, and several of the defendants, old party militants who had been close to Houphouet-Boigny since the start of his career, were absolved on condition they make public confessions and apologize. It was an offer they all hastily accepted. Except for one. Ernest Boka wasn’t in any position to accept anything. He had died under mysterious circumstances in a cell in Houphouet-Boigny’s compound.

Boka was a well-known lawyer and former government minister who had been appointed president of Côte d’Ivoire’s Supreme Court by Houphouet-Boigny at the age of just thirty-five, but had resigned the year prior to his detention. He was suspected of having communist sympathies, and had been picked up during one of several sweeps connected to the alleged conspiracy, after which he had been kept in a cell in Yamoussoukro like the others. In April 1964, with the trials over and still no mention of Boka, it was announced that he had been found hanging from the ceiling of his cell.

Rumours quickly spread that Boka’s death was not suicide, but that he had been assassinated or died of ill-treatment. Houphouet-Boigny decided a swift rebuttal was required. He called together foreign diplomats, religious figures and businessmen, and announced that Boka had killed himself, despite the fact that his body showed clear signs of torture. He devoted the major part of his address to reading out a bizarre Soviet-style confession allegedly written by Boka before his death, in which he admitted being sympathetic to the French Communist Party, and using his influence to place communists in top government posts, so that he himself could become president. The event seemed, to many, like a desperate attempt at a cover-up, especially when Houphouet-Boigny said that Boka had confessed to trying to use black magic to assassinate him.

Boka was sorry, declared the president, still reading from the confession, and had realized his terrible mistake. He asked for his family’s forgiveness and wished to be executed. The president then displayed two suitcases, allegedly seized from members of Boka’s family. Inside one was a rack of magic potions, in the other a collection of tiny coffins containing Houphouet-Boigny’s corpse in effigy.6

*

Philip Chapman settled into village life constructing small breeze-block churches around the bush, while Judith taught in local schools. They soon encountered evidence of how all-pervasive Houphouet-Boigny’s PDCI machine had become. Everywhere they turned, in the local store, down at the cocoa-weighing station, at the livestock market, PDCI representatives were hanging around. They portrayed themselves as concerned neighbours, eager to hear the most trivial problems. But the information they collected travelled one way: up. Everyone in the country was being monitored.

The largely compliant electorate seemed unconcerned. They called Houphouet-Boigny ‘Le Vieux’, the wise one, and expected to consult him on a whole range of inconsequential family matters. ‘We are just off to see Le Vieux!’ people would shout, nonchalantly, as they cycled by. ‘Problems with the inheritance’, or ‘A disagreement over land’. The Chapmans thought them innocently optimistic, but, time and again, they would return with breathless stories about Le Vieux’s hospitality and how he had offered such kind and wise advice.

The Chapmans had a friend, a local Methodist minister called Pasteur Jean Nanga. Jean was a humble man from a low-status family, a man who recoiled from argument or conflict, but whose son had different ideas. He was young, bright and restless, and when he won a place at medical school he became involved in student politics. It was normal teenage behaviour, nothing to threaten Le Vieux and his team, just marches and demonstrations. Jean Nanga was worried, though. He had brought up his son properly and didn’t want any trouble. When the PDCI network of officials came to hear about the young man’s activism, and Le Vieux summoned him in for ‘a chat’. He had no choice but to attend.

Then there was silence. Jean Nanga waited for news.

*

In those early years as president, Houphouet-Boigny, ever the cocoa farmer, was rubbing his hands at the prospect of retuning the country’s economy so that it became entirely self-reliant. The fertile earth could make Côte d’Ivoire a peaceful and relatively prosperous land. The production of cocoa, coffee and pineapples was not dependent on securing foreign investment like the oil in Libya and Nigeria, but neither could he take his resources for granted, like Congo and South Africa, with their limitless supplies of inanimate diamonds. Agriculture required loving attention, efficient organization of labour, and the luck of the gods when it came to harvests. The president offered relocation packages to tempt people away from the barren savannah regions into the fertile central forests. He invited people from neighbouring countries too. ‘Come and resettle,’ was the message, ‘and be part of an agricultural revolution.’ He gave farmers generous deals to acquire their own land, and educated them in the most advanced agricultural techniques. Soon the majority of the population were involved in his Ivoirian Miracle. In the first decade and a half of independence, coffee production increased by 200 per cent, cocoa production by 600, and pineapples by a staggering 4,000. Economists in Britain and America were scratching their heads. It seemed that Houphouet-Boigny had managed to buck the trend of post-colonial economic decay that was afflicting much of Africa. But then he over-reached.

