I spent about ten days in the Ivory Coast, mostly in Abidjan, but also Yamoussoukro, Man, and Grand Bassam.

(Note – The Ivory Coast is so French in culture and temperament that it insists on officially being called “Côte d’Ivoire.” But I don’t know how to make that accent on my keyboard and I don’t feel like copy-and-pasting the name over-and-over, so I’m just going to call it the “Ivory Coast.”)

The Ivory Coast was the last stop on my West African trip, but it was also one of my most anticipated. I keep writing about being fascinated by particular countries or leaders, but I think the Ivory Coast tops my fascination ranking for West Africa. That’s why this post is over 30,000 words long. If you’re not interested in the economics and history of the Ivory Coast, skip to the end for a bit of travel writing.

If you’ve spent a lot of time reading about Africa, a thought may have occurred to you as it did to me: how are there no successful post-colonial African countries? By “successful,” I mean consistent strong economic growth, political stability, and a reasonable income distribution so the new oil/gold/mineral wealth isn’t all held by the dictator and his friends. For awhile, you could say South Africa or Rhodesia, but only if you ignored the apartheid. It feels like one of the other 50+ African countries should have achieved success, even if just by chance.

About 40 years ago, there actually was a clear example of a successful African country. Here is GDP per capita in constant 2015 USD from 1960-1978:

The Ivory Coast wasn’t just leaving its African competitors in the dust, it was even doing pretty well compared to developing Asian economies:

It’s hard to believe that a Sub-Saharan African country was posting an average annual real GDP growth rate of 7.3% over 17 years. And it wasn’t based on oil, diamonds, rare earth minerals, or some other narrow extractive resource. The Ivory Coast’s economy was based on cocoa, coffee, timber, and a healthy dose of investment from France. While it had a decently developing industrial and services sector, the Ivory Coast was still a mostly resource-based economy, but a relatively diversified one with a wide base that not only employed millions of its own people, but millions of immigrants that constituted about 1/3rd of the population at their peak. And it did all that successfully while nearly every other African state crashed-and-burned into political and economic chaos throughout the 1960s and 70s.

You may have noticed that I cut these graphs off precisely at 1978. That’s because after that, the Ivory Coast’s GDP per capita looks like this:

In other words, from the Ivory Coast’s independence in 1960 until its peak in 1978, its GDP per capita doubled. Then from 1978 to 2008, its GDP per capita just about halved, leading to a net per capita economic growth of nearly 0% across 48 years.

Meanwhile, the Ivory Coast’s African neighbors:

And compared to East Asia:

So… what happened?

To figure that out, I started with my favorite sources: Martin Meredith’s Fate of Africa: A History of the Continent Since Independence, Paul Kenyon’s Dictatorland: The Men Who Stole Africa, and Tom Burgis’s The Looting Machine: Warlords, Oligarchs, Corporations, Smugglers, and the Theft of Africa’s Wealth.

A big new source is the Area Handbook for the Ivory Coast by Thomas Duval Roberts and Benjamin Nimmer. I can’t find much information about Roberts online, but apparently he had my dream job 50 years ago. Meaning, he traveled around the world writing in-depth summaries of countries. His coverage of the Ivory Coast (written in 1973) is excellent, and provides an amazing snapshot of a nation in mid-development.

I also used an updated version of the Handbook from 1988, which in addition to Roberts, has contributions from Robert Earl Handoff. It’s worth noting that the Wikipedia entry, “Economic history of Ivory Coast,” is almost entirely based on this source, often word-for-word.

Then there’s John Dunn’s West African States: Failure and Promise which predictably says a lot more about the failure than the promise. Despite giving me Marxist vibes, it’s a great source for statistics and microeconomic narratives in the state, and is also an interesting snapshot since it was written in 1978, at the very peak of economic progress.

There’s also this excerpt from former US Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Herman J. Cohen’s memoir, The Mind of the African Strongman: Conversations with Dictators, Statesmen, and Father Figures.

There’s Jeanne Maddox Toungara’s “The Apotheosis of Cote d’Ivoire’s Nana Houphouët-Boigny” which analyzed the Ivory Coast’s most prominent leader’s style and personality.

Finally, there’s “The Ivory Coast Economic ‘Miracle’: What Benefits for Peasant Farmers?” by Robert M. Hecht, which gives yet another timely snapshot of the nation, but this time in 1983, after the start of the economic collapse.

Some other important sources: One Party Government in the Ivory Coast, “Direct Foreign Investment Strategies and Economic Performance in Ghana and the Ivory Coast,” and “An Economic Analysis of Food Policy in the Ivory Coast.” Other smaller sources will be linked within.

Overview

Population (2021) – 27.5 million

Population growth rate (2021) – 2.5%

Size – 124,503 square miles (a little bigger than New Mexico or Poland)

GDP (nominal, 2021) – $70 billion (about the same as South Dakota or Azerbaijan)

GDP growth rate (2021) – 7%

GDP per capita (2021) – $2,549

GDP per capita PPP (2023) – $7,010

Inflation rate range (2018-2023) – 0%-6%

Biggest export – Cocoa

Median age (2023) – 18

Life expectancy (2020) – 59

Founded – 1960

Religion (2021) – 43% Muslim, 39% Christian, 2% African Pagan (though other estimates reverse the Muslim and Christian percentages?)

Corruption Perceptions Index rank – #99

Heritage Index of Economic Freedom ranking – #81

Felix Houphouët-Boigny and the Rise of the Ivory Coast

(Note – Felix Houphouët-Boigny is the most important person in the Ivory Coast’s history. His name, pronounced “Hoo-fwey-boy-nee,” is very long and also has an accent that I can’t figure out how to type on my computer. So in the grand tradition of Sam Bankman-Fried and Mohammed bin Salman, I am usually going to refer to Felix Houphouët-Boigny as “FHB.”)