In the late 1960s Houphouet-Boigny began to borrow money to fund an ambitious construction programme. There was to be a world-class port at San Pedro to export cocoa and coffee. A hydro-electric damn, one of the most expensive in Africa, was planned for the Bandama River, which would create a lake three times the size of Lake Geneva. Public buildings were to be constructed in all major cities, and tarmac roads built through remote districts, connecting towns and villages that had previously only been accessible by jungle tracks. It was a modernization plan worthy of a ‘battering ram’ president, and its centrepiece was to be a church in his own ancestral village.

In the 1950s Yamoussoukro had been a nondescript farming community north of Abidjan, one of many hundred tucked away in the bush, quietly producing its weekly sacks of cocoa. In his youth, Houphouet-Boigny had viewed it as a bucolic retreat, but his Parisian years had changed him. How could he invite international statesman to his country and have them see there wasn’t even a road named after him, or a public building with a proud bust of Houphouet-Boigny?

The monumentalizing of a leader’s birthplace had become a fashion among post-colonial strongmen. Hastings Banda of Malawi was one of the first, shifting his entire capital city with all its administrative apparatus to his ancestral fishing town of Lilongwe. Mobutu opted to keep his capital where it was, but to erect his ‘Versailles of the jungle’, with its immensely long runway in Gbadolite.

Houphouet-Boigny was dining with Tunisia’s President Habib Bourguiba when he hit upon the idea. Bourguiba was transforming his ancestral fishing village into a thriving tourist city. Weren’t all self-respecting new African leaders doing the same? He recommended a good architect, and Houphouet-Boigny went away dreaming of building an exciting, modern village capital in Yamoussoukro.

He would have six-lane American-style freeways leading out of the bush to a giant artificially flooded lake to mimic the lagoons of Abidjan. The scrubland would be turned into golf courses, the trees cleared for resort hotels, and at the heart of it all would be an architectural eulogy to God and himself: a basilica in the bush. It would be expensive, but he was in the midst of the Ivoirian Miracle. The country’s credit rating had never been higher, and Houphouet-Boigny borrowed enormous sums to begin the building. It all rested on the world’s precarious commodity markets, and sustaining the prices of cocoa and coffee.

In the 1970s Côte d’Ivoire overtook Ghana as the world’s largest producer of cocoa. French investors clamoured for a piece of Ivoirian real estate. International businessmen struck deals in the foyers of Abidjan’s newly built hotels. For the small, land-owning elite around Houphouet-Boigny these were immensely prosperous times. Enough money was rolling in for the purchase of second homes on the French Riviera. The president’s wealthy friends would cruise around the capital’s well-maintained tarmac streets in brand-new Citroën and Mercedes cars. Houphouet-Boigny became the country’s biggest exporter of cocoa, and quickly expanded his business into pineapples and avocados. He could see no conflict of interest with his role as president, and took to announcing publicly just how rich he had become. His money, he said, accounted for a quarter of all deposits in Abidjan’s main bank. He had more in tax havens abroad. ‘Is there any serious man in the world who does not place a portion of his assets in Switzerland?’ he smilingly asked during one interview.7 These were the glory days. Houphouet-Boigny travelled Europe collecting trophy homes, several in France, one in Geneva, and a castle in Italy close to the summer residence of the pope.

The president spent much of his time in Paris. Gone were the dark days of paranoia about coups. Now he could hardly be coaxed back into the country unless it was for business. During the 1970s he lived for months at a time in his property at 11 Rue Masseran, a palace built for a Spanish prince, into which he crammed Louis XVI furniture and Russian imperial porcelain. While his aides kept an eye on world events from their sticky offices in Abidjan, the president wandered through his aromatic gardens in the 7th arrondissement or dined with Valéry Giscard d’Estaing and Jacques Chirac. He became the French government’s political agent in West Africa, relied upon to push their cause on the international stage. Instead of them backing his political campaigns, he was backing theirs, supporting his best French friends with funds to help them stay in power.

From his home in Paris his reach extended into every meeting in every public building in Abidjan. That included the twenty-five-storey slab of corporate secrecy that was the headquarters of the powerful Cocoa and Coffee Marketing Board. It was responsible for ninety per cent of Côte d’Ivoire’s exports during the 1970s and was a place over which Houphouet-Boigny exercised complete control. Around him he spun a whirligig of black-market deals and untraceable middlemen, of informal contracts and hidden surpluses that no one could easily disentangle.

Importantly, Houphouet-Boigny also controlled the surplus crop, the cocoa put aside for a rainy day. It was supposed to act as a buffer against harvest failures or unexpected changes in the markets. But if anyone bothered scrutinizing the warehouses where it was supposed to be kept, they would have found scandalous scenes. The president bought and sold the surplus as he saw fit, rewarding his cronies with favourable deals, and dishing it out to his friends in Paris as gifts. A French investigation later found that he kept at least ten per cent of the country’s cocoa revenues in his personal bank accounts.8 His cronies hid the scale of his theft by creating bogus accounts and log books, a ploy so successful that even today in Côte d’Ivoire many still believe he did no wrong.

*

Philip and Judith Chapman finally received news of what had happened to Pasteur Nanga’s son at a church service one Sunday morning. As instructed, he had gone to visit Le Vieux, and been given a dressing down about his potentially subversive activities. He was, the president told him, in need of re-educating. Nanga Jnr was to go to the airport, where a plane would fly him to France. From there, he would be driven to the prestigious Saint-Cyr, the military academy where de Gaulle had been trained. Nanga Jnr was to spend a year training to be a military officer. Houphouet-Boigny’s approach worked, in that the pastor’s son later became a brigadier in the Ivoirian army.

Another young man who was summoned to the president’s office at the time was a history professor and trade unionist called Laurent Gbagbo. He had been raised near the cocoa fields of the southwest during the worst of French forced labour, and was fiercely opposed to his leader’s Francophile tendencies. Gbagbo made Le Vieux feel uneasy. He had a rare talent for rallying crowds, and was unafraid of pointing out the failings of the authoritarian, single-party state. Gbagbo was invited into the leader’s office and given a stern rebuke. Later Houphouet-Boigny had him arrested and thrown in jail for two years. Gbagbo would become the president’s main political rival.

The clearing of settlements and scrubland around Yamoussoukro began in the early 1970s. Labourers moved in from across the country. Youngsters abandoned their family farms to learn scaffolding, bricklaying and concrete-mixing. Houphouet-Boigny wanted to build the city fast. Surveyors arrived equipped with maps and sketches that were eagerly transformed into whatever structure the president desired. Decisions were made on the ground, plans changed, buildings moved. There would be no industry, no factories or production lines, nothing to sustain any new workforce once the city was complete. He wanted prestige buildings, a scientific institute, tasteful government offices, and wide carriageways for the hordes of tourists. The purpose of Yamoussoukro wasn’t to cater for the masses; it was an aristocratic retreat in the Roman tradition, a place to escape the busy markets and congested roads of Abidjan for the calm exclusivity of the president’s birthplace.9

A lunch invitation arrived for Judith Chapman one day in 1976, delivered by a clerk of the presidential household. By now the family had moved to San Pedro, little more than a seaside village at the time, but soon to be the country’s main cocoa and coffee port. Her presence was requested at the seaside home of Houphouet-Boigny’s wife. By this time, the president had divorced his first wife, and taken a woman twenty-five years his junior. Marie-Thérèse was glamorous and beautiful, and shared her husband’s tastes for the high life. She was photographed in Paris dressed as Marie Antoinette, all diamonds and long satin gloves. In Washington, she received roses from the Kennedys, and excitedly toured the capital with them, photographed wherever she went. The press referred to her as ‘Africa’s Jackie Kennedy’.

In San Pedro, Judith Chapman arrived at Marie-Thérèse’s residence, and found it surprisingly modest, aside from a single architectural flourish: the swimming pool was half in and half out of the house. Beyond lay the beach and the lagoon, and beyond that the Atlantic Ocean. It was certainly in better taste than the president’s palace in Abidjan. Judith’s husband, Philip, had visited there. ‘Gilding and false Empire’ is how he described it: French antique furniture, marble statues and walls of ornate mirrors.

Marie-Thérèse was warm and unpretentious, and sat among the other young women laughing and gossiping as if it were a meeting of the Ladies’ Circle rather than lunch with the president’s wife. The talk was largely about children and schools: why there were too few of them, and how to reach out to more remote communities. Marie-Thérèse wanted to understand what improvements could be made, something in which she appeared to take genuine interest. Her husband would consult her about political decisions; she was the only person he felt he could truly trust.

The port of San Pedro was starting to take shape, soon cargo ships from America and Europe would be queuing out to sea. But for the moment, all it offered was an insight into how the culture of corruption was percolating down from Le Vieux through every stratum of society. Philip Chapman was approached by a worried member of his congregation, Germain, a smartly dressed, family man who thought deeply about issues. He had got a new job as a customs officer in the port, but his colleagues had quickly turned against him. He had seen them all taking kickbacks in return for allowing even the smallest consignment of cocoa through the port. When a company refused to pay, their beans were ‘lost’ somewhere in a warehouse at the far end of the docks, and next time they were more co-operative. Germain never complained, he let his colleagues get on with it. But that wasn’t enough. His non-involvement in such a ready source of backhanders was seen as weird, even immoral. Why did he not want money for his children’s education, or his parents’ medicines? Didn’t he care?