Spanish colonial policy was to subjugate the natives and take every ounce of wealth that wasn’t nailed down. British colonial policy was to control as much land with as few Brits as possible by indirectly ruling through well-compensated local elite collaborators. French colonial policy was the (in)famous “civilizing mission” – over the course of years, decades, and generations, if need be, the natives would learn the French language, adopt the French culture, live in French-designed cities, and eventually, hopefully become Frenchmen. Of all of France’s African colonies, the Ivory Coast would arguably adopt French culture more than any other, and this factor sowed both the rise and fall of its fortunes.

Dia Houphouët (later known as FHB) was born in 1905 in Yamoussoukro, a village situated in the middle of the modern Ivory Coast nation. Its location, right between the Christian south and Muslim north, left its people in Pagan animism. At the time, the Ivory Coast was too wild for the French to have made serious inroads into the interior. There were some trading outposts on the coast (notably Grand Bassam), and some scattered cash crop agriculture a bit inland, but the vast majority of the colony was barely mapped, let alone tamed, civilized, and economically utilized. The same could be said of much of French West Africa, with Senegal appearing as the only French colony with decent economic prospects.

But in the decades after FHB was born, the French started to put a bit more effort into civilizing. They made deals with the hundreds of chiefs throughout the Ivory Coast, offering them wealth, technology, and political access in exchange for loyalty and a slow integration into the French colonial administration. FHB’s father was a regional chief presiding over 30+ villages. As part of his dealings with the French colonials, the chief got the opportunity to send his children to a French school at a nearby military outpost.

I don’t know how many of the chief’s five children went to this school, but FHB was the only one to soon transfer to a much better and more intense boarding school not far from Abidjan, the colonial capital. Even at a young age, FHB was noted for his intelligence, and he got excellent grades. Nevertheless, his family back home was worried about what four years of Western boarding school might do to the boy, and they were right to be concerned. When FHB graduated at age 14, he emerged not only as a Francophile but a Christian, having supposedly converted after learning of human sacrifices that accompanied royal funerals in his traditional faith. He even adopted a new Christian name, becoming Felix Houphouët.

In 1919, at age 14, FHB went off to Senegal to attend the École William Ponty, the best school in French West Africa. It was established to cultivate a Francophilic loyal class of intellectual and political elites among the African population to rule the colonies. In one sense, the school was a massive success, since it would go on to produce future leaders of Mali, Niger, Guinea, Benin, Burkina Faso, Senegal, and the Ivory Coast. In another sense, the school was a massive failure, since nearly all of those leaders hated France and many led successful independence campaigns against the Empire.

But the school was a success in FHB’s case. He got a classically liberal education filled with literature, poetry, and history, and his nascent Francophilia deepened into an unbreakable core of respect for his colonial overlords. He got on the path to becoming an evolué, the highest legal status for French Africans, which was still below actual Frenchmen of course, but would permit FHB to work most professional jobs or even get an official place in the colonial administration. Only 2,000 Africans across all French colonies ever reached citizen status, which was the next tier below evolué so evolués probably numbered in the hundreds or dozens in Africa

After graduating, FHB cashed in on his legal status and entered a French medical school in Dakar. He quickly rose to the top of his class and earned a certification as a medical assistant, which was the highest medical professional position he could achieve even as an evolué.

After crushing med school, FHB moved to Abidjan at the age of 20 to work in a hospital and he fit right in. He made very good money for an African and was living in a rising colonial capital that saw more investment flowing in from France every day. FHB was obviously smart to everyone who met him, but also genteel and a smooth talker. Unlike 99.9% of Africans, he spoke French perfectly and had a worldly liberal education, and so he easily connected with prominent French colonials.

FHB’s career was looking good until he decided to dip his toes into politics. Like all medical workers since time immemorial, FHB thought he was being a bit taken advantage of. The hours were too grueling, the pay was too little, and the living conditions were subpar. So FHB organized a little union, entirely consisting of academically elite Africans, to advocate for improved working conditions in hospitals.

When the French colonial government heard about this, they flipped out. This was the mid-1920s, and African revolutionary independence movements were still a long way off, but if any people know what the early stages of revolution look like, it’s the French. FHB, as the union ringleader, was suddenly scooped up by the French colonial authorities, taken out of cosmopolitan Abidjan, and reassigned to do his medical work in a bunch of backwater rural villages in the inland of the Ivory Coast. This was meant to exile the too-smart-for-his-own-good young man until he learned his place. FHB spent the next decade among the timber fields, coffee plantations, and cocoa farms.

Cocoa

Cocoa is a big part of the Ivory Coast and FHB’s story, so it’s worth an aside to set up.

Cocoa is the seed in the fruit of the Theobroma cacao. It’s native to northern regions of South America, but spread into Central America long ago where it was famously enjoyed by the Mayans, Aztecs, and other Mesoamericans. Raw cocoa does not taste good; it has almost no sugar and is extremely bitter. But it’s more tolerable when processed, at which point it becomes chocolate. The Mesoamericans mostly consumed cocoa in melted form as a sort of frothy bitter hot chocolate. In a land without refined sugar, this was one of the best tasting things they had, and it became a highly valuable luxury drink consumed by the elites, and was also used as a form of currency.

The first Europeans to learn of cocoa were probably Christopher Columbus and his expedition which brought cocoa beans back to Spain. A few decades later, Hernando Cortez and his conquistadors noticed that Aztec Emperor Tenochtitlan had a shitload of cocoa in his palaces. They brought more cocoa back to Spain, and once some Spaniard figured out to add refined sugar to the drink, it caught on and became a bit of a fad in European courts.