Côte d’Ivoire society had been turned on its head. Those who refused kickbacks were seen as deviants. Parents financed a good education precisely so their children could choose a career with good bribe-potential. If someone secured a job in the civil service, at whatever level, it was their duty to make it pay.

Rumours of presidential corruption were of little concern to most people, who reasoned they would do the same in his shoes. But occasionally a story would emerge of such spectacular misuse of public funds that the president was expected to make a statement. It usually entailed the creation of more toothless anti-corruption laws, or the vague promise of an inquiry. On several occasions, though, Houphouet-Boigny was so penitent, he promised to donate all his private land to the state. It sounded like a genuinely selfless act, and the papers often reported it as such. But since Houphouet-Boigny was ‘the state’, it was a meaningless gesture. He repeated the announcement on many occasions, without ever explaining how the plantations had fallen back into his hands since the last time.

The speed of building work at Yamoussoukro was following the same exhilarating curve as the price of cocoa. The wide roadways provided a curious spectacle for the locals, almost empty of cars, but with donkeys and traps eagerly testing the delights of the glass-smooth surface. There was a palace too, which was strangely brutalistic in its architecture, considering Houphouet-Boigny’s taste for gilding and Second Empire kitsch. In the lagoon around its grounds, he began introducing crocodiles, creatures he believed to be sacred. There were half a dozen of them, which he treated as exotic pets, and fed personally in front of astonished foreign dignitaries. Still to come was its centrepiece, which he now envisaged as a cathedral rather than a mere church, perhaps something to rival what the pope had in Rome.

By 1978 the building programme at Yamoussoukro had become a serious drain on the public purse, absorbing one-third of the country’s entire urban investment fund outside Abidjan. People had noticed how money was being diverted from their own towns and cities. But while cocoa prices remained high, and salaries were among the best in Africa, they were prepared to look away. In March 1983, Houphouet-Boigny declared that his previously obscure home village was sufficiently well-developed to become the political and administrative capital of Côte d’Ivoire, replacing Abidjan. The question was, how long before the cocoa bubble burst?

*

When Jean-Bédel Bokassa, self-styled ‘emperor’ of the Central African Republic, flew into Côte d’Ivoire in September 1979 he was homeless, stateless and fortunate to be alive. Events had moved swiftly during his final days in office. Bokassa had been president of the former French colony, which lay just north of Mobutu’s Zaire, for thirteen years. In April that year he had issued an ill-considered presidential decree concerning school uniforms. From now on, all children were to wear clothing bearing Bokassa’s image. It wasn’t the narcissism of the man that rankled – they were used to that – but the fact that the contract for the compulsory, and expensive, new clothing had been awarded to a member of his own family. Demonstrators took to the streets, on a small scale at first, but their numbers quickly grew. Bokassa decided to send in troops. A large number of elementary schoolchildren were arrested, and crammed into small cells. There the beatings began. Some reports placed Bokassa himself at the scene, killing children with his own cane. In the end more than 100 schoolchildren were dead. After that, the demonstrators didn’t just want a reversal of the uniform decree, they wanted Bokassa’s head.

In Paris, the French government was watching with increasing alarm. This was one of their own – Bokassa had fought in de Gaulle’s Free French army during the war and taken part in the capture of the Vichy government’s African capital at Brazzaville in French Congo, as well as being part of the Allied landings that liberated southern France. He was a close friend of the French president, Valery Giscard d’Estaing, and the French had helped finance his bizarre ‘coronation’ with a diamond-encrusted crown. Bokassa had been eccentric from the start, but now he was out of control.

Shortly after the child murders, he had taken off to see his old friend Colonel Gaddafi on a state visit. Giscard d’Estaing’s government took the opportunity to stage a coup. Code-named Operation Barracuda, French Special Forces were airlifted into the capital, Bangui, on 20 September 1979, to overthrow Bokassa in what became known as ‘France’s last colonial expedition’. When they searched the president’s villa they discovered chests full of diamonds. In his fridges were body parts. There were also human remains in the pond where he kept his crocodiles.

The French reinstated David Dacko as president, the man Bokassa had himself overthrown. Bokassa was outraged. He had always referred to President Giscard d’Estaing as his ‘dear cousin’. And what about the diamonds he had given French politicians as gifts? His immediate concern, though, was finding somewhere to live.