Cocoa remained a minor delicacy for centuries in Europe and eventually among the New World colonies. Its popularity was restricted by the high cost of growing the crop, slow transport of cocoa from the colonies to population centers, and being difficult to manufacture in bulk as a drink. Solid chocolate also existed dating all the way back to Aztec times (Aztec soldiers carried them in rations) but the extremely bitter taste prevented it from really catching on in Europe.

Then, in 1819, Swiss chocolatier Francois-Louis Callier invented a method for mechanizing chocolate production and molding it into blocks. He created the first mass-produced modern chocolate bar. The discovery brought down chocolate prices and kicked off a new wave of chocolate demand and innovation. Callier’s methods were refined by others – cocoa and sugar ratios were balanced, cocoa butter was created, and Callier’s son-in-law combined their chocolate with Nestle’s condensed milk to create milk chocolate.

Supply responded to growing demand. All these European chocolate makers needed more cocoa, but it was hard to get. Central and northern South America had low populations in the mid-1800s, most of the land was still untamed, and the territories were controlled by unsteady post-independence governments, so entrepreneurial traders looked elsewhere to grow more cocoa.

In 1822, Portuguese merchants brought cocoa to Sao Tome, an island off the coast of central Africa. The cocoa grew extremely well. As covered in a lengthy chapter in Paul Kenyon’s Dictatorland, the men who controlled these plantations became some of the richest people in the entire Portuguese Empire (including Brazil). 50 years later, cocoa was brought to Ghana, and soon after it spread to the Ivory Coast.

Bringing cocoa to West Africa was a smart idea on the part of the traders, but its growth in a new location was by no means forgone. That’s because cocoa is a notoriously difficult and annoying crop.

Cocoa can only grow at scale between about 20 degrees north and south of the equator. The Aztecs, who loved their cocoa dearly and considered it a literally divine substance, tried to cultivate it repeatedly, but they were situated a bit too far north. Cocoa trees require a complicated and chaotic mixture of factors to grow that are hard to predict and control, including, most notably, lots of shade. As a result, it is extremely difficult to grow cocoa in classic plantation formations. Many European cultivators tried and failed to do so for hundreds of years.

So while most crops can be put in rows in a big field and they’ll grow with the right amount of sunlight and water and soil nutrients, cocoa trees can usually only be grown in natural habitats. Thus, cocoa “plantations” typically consist of wild jungles with cocoa trees sporadically spaced out among natural flora and maybe some coffee or banana trees.

(As far as I can tell, maybe in the 1970s or 1980s, some cultivators figured out how to grow cocoa in plantations through hybridization, but even then, the process was quite difficult, and the technology wasn’t globally available. To this day, virtually no cocoa in West Africa is grown in standard plantations.)

Much like cotton in the American South, the peculiarities of cocoa harvesting had massive social and political implications for West Africa. Cocoa trees were sporadically spread throughout jungle, so there was no easy way to mechanize production. Thus, efficient cocoa harvesting meant having lots of people running around big jungles manually cutting cocoa pods off trees and depositing them in sacks. This meant cocoa farms needed lots of labor, and unfortunately, West Africa’s labor acquisition process was quite similar to Southern America’s labor acquisition process.

Cocoa arrived in the Ivory Coast in 1870. Native planters like FHB’s father received subsidies and land to expand operations while French planters also came to establish their own plantations. Coffee farming and timber production emerged as the two biggest sources of economic growth, but cocoa was a close third, and it was more labor-intensive than the other two. Cocoa production was based primarily in the south of the colony, and there simply weren’t enough local Ivorians to do all the work. So the plantations began importing lots of immigrant labor from the far northern part of the colony, an entirely Muslim region that would eventually break away from the Ivory Coast to become the Upper Volta, which would eventually be renamed Burkina Faso.

But even that wasn’t enough labor, so both native Ivorian and French planters turned to slavery. Of course, they didn’t call it that; slavery had been outlawed in the most remote of French colonies by 1905. But this “forced labor” was clearly slavery. Gangs would kidnap Ivorians or Upper Voltans and press them into work outfits to be rented out to the cocoa plantations, or the plantations would buy labor from chiefs who enslaved and sold their own people. Children in particular were popular slaves because they were easy to control, cheap to maintain, and cocoa farming didn’t require much strength. Numbers are understandably hard to come by, but slave labor undoubtedly constituted a significant portion of cocoa farming labor in the Ivory Coast by the 1930s.

From the Farm to Paris

In 1927, FHB was exiled from Abidjan to a rural hospital where it was assumed he would calm down and learn some humility. But FHB decided to make the most of the opportunity. He threw himself into his work, travelling through small villages where he improved health and sanitation with modernization plans, like separating drinking water from wastewater. Village chiefs noticed that disease and mortality fell wherever he went, and so he became quite popular as this clever, learned figure who devoted his energy to helping the poor (though with a decent salary). Plus, just like back in Abidjan, everyone was impressed by an African who dressed like a European and spoke impeccable French.

This was FHB’s life for over a decade, and he became increasingly disturbed by what he saw around him. He saw that the Ivorian economy was growing, but partially on the backs of tens of thousands of slaves who were kept in enclosures, fed barely enough to survive, and physically prevented from leaving. He saw that the increasing population of white French plantation owners were just as educated as him on colonial law and knew that slavery was technically illegal, but they turned a blind eye both for profit and because there was an attitude of “that’s just how things work in barbaric Africa.” And FHB noticed that these white plantation owners received explicit legal privileges over native farmers (like his father) that gave them preferential access to credit and labor.