Zaire seemed an obvious choice, but President Mobutu was too concerned about his international reputation. Bokassa tried Omar Bongo of Gabon, a man of few scruples who had embezzled millions in oil money from his own people, but even for him Bokassa was too toxic. Togo and Senegal also said no. Bokassa even had the cheek to ask the French for asylum. In the end, only one man was prepared to take him.

Houphouet-Boigny believed France should have shown more loyalty to one of its military veterans and, as France’s trusted agent in West Africa, he was prepared to do a little housekeeping on their behalf.

Bokassa’s plane landed at Abidjan airport on 24 September 1979 and the ‘emperor’ was whisked off to a villa owned by Felix Houphouet-Boigny, a grand three-storey property overlooking the lagoon in the exclusive residential district of Cocody. He soon settled into a routine, receiving daily meals from a local hotel, listening to military marching music, eating Camembert and drinking Beaujolais.10 Soon he felt confident enough to venture to the local nightclubs and bars, although his popularity among the waitresses waned when they found out about the body parts and the child-killing.

By this time, Houphouet-Boigny was a rarity, one of the few among the first generation of post-independence African leaders still standing. If he glanced around his own immediate neighbours, there was only violence and instability. To the east, in Ghana, there had already been four coups d’état. North, in Mali, three coup attempts had failed. To the west, the president of neighbouring Guinea-Bissau had been overthrown by his own prime minister. In Liberia, a junior army officer, Samuel Doe, had just led a particularly bloody coup, killing the president and following it up with the public execution of thirteen members of his cabinet. Houphouet-Boigny held on, not only because of his wealth creation and moderate temperament, but also because he had reduced the size of his army, and placed it under French control.

*

Herman J. Cohen was not the kind of American you would expect to be doing business with dictators. He looked like a man who might keep bees or restore antiquarian books, but Ambassador Cohen was America’s top man in Africa, and had become close to several autocrats: Mugabe, Gaddafi and Charles Taylor. Mobutu had grown so fond of him that he had invited Cohen to his sixtieth birthday party at Cape Martin in the South of France. ‘Listen, don’t lecture’ was his motto, and Houphouet-Boigny was a man who liked to talk.

When Cohen arrived in Abidjan in the summer of 1987, Houphouet-Boigny had wanted to see him so urgently he had flown him in by private plane. The president was an octogenarian by then, shrunken by the years, ‘a roly-poly little guy whose feet barely reached the floor’.11 But he was still sharp, a master-manipulator. He told Cohen he had a problem on his hands.

It concerned his northern neighbour, Thomas Sankara, the president of Burkina Faso. Sankara was a dashing Marxist revolutionary rarely seen out of military fatigues. His politics couldn’t have been more distant from those of Houphouet-Boigny. But the two countries were deeply interdependent. Around thirty per cent of Houphouet-Boigny’s population originated in Burkina Faso, and had crossed the border to work in the cocoa fields. He needed Sankara on his side.

Originally the two men had been friends. Houphouet-Boigny had helped finance the coup that brought him to power in the first place, but Sankara turned out to be too wild. Seen from Abidjan, Burkina Faso’s president was a populist troublemaker in a scarlet beret, frightening the region’s old guard and daring to suggest they were all corrupt. Everyone knew he was pointing the finger at Houphouet-Boigny. To make matters more interesting, Sankara’s deputy, and almost certain successor, was one of Houphouet-Boigny’s closest friends, Blaise Compaoré. Compaoré’s wife was even closer. Houphouet-Boigny had made no secret of his fondness for her, and it was widely assumed she was one of his many dozen illegitimate children.

Whatever the truth, it would clearly suit Houphouet-Boigny if Burkina’s Number 2, his old friend Compaoré, were to become Burkina’s Number 1. It would also suit the United States of America, which preferred not to have a Marxist revolutionary whipping up trouble in West Africa.

Herman Cohen sat opposite Houphouet-Boigny in his presidential office, and threw in a remark he assumed would land on fertile ground. Sankara, he said, was destabilizing the whole region, and something needed to be done.

Cohen didn’t expect the Ivoirian leader to explicitly announce a desire to see Sankara dead, but he did expect at least some vitriol. Instead, Houphouet-Boigny was uncharacteristically demure. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘Sankara is just a boy; he will mature quickly.’ Cohen was confused as to why he had been flown in with such urgency. He could only assume the Ivoirian president was hiding his true intentions, and using the meeting to give himself deniability later.

In October 1987, President Sankara was sitting in a staff meeting in Burkina’s capital when an armed group stormed into the room and riddled him with bursts of automatic gunfire. His body was then dismembered and buried in an unmarked grave. As expected, Blaise Compaoré became the country’s new president. It was no mystery to Herman Cohen who was behind it. The plotters couldn’t have executed such a high-risk plan without money and support. Afterwards they relocated to Côte d’Ivoire, and lived with Houphouet-Boigny’s blessing in Abidjan.

*

When the economic crisis struck, it was as if Houphouet-Boigny was cruising along his smooth six-lane freeway in Yamoussoukro, revelling in his wealth and security, his enemies dead or in exile, and then the road suddenly collapsed beneath him. The bottom fell out of the world cocoa markets.

Prices had been on a downward trend throughout the 1980s. There was just too much cocoa on the market. Indonesia, Brazil, Ecuador, Nigeria: they were all pushing hard to increase their share by lowering prices and expanding output. Côte d’Ivoire was already the biggest cocoa producer in the world, and its capacity to produce more was unrivalled. During the 1980s it responded to the competition by doubling its output, until it controlled forty per cent of the market. But there was only so much chocolate the world could consume.

Faced with a seemingly endless queue of eager cocoa exporters, chocolate manufacturers chose the cheapest. Houphouet-Boigny was not going to be pushed around. He had promised to pay his farmers a good price, a mandatory minimum for each kilo sold at the farm gate, and he was determined not to let them down. But he couldn’t control world markets. Forced to sell at a steadily reducing price, he continued paying his farmers what he had promised, leaving the Côte d’Ivoire government making a loss. Houphouet-Boigny’s farm-gate prices were twice as high as any other cocoa-producing country. A wave of cocoa smuggling began, with Ghanaian farmers pouring across the border to sell at the artificially inflated price. Houphouet-Boigny was defiant. He continued shovelling more cocoa onto the docksides of San Pedro and Abidjan, predicting that an upturn was inevitable.

World prices slid further. Buyers accumulated mountains of spare cocoa in foreign warehouses. They had reserves that would last for months. The IMF and World Bank advised Houphouet-Boigny to slash his farm-gate prices in half, but he refused. He blamed the commodity brokers on the trading floors of London and New York. ‘They amuse themselves by playing with our cocoa as if they were at the race track or cockfight,’ said the president. Partly out of loyalty to his farmers, partly because the grand old man of cocoa could never be wrong, he continued on his obdurate course.

He was wildly over-leveraged. His village-capital at Yamoussoukro had required massive capital investment, for which he had borrowed extensively when times were good. Now his arrears were approaching $2 billion. The cathedral on its own had cost $500 million, and still wasn’t finished. Creditors were queuing at his door. He tried to diversify, hurriedly encouraging his farmers to grow cotton, rubber and palm oil instead. But it was far too late. In May 1987, the cocoa markets buckled and then collapsed altogether.

Houphouet-Boigny was glued to his television set. He followed world prices obsessively, cursing the international speculators, and clinging onto the myth that he could single-handedly steer the markets back in his favour; in the past, even a rumour about the eighty-four-year-old’s ill-health had been enough to affect prices in Ghana and Brazil. As the figures on the screen tumbled, and traders were shown in a frenzy of buying and selling, the president decided on a high-risk power play.

In January 1988, he boycotted the world cocoa markets, withholding forty per cent of the world’s crop with a flourish. Côte d’Ivoire would sell no cocoa except at the price he decreed. It was a huge gamble. He tried to persuade other countries to join him, and create an OPEC-style cartel to fix their own prices. They declined. Houphouet-Boigny was on his own.

At the ports, cocoa wagons waited in the equatorial sun, engines churning out acrid smoke as their drivers slept nearby in hammocks. Pallets of cocoa rotted on the docksides. Piles of uncollected sacks waited by jungle roadsides.

Houphouet-Boigny stopped payments on what was now a $12 billion foreign debt. The IMF suspended a $200 million lending fund. Creditors gave up on Houphouet-Boigny ever reimbursing them, and raced around selling on the debts to third parties for half what they were originally worth. Côte d’Ivoire’s banks became insolvent. When officials turned to the ‘cocoa stabilization fund’ for help, they discovered it had been looted.

Official government cocoa agents had no further capacity for buying the crop. With no one to sell to, Côte d’Ivoire’s farmers resorted to the black market, trying to smuggle beans out of the country for half the previous price. Houphouet-Boigny came down hard. Anyone caught doing so would face a jail sentence of twenty years. The rest of the cocoa-producing world simply moved on without him.