Francophilia was and always would be a big part of FHB’s ethos, but he was not a mindless zealot. FHB’s rural experience shook his faith in the French system as he saw the hypocrisy and brutality of their rule with his own eyes. For the first time, FHB developed a nationalist consciousness and considered the prospects of Ivorian independence, or at least serious reform to the French colonial administration.

Throughout the 1930s, the Ivory Coast emerged from colonial obscurity into a higher-tier colony status, though still well behind Senegal and Ghana in West Africa. French investment continued to drive agricultural production, and a farming boom birthed something approximating a native middle class, or at least lower-middle class. To their credit, the French colonial administrators set up a very easy land-grant system to promote farming and thousands of Ivorians got free plots of land. It wasn’t just the privileged tribal elite farming coffee and cocoa, but also educated civil servants, merchants, and hardworking laborers with some savings. The average cocoa or coffee farm size was small, but the farm owners made good money for colonial Africans.

In 1933, FHB’s father died and FHB was in line to inherit his chiefdom based in Yamoussoukro. But FHB preferred his medical career, so he passed the chiefdom to his younger brother. When that brother died unexpectedly in 1939, FHB finally decided to do his duty and go home to become chief. His medical career ended permanently.

Kenyon’s depiction of FHB’s homecoming could be a comedy movie plot. FHB was known for dressing like a French gentleman, talking in silky French, practicing devout Christianity, and he had a head full of medical knowledge, classical literature, and more recently, politics. Then, he was suddenly the overlord of 36 rural villages populated almost entirely by illiterates and still quite a few Pagan animists.

But Kenyon’s description of FHB’s mindset was more befitting of a drama. Growing up, he had been the son of a chief, and a fairly powerful one at that. But by the late 1930s, the Ivory Coast’s village chiefs were glorified bureaucrats. They had been reduced to tax collectors by the French colonial administration. Compared to all FHB had seen in Abidjan and Dakar, and what he had heard about France from white contacts, being a rural chief in the inland of the Ivory Coast felt quaint.

But yet again, FHB made the most of his situation with skill and knowledge. He had just spent a decade travelling through villages throughout the southern Ivory Coast, and he had developed a good understanding of agriculture. So he turned his focus away from trite chiefdom work and towards his father’s cocoa plantations. He modernized their cultivation methods, bought equipment and fertilizer, and drove production into high gear. Successful harvests were rolled over into more investment and expansion. Within a few years, FHB was emerging as a cocoa baron in the early boom years of the Ivory Coast.

In 1936, the left wing Popular Front took over the French government. It consisted of socialists and communists with many plans for France, one of which was to liberalize the French colonial administration. Popular Front appointees flocked to the colonies and set about softening or revoking many of the laws that discriminated against French Africans, including the agricultural laws in the Ivory Coast. Censorship was also lessened, and Africans were permitted, if not encouraged, to develop a sense of regional identity. FHB saw all this as a step in the right direction.

But the Popular Front lost power in 1938. The following year, World War II broke out, and the year after that, France was invaded by Nazi Germany. The French government fell within weeks and the collaborationist Vichy France was established in the nation’s south. All of France’s colonies were put under Vichy’s control.

What this meant for the Ivory Coast was that there was about a three year period ending in 1943 when the colony was controlled by a fascist government in league with Nazi Germany. All the liberalizing policies of the Popular Front were terminated, and a new set of laws were enacted that were far more repressive than the pre-Popular Front days. The entire colony was given quotas of crops to produce, native farmers were legally prohibited from hiring any labor so it could all be preserved for white farmers, and the informal slavery system was formalized in law.

These were tough times for FHB and other native farmers, and in response, serious solidarity and political consciousness developed in the Ivory Coast for the first time. Until that point, the Ivory Coast was quite a passive, even contented colony in the French Empire. Then three years of Vichy rule hardened a core of relatively well-off native farmers who began to make big plans for their colony. And at the head of this core was FHB, who through entrepreneurial gusto, wise management, and strong political connections, had muscled his way into becoming probably the single-largest cocoa farmer in the Ivory Coast by the mid-1940s.

The Ivory Coast was seized by Free France in 1943 and a provisional colonial administration was put in place. The following year, FHB and seven other wealthy farmers capitalized on the chaos to form the Syndicat Agricole Africaine (SAA), the colony’s first real political organization and high-level economic cooperative. Its stated goals were not radical, but just to advocate for reforms in the administration for the benefit of native farmers – eliminate the discriminatory labor policies, cut out the European middlemen between native farmers and European buyers, and if possible, end the forced agricultural labor. Naturally, as its wealthiest member, FHB became the SAA’s first leader.

The SAA was an immediate hit. In 1944, there were 40,000 cocoa and coffee farmers in the Ivory Coast, and about half of them signed up for the SAA in its first year. The vast majority of these farmers had small plots, but combined, they dwarfed the mere 200 (rather larger) European farms in the colony. Best of all for FHB, the SAA got an official seal of recognition from the French government, which, rather than view the SAA as a threat to French rule, welcomed FHB and his educated landed aristocratic friends as partners in growing the Ivory Coast’s economy.

World War II ended in Europe in April 1945. The French government reformed around the vision of Charles De Gaulle, the stalwart leader of Free France who sought to put the nation back on solid footing as a more benevolent and inclusive empire. Thus the French Fourth Republic enacted a daring and unprecedented colonial policy: each of France’s colonies would elect a single representative to serve in the French legislature. Black African legislators would have the same power as their white counterparts elected in France, albeit while representing vastly disproportionately more people per representative.

FHB immediately set his sights on the French legislature. He was probably the wealthiest Ivorian, he controlled its largest and most powerful political organization, and he had strong name recognition among Ivorian farmers and French colonial administrators.