Over in Yamoussoukro, his pet building project was reaching its conclusion. The vast marble cathedral that was to be a monument to God and to himself had taken four years to complete. Its giant columns were finished, the marble was laid seamlessly across its floors, the dome pieced together like a giant Fabergé egg. In the circumstances, ‘The Basilica of Our Lady of Peace’ seemed like a work of utter folly rather than a visionary’s gift to the nation. Houphouet-Boigny insisted he had paid for it with his own personal fortune, but his people knew the truth.

His last stand against the world’s cocoa buyers persisted for eighteen months. In the summer of 1989 Houphouet-Boigny surrendered. He staggered back into the world markets slashing his prices and releasing hundreds of thousand of tonnes of cocoa. The wise old man had been defeated. In ailing health, and half-blind, he returned to his palace in Yamoussoukro to lick his wounds.

With his country near bankrupt, he had little choice but to embark on an austerity programme, cutting public-service jobs and halving the income of cocoa workers. Facing a fall in their wages, the police and army began setting up extra road blocks to shake money from motorists. Cocoa drivers went on strike. Gradually people began taking to the streets, mainly students and teachers at first, but even former loyalists soon joined them. It wouldn’t have escaped the president’s notice that the favourite chant was ‘Corrupt Houphouet’.

Resentment over falling living standards turned into demands to move away from a single-party state and introduce multi-party elections. Leading the protests was the young history professor he had chastized in his study all those years before. Laurent Gbagbo could smell blood; the president had never experienced such public dissent. In panic, Houphouet-Boigny hit back with tear gas and stun-grenades, dismissing the protestors as loubards, petty thieves and drug addicts. That only served to inflame the situation. Army and airforce recruits joined the protests, and occupied the international airport.

Houphouet-Boigny had little choice. On 3 May 1990, he capitulated, announcing the legalization of opposition parties and his intention to hold elections. After months of dragging his feet over every economic decision, suddenly he was in a hurry. The elections would be in October, short notice for a country that had no history of opposition politics. There were dozens of small pressure groups, often with contradictory aims, but no unifying movement. Now they needed to find candidates and organize a plausible opposition in the space of just five months. In the event, twenty-six political parties were created. Houphouet-Boigny couldn’t have hoped for better news. His people, having been starved of choice for three decades, were now faced with too much. The candidate who came closest to unifying them was Laurent Gbagbo, leader of the Ivorian Popular Front, but he was running out of time. His presidential bid only got properly under way a matter of weeks before the polls opened.

On 28 October 1990 Felix Houphouet-Boigny put himself at the mercy of his electorate. He was filmed on the day, relaxed, enjoying the moment, as if, uncannily, he knew the result before it happened.

Large numbers stayed at home, suspecting their votes would have little effect on the eventual outcome. At several polling booths fights broke out when opposition members claimed the ballot boxes had been stuffed with Houphouet-Boigny votes. They tried to smash the boxes open.

The president’s extensive network of bent party officials and bribable election staff carried out their job a little too well. Houphouet-Boigny won with an implausible 81.7 per cent of the vote, with Gbagbo receiving just 18.3 per cent. Unofficial estimates by Western observers gave Gbagbo between 30 and 40 per cent. In addition, Houphouet-Boigny’s PDCI took 163 of the 185 seats in the legislature. Even without the ballot-tampering, his almost mythical status as the father of independence and his loyalty to his cocoa farmers would have been enough to win him the election. The five-year term as president would take him beyond his ninetieth birthday.

*

In the fall of that year, Felix Houphouet-Boigny sat in a front pew, waiting. He was small and crumpled now, an eighty-five-year-old schoolboy in his own basilica, smiling nervously and wondering how long it would be. Behind him were rows of hats: blue polka-dots and pink satin saucers. There were suited security officers in dark glasses, French diplomats and tribal chiefs in flowing golden gowns. The church was full, everyone straining for a view of the main door. For once, Houphouet-Boigny was not the person they had come to see.

He didn’t know it, but his guest had not been keen on coming. Only months before, Ambassador Herman J. Cohen had been at the Vatican’s Foreign Ministry in Rome when an official told him, ‘We consider the basilica to be a tremendous extravagance for a poor African country.’ It seems they had thought about boycotting, but had found themselves boxed in. ‘To make matters worse, Houphouet wants to give it to the pope,’ said the official. ‘We are trying to dodge this one but we will not be able to do so.’12

When the procession entered the building it passed through a corridor of bowing bishops. Above them, in a stained-glass window, was that image of Houphouet-Boigny kneeling at the feet of Christ.