But first, he set his sights on a lower political seat. The new French colonial administration was setting up dozens of lower-level offices across the colony to encourage self-rule, including a new city council for Abidjan, the colonial capital. Candidates in Abidjan were required to run as a slate, from the city council down through a list of lower offices. Some of FHB’s city council opponents ran with a bunch of Frenchmen on the ticket, hoping to attract European money. Others ran a single ethnic group on the entire slate to curry tribal loyalties.

FHB outfoxed both groups. He countered the first group of opponents by doing a media blitz to denounce European participation in the election, arguing that Ivorians should use the opportunities provided by these new elections to practice genuine self-rule. Apparently, FHB kicked up enough nationalist sentiment to embarrass or scare off the European candidates who all dropped out of the race.

More importantly, FHB countered his second group of competitors by building a slate of candidates under him that cut across ethnic groups, portraying himself as a unifying nationalist above tribal conflict. This campaign strategy would become one of FHB’s defining traits as a political leader for the next 50 years, and would arguably go on to constitute his greatest achievement.

The result – FHB and his slate won in a landslide. Aside from his strategic maneuvering, the election was secured by the SAA which temporarily morphed into FHB’s personal political machine and broke out of its base in the plantation heartland to flood the cities with pro-FHB marketing. The groundwork laid by the campaign would be converted into a new political party the following year.

But before that could happen, FHB launched himself into another election a mere two months after his first victory. The target this time was the real prize – the French legislature. If FHB won, a rural village chief from Yamoussoukro would be taking high office in Paris.

As a political prospect, FHB had even more going for him in this election. In a sense, he was like a frankensteined candidate dreamed up by politicos to appeal to almost every Ivorian demographic – wealthy farmers liked him because of the SAA and because he was one of them, poor farmers liked him because of the SAA and his reputation from years as a rural doctor, his Baoule ethnic group was entirely behind him, educated Ivorians and Europeans liked him because of his background, and even many Muslims liked him because he had a Muslim wife. Kenyon called FHB “miraculously well-placed” to win the election.

But FHB’s major opponent was a Muslim guy from the far north, in what is now known as Burkina Faso. The entire territory was integrated into the Ivory Coast at the time and so all of their votes counted toward the singular election that would send a legislator to Paris. FHB had little experience in the north or with its people besides seeing them work as migrant farm labor in the south. So all FHB could do is throw everything he had into the south with the SAA political apparatus and hope to drum up enough support.

The result – FHB won with 50.7% of the vote. It would be the only close election of his life.

Apparently a big fan of changing his name to commemorate life achievements, Felix Houphouët became Felix Houphouët-Boigny. The new addition, Boigny, means “battering ram” in his native Baoule language.

Paris and Colonial Ascendency 

At age 40, FHB went to Europe for the first time in his life. From Kenyon:

“Felix Houphouët-Boigny set off for Paris in November 1945, a monied but unworldly Ivorian plunged into a freshly liberated city. Edith Piaf was performing on the Champs-Elysees. There was jazz, experimental theater, and now Houphouët-Boigny was taking his seat among the men of empire.”

FHB was now the top man in the Ivory Coast and one of the most elite figures in French West Africa. But in Paris, he was just one of hundreds of legislators in a brand-new government system. He suddenly had to navigate Cold War politics, the reconstruction of France, and the general chaos of another low-key French revolution. But yet again, in an uncertain space, FHB found amazing opportunities for advancement.

The French Fourth Republic started to teeter as soon as it began. President De Gaulle’s government consisted of a coalition of a communist party, a socialist party, and a center-right party of De Gaulle loyalists. De Gaulle didn’t like the socialists and hated the communists, whom he correctly diagnosed as being on Stalin’s payroll. The French commies actually wanted to launch a revolution in France immediately after WWII, but Stalin told them to sit tight and play ball in the new French state. De Gaulle parlayed with them for a while but eventually became fed up with the obstructionism. In January 1946, De Gaulle resigned from the presidency.

This threw France into a constitutional crisis. De Gaulle had set up the Fourth Republic, but it was unclear if it could survive without him, especially with the communist-dominated government lacking legitimacy. The communists and socialists desperately tried to salvage the situation with a flurry of reforms and new laws even though nobody knew if the government would survive another month.

In the midst of this chaos, FHB proposed his own law, which was literally called the Houphouët-Boigny Law – a complete prohibition on forced labor in the French colonies, including the closure of all existing loopholes. The communists and socialists had always been sympathetic to the colonial cause, so with no debate nor voting, the Houphouët-Boigny Law was passed and ended slavery throughout the French Empire.

FHB was catapulted to international hero overnight throughout French Africa. Some people saw him as a Moses or Abraham Lincoln, others saw him as a political genius. Not only was he one of the first-ever Africans to serve in a European legislature, but he had ended slavery. And he did it three months!:

“The ecstatic celebrations that followed were not confined to Cote d’Ivoire. Forced labor had been a brutal fixture in other French territories too: in the rubber plantations of Guinea, and the salt mines of Senegal. And now it was over thanks to Felix the ‘battering ram.’”

FHB’s popularity was also reciprocated in France, and not just among his communist and socialist political allies. To many Frenchmen, FHB was the ideal colonial: a refined, urbane Francophile who sought reforms but not revolution, who worked within the French system rather than outside it, who had risen above his station in a colonial backwater and now pushed the French system forward. Plus he liked to party and was quickly becoming a fixture of the elite Parisian social scene.

The best proof of FHB’s new sky-high popularity came a few months later. The communists and socialists couldn’t sort the system out, so the French Fourth Republic collapsed. The new French Union was launched in its place, which slightly scaled back colonial representation in the French legislature, from 30 to 24, but left the Ivory Coast’s seat intact. However, a mere seven months after FHB was first elected to the French legislature, he would have to go back to the Ivory Coast and run again.

The result – FHB won reelection in the Ivory Coast with 98% of the vote. As far as anyone can tell, the election was free and fair. He really truly was overwhelmingly beloved in his homeland.

FHB returned to Paris after the election as by far the most popular, highest profile African politician in the French Empire. He quickly leveraged his influence to bind the new African legislatures into a voting bloc called the African Democratic Rally (RDA) with FHB of course at its head.

FHB and the RDA became a fixture of French politics for the next decade. Its relatively small number of seats constrained its influence, but FHB was able to wield it effectively to gain financial support and limited concessions for colonial Africa.

Back home, FHB consolidated his hold over the Ivory Coast. In 1946, he transformed the SAA’s political apparatus into the Democratic Party of the Ivory Coast – African Democratic Rally (PDIC), the first formal political party in the colony. From his high post, FHB oversaw the party’s spread into the lower organs of representation throughout the Ivory Coast, occasionally encountering opposition, but mostly overwhelming it through better organization, funding, and the outspoken support of the man who had ended slavery. His biggest obstacle for a time was the French colonial administrators who, concerned about FHB’s alliance with the French communists, ordered repression against the PDIC in the early 1950s and would have even arrested FHB if not for his parliamentary immunity. But once the alliance was broken, the French colonials chilled out and basically let FHB take over the country.

FHB split his time between Abidjan and Paris, but clearly favored the latter. Ironically, he was one of the wealthiest men in the French legislature, which, along with being a mass-landowning self-proclaimed capitalist, made his early alliance with the communists a bit uneasy. He lived in luxury in Paris as a socialite and hobnobbed with French statesmen and European nobility. In 1952, FHB divorced his first wife, and two years later, he married his second, a famously beautiful and charming, French-educated Ivorian named Marie-Thérèse Brou, who happened to be 25 years younger than him. The two made a perfect pair in French social circles and were constantly seen at fancy dinners and operas with Marie-Thérèse always in satin gloves and diamonds. She would later be called the “African Jackie Kennedy” by the American press. However, FHB was not loyal to her and I’ve seen sources saying that he had anywhere between one and a dozen children out of wedlock.

FHB loved the luxury and splendor of Paris, but it wasn’t all about having fun. Over the decade, FHB sharpened his political skills to a razor’s edge and built up a massive list of friendly and powerful contacts. He became known as a wheeler-and-dealer, an expert negotiator, and a great seeker of compromise. He always advocated for the Ivory Coast and was principled enough not to sell it out for personal gains, but he took a pragmatic approach to politics. The RDA initially stayed aligned with the communist party until the Cold War turned the national mood against them, so the RDA jumped ship for the moderates and became a mostly loyal supporter of maintaining French colonial policy.

And in return for this support, the French Empire bestowed great wealth on the Ivory Coast. Partially at FHB’s behest, the French government invested over $100 million into the Ivory Coast from 1948 until the late 1950s. Between 1946 and 1958 alone, the French government was responsible for facilitating 70% of investment into the Ivory Coast and footed the bill for 30% of the colonial administrative costs. The already rapidly growing agricultural export sector entered a new boom phase: in 1944, there were 40,000 cocoa and coffee farmers in the Ivory Coast, by 1956 there were 120,000, and by 1959 there were 200,000.

By the mid-1950s, the Ivory Coast had surpassed Senegal as the largest exporter in French West Africa (constituting 40% of total exports and being the only net-exporting colony) and was arguably Ghana’s economic equal. Annual GDP growth was over 7%. The Ivory Coast was by far the largest supplier of cocoa and coffee to France and was beginning to look like the greatest product of French colonialism in the modern age.

FHB rode this success to even more power and popularity both at home in the Ivory Coast and in France. In 1955, he became the French Minister of Discharging the Duties of the Presidency of the Council, which was probably not the most prestigious ministerial post in the French government, but it was the first time in French history that a full-fledged African reached a ministerial position in the French government (or maybe any European government). Kenyon pointed out that a year earlier, Rosa Parks had staged her bus protest in the United States. In 1956, FHB was promoted to Minister of Public Health and Population, the highest health-related government position in an Empire ruling over 200 million people.

FHB was on top of the world, but it was time yet again for the French government to collapse. France lost its colonies in Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam in the mid-1950s. Meanwhile, the French military fought a brutal insurgency to maintain Algeria not as a colony, but as a full-fledged French province. The military claimed it wasn’t getting enough support from Paris while voters wondered if it was worth spending more blood and treasure to maintain control over people who clearly didn’t want to be under French rule. Tensions rose until there was a real threat of a French military coup.

That is until De Gaulle heroically came out of retirement and temporarily became the de facto dictator of France. With the communist influence on the wane, he tried again to rewrite the constitution and come up with a worthy political compromise between the French mainland and its colonies. The result was the French Community, which could best be described as a tighter version of the British Commonwealth. The plan was to hold a referendum in most of France’s colonies on whether to remain with the Empire. Colonies that voted to stay would be granted autonomy over all governing matters besides foreign affairs, currency, financial policies, and key resources. Those who voted to leave would be granted independence but also unceremoniously kicked out of the French sphere.

FHB’s position on the independence question was clear… vote no! Or at least vote no for the foreseeable future. FHB wanted the Ivory Coast to be a free and independent nation once it was ready, but he (IMO accurately) believed it wouldn’t be ready for decades. Even as the most prosperous French African nation, the Ivory Coast was still very poor, and highly dependent on France economically, militarily, and administratively. This wasn’t idle speculation; FHB loved to get in the weeds on economic matters. He was well-aware that French colonial policy was inflating the prices paid to the Ivory Coast for its agricultural goods by 15-20%. If those prices suddenly crashed to global market rates, the Ivory Coast would suffer a massive economic shock, which would make it all but impossible to pick up the 30% administrative costs France currently paid, let alone continue France’s rate of economic investments.