He raised himself from his pew, his wife Marie-Thérèse by his side. The whole congregation was on its feet. An official touched his sleeve and Houphouet turned around to see Pope John Paul II standing before him. The pope raised a hand in blessing, and Houphouet reached out, head bowed, face exultant. For a moment the dictator and the pope touched. Houphouet had given his basilica to the Church: the symbol of his hubris and corruption in return for his elevation to a place above the masses and their cocoa farms, above the protests and the fighting over who would be his successor, above his copy of St Peter’s basilica, and into the cloudless African sky where Houphouet-Boigny could sit for eternity beside the most powerful leader of them all.

*

After his death from cancer at the age of eighty-eight on 7 December 1993, the country sank into the kind of political turbulence that had befallen so many of its neighbours. Two of Houphouet-Boigny’s protégés tried to assume the presidency: his prime minister, Alassane Ouattara, and the president of the national assembly, Henri Konan Bédié. A bitter power struggle ensued, with the security forces divided on who they should back. In the end, they rallied behind Bédié, and it was he who became president. But instead of offering a consolation job to Ouattara, he banned him from public office. Watching from the sidelines, a weary Laurent Gbagbo commented, ‘This is what happens when power is offered publicly for auction. When it is time to share the cake, they tear each other apart.’

Bédié’s approach was dramatically different from that of Houphouet-Boigny. He championed a philosophy of Ivoirité, or Ivoirian-ness. At its heart was a belief that only the largely Christian southerners were true Ivoirians. The largely Muslim northerners, into which category he placed Ouattara, were immigrants who had more in common with ethnic groups in Burkina Faso and Mali than the tropical south of Côte d’Ivoire. It was racism disguised as patriotism. Ivoirité resurrected long-dormant tribal antagonisms, and introduced fresh ones.

Condemned to the political wilderness by his beloved PDCI, Ouattara formed a new party, the Rally of the Republicans (RDR), which drew its support from the marginalized north of the country. Côte d’Ivoire was dividing into two distinct regions. Two coups followed, and a lengthy civil war that drew in the French. There were several attempts at elections, but each time a candidate lost, he refused to accept the result and the violence continued. Among those jockeying for power was Laurent Gbagbo, transformed from a mild-mannered history professor during the years of Houphouet-Boigny to a hardened and corrupt politician. When he was defeated in the 2010 elections by his old adversary Ouattara, he refused to accept the result, and both men declared themselves president. Gbagbo unleashed a wave of sectarian violence.

His security officials began touring restaurants in Abidjan, hunting down leaders from Ouattara’s newly formed coalition and bundling them into waiting vehicles. Their bodies were later found in local morgues, riddled with bullets. Women were gang-raped simply for the crime of wearing pro-Ouattara T-shirts. Suspected Ouattara supporters were stopped at road blocks and shot. Others were captured in their homes, and beaten with bricks or burned alive beneath piles of tyres and petrol-soaked-wood. It became known as an ‘article 125’: 100 francs for the petrol, plus 25 francs for the box of matches.

Gbagbo was eventually caught and arrested in a French-assisted raid, and is now standing trial for crimes against humanity at The Hague.

A quarter of a century after the death of Felix Houphouet-Boigny, his gift for keeping the country together appears near-miraculous. He achieved stability not through force but by a long period of economic growth and an almost reckless loyalty to his cocoa farmers.

But what had happened to all the money?

A bitter legal dispute continued for years after his death, with claims of forged paperwork, theft and corrupt lawyers. The former president had accumulated a spectacular fortune that placed him among the richest men in the world: an estimated $11 billion, some in cash deposits held in Zurich and Geneva, the rest in property. He had several mansions in Paris, a home in Chêne Bourg in Switzerland and another at Castel Gandolfo in Italy, near to the summer residence of the pope.

His second wife, Marie-Thérèse is still alive, an elegant eighty-eight-year-old who looks two decades younger. She spends most of her time in her grand house on the Swiss–French border, where liveried servants float around with trays of champagne. She receives few visitors now, but sometimes Catherine Bokassa flies in, the widow of the ‘emperor’ of the Central African Republic to whom Houphouet-Boigny gave sanctuary all those years ago.

Marie-Thérèse occupies herself by making embroideries seated among the Louis XV furniture that she managed to salvage from her husband’s main address in Paris. The property at 11 Rue Masseran was seized, without compensation, by the Côte d’Ivoire government. Its exquisite furnishings and paintings were auctioned at Sotheby’s, but Marie-Thérèse says she didn’t receive a penny. She claims to live off a pension of less than €2,000 a month, a sum supplied to her by the Ivoirian state. The benefactors of her husband’s fortune, she says, were the four children from his first marriage to Kady Racine Sow. Only two of them are still alive today, and live discreetly in Paris. The rest of the money has fallen into the hands of lawyers, bankers, notaries and Côte d’Ivoire officials.13