This outlook brought FHB into stark contrast with most up-and-coming African leaders. Most notably, Kwame Nkrumah led Ghana to independence from Britain the previous year with battle cries of “we prefer self-government in danger to servitude in tranquility.” Nkrumah and other major independence leaders like Guinea’s Sékou Touré were always focused on politics, nationalism, and grand civilizational narratives; FHB was more focused on watching lines go up or down on pieces of paper, and I don’t mean that in a bad way. FHB knew those lines, representing commodity prices, interest rates, public investment levels, and export rates, represented the livelihood of his people. With a healthy dose of Francophilia, he pushed aside narrow nationalistic concerns as foolish and base, and set about wonkishly planning for the Ivory Coast’s future. To put all that in a slightly more poetic form, FHB once said:

“It is not the shell of independence which counts, it is the contents, the economic contents, the social contents, and the human contents.”

So FHB set about defeating the independence referendum. He cranked the political machinery of the SAA and PDIC into high gear and launched his most aggressive campaign yet. By Meredith’s description, this period was something of a turning point in FHB’s outlook where he began to lean more into authoritarianism. Meredith described one campaign event where FHB drove in an open-top car through a jubilant crowd of thousands in Abidjan to a soccer stadium and then gave a speech to a crowd of 40,000. He mostly spoke about how well the Ivory Coast was doing and how a hasty independence vote would jeopardize their progress, but he also declared that anyone who voted “yes” on the referendum would have 24 hours to leave the country, or else be arrested. Then he favorably compared this ad hoc proclamation with no legal power to American McCarthyism and Stalinist purges.

The Ivory Coast voted against independence with 99.9% of the vote at 98% turnout, and with the PDIC winning 100% of local legislative seats. The results were obviously fraudulent, but it’s an open question why FHB even bothered with the rigging. The Ivory Coast had a reputation as the most Francophile colony in the Empire, but even the less loyal colonies voted to remain. Out of 20 voting colonies, 19 voted to stay with France, with French Polynesia having the lowest margin of victory at 64.4%, and 15 colonies voting to stay with margins greater than 92%. Only Guinea voted for independence.

It was another moment of triumph for FHB, the strongest signal yet of both his loyalty to France and uncontested authority over the Ivory Coast. But all was not well in FHB’s life. Dark forces conspired against him…

The year after the election, FHB was chilling at one of his mansions in the Ivory Coast when a gardener showed him a dead black cat that he had discovered buried in FHB’s yard. Despite normally being known as a cool-headed and rational figure, FHB announced to the media that there had clearly been an attempt on his life using Voodoo black magic. He dubbed it the “black cat conspiracy,” and quickly identified his second-in-command at the PDIC, a highly charismatic figure who openly criticized FHB’s Francophilia and wanted to push the party in a more nationalistic direction, as the culprit. Rather than arrest and execute this guy for treason, FHB made him the ambassador to Israel and sent him off to political exile. FHB narrowly avoided death, but the removal of his greatest rival in the PDIC was a very nice silver lining.

And the timing couldn’t have been better. Despite De Gaulle’s best efforts, the French Community was a bust and colonies began agitating for genuine independence almost immediately after the vote (I can’t actually find good explanations for why this was the case). In June 1960, Mali was the first to go, shortly followed by Dahomey (later called Benin), Niger, and the Upper Volta.

On August 7, 1960, the Ivory Coast was officially and unilaterally granted independence from France. FHB and his lieutenants wrote up a constitution with a strong French-style executive branch overseen by a president with five-year terms, and a unicameral parliament. The PDIC was officially written as the sole legal party in the country. In November, the Ivory Coast held its first elections; FHB won with 100% of the vote and the PDIC got 100% of the legislative seats.

The Ivorian Miracle Begins

Felix Houphouët-Boigny didn’t want the Ivory Coast to be independent for decades and had politically fought for his land to remain within the French Empire for years. But in 1960, FHB became the leader of a free Ivory Coast, not just as its president, but as a de facto dictator who ruled with nearly unchallenged authority over a single-party state. Fortunately, FHB had envisioned this scenario.

The plan – make the independent Ivory Coast resemble a French colony as much as possible. This was achieved through a combination of official legal structuring and backroom deals made between FHB and prominent French government officials and business leaders.

Arguably the most important component of the plan was maintaining French human capital. Nearly all Frenchmen pulled out of Guinea after it voted for independence in 1958; the evacuations of the other French colonies were less dramatic, but by the end of the 1970s, French Africa had lost the vast majority of its highly skilled civil servants, engineers, teachers, academics, and businessmen. The French colonial administrators were usually ordered to leave by the French government, while the private sector Frenchmen typically left out of concern for their safety and/or economic well-being.

But the Ivory Coast was different. FHB folded virtually the entire French colonial administration into his own government, making his the only independent African state besides South Africa and Rhodesia that consisted almost entirely of whites at the upper echelon (in the 1970s, 94% of “senior staff” in the Ivorian government was white).

One of the French expats to stick around was M. Raphael Sailer, the newly appointed Ivorian Minister of Economy and Finance. At the government’s behest, he wrote the Ivorian Code des Investissements, a far-reaching set of regulations designed to preserve the existing economic structure and protect French investments, as well as invite new European capital: the top tax bracket was capped at 25% with a guarantee of no new or higher taxes for 25 years, expats were required to reinvest 10% of profits back into the Ivory Coast but the other 90% could be transferred out of the country with no absolute limit, import duties on raw materials were eliminated, and a host of regulations were put in place for guaranteeing good terms on resource concessions.

At independence, the Ivory Coast had more Europeans than any other French colony – 10,000 – 90% of whom were French. In the ensuing decade, the Ivory Coast was (as far as I can tell) the only former colony in all of Africa to increase its European population, to 20,000 by 1963, to 40,000 by 1970, and maybe up to 50,000 by 1975.

Then there were commodity prices. The Ivory Coast had grown on a booming cash crop sector based on coffee, cocoa, and timber, which, combined, equated to 24% of GDP and 80% of the country’s export value in 1960. But a not-insignificant portion of that value came from trade agreements that the colony had maintained with France wherein the latter paid a 15-20% mark-up compared to international prices.

So as the new president of the Ivory Coast, FHB negotiated with France to continue these trade agreements in only slightly altered forms. In 1961, the Ivory Coast signed a 5-year trade deal with France guaranteeing that the latter would import at least 100,000 tons of coffee (70% of the Ivory Coast’s production) at an inflated price. Similar deals were made for cocoa and timber with only minor adjustments made over the following decade.

While these agreements clearly benefitted the Ivory Coast at the expense of the French consumer, this was not a free lunch. In 1960, the Ivory Coast imported 22.3 billion CFA worth of goods from France. In return for France propping up Ivorian agricultural prices, the Ivory Coast agreed to maintain its 1960 level of imports, and to accept minimum import quotas. The Ivory Coast was required to buy 100% of its imported wheat and flour from France, as well as 70% of its wine and printed cotton cloth, 60% of its milk, 50% of its tractors and air conditioners, and 30% of its radios. While the import deals were obviously more beneficial to France, it could be argued that by forcing Ivorian consumers to buy imported wheat and flour at artificially high prices, Ivorian food producers were incentivized to convert to cash crops better suited to Ivorian comparative advantage.

The relationship between the governments of the Ivory Coast and France prompted a new wave of investment to dwarf the old colonial development funds. From 1960 to 1970, the Ivorian government received $650 million in grants and cheap loans from Western governments, while another $300 million came in from foreign direct investment (about 50% of both from France, the rest mostly American). While the Ivorian government squandered a colossal amount of money later, these funds seemed to mostly be used as intended in the 1960s. The new country developed the best road network in West Africa, expanded its ports to handle anticipated exports, built a giant hydroelectric dam, mechanized its larger farms, launched a light industrial sector, erected apartment buildings for the new middle class, and built luxury estates and hotels for the rapidly expanding upper class.

The result of early Ivorian economic policy surpassed even the most optimistic projections for the Ivory Coast. From 1960-1970:

• GDP increased from 141 billion CFA to 414 billion CFA (194%)
• Export value increased from 40 billion CFA to 138 billion CFA (245%)
• Average annual real GDP growth was 8.8%, with a peak of 17.9% in 1964
• Real GDP per capita reached the second highest in Sub-Saharan Africa, lagging only behind South Africa
• Despite ever-increasing spending, the government nearly always maintained an annual budget surplus

From 1960-1972:

• The value of coffee exports rose from 19 billion CFA to 38 billion CFA (100%)
• The value of timber exports rose from 7 billion CFA to 38 billion CFA (443%)
• The value of cocoa exports rose from 9 billion CFA to 28 billion CFA (211%)

The Ivory Coast’s record was even more remarkable given its competitors. The rest of West Africa was given independence in the early 1960s with high hopes and often ample foreign support, but one-after-another, the independent states collapsed into sluggish authoritarian military dictatorships and the meager economic gains of colonialism were lost.

To the Ivory Coast’s east, Ghana went from one of the best African economies to one of the worst, culminating in the overthrow of Kwame Nkrumah in 1966. Farther east, Togo, Benin, and Nigeria all faced coups around the same time, with the last descending into a brutal civil war. To the Ivory Coast’s north, the Upper Volta held on to democracy for six years until its first coup, and Mali’s elected government fell two years later. To the Ivory Coast’s west, Guinea remained under the Mao-inspired Sékou Touré who drove an already impoverished colony further into the ground. Of the Ivory Coast’s neighbors, only Liberia remained a democracy, albeit an extremely corrupt and repressive one whose final president would be gunned down by an impromptu coup in 1980.

In the middle of all that was the Ivory Coast – sky-high economic growth, no coups, no civil wars, minimal ethnic tension, and an extraordinarily beloved leader. The economic success of the Ivory Coast reinforced FHB’s popularity and totalizing stranglehold over the country, and by the end of the decade, many both within and outside of Africa were beginning to think of him as some sort of political genius. But FHB was a cautious man and he made sure to hedge his bets in case his fortunes turned.

First, FHB continued to rig every election. The Ivory Coast was constitutionally a one party state, but the PDCI could theoretically elect another president in his place. He undoubtedly would have won the elections throughout the 1960s and 1970s anyway, but just to be safe, he made sure he always ran for president unopposed and got a ludicrously high voter turnout to boost his legitimacy.

Second, it didn’t take a political genius to recognize that the greatest threat to African leaders of the era was not voters, but militaries. FHB’s solution was to barely have one. The Ivory Coast, with a population that reached 5 million by the early 1970s, had a military consisting of only a 3,100-man army, a 100 man navy, a 300 man airforce, a 2,000 man police-oriented paramilitary, and an 800 man national guard, all of whom were armed and trained by the French military. If the Ivory Coast ever needed to defend itself against a real threat, it would invoke its mutual defense alliance with France and receive assistance from the tens of thousands of French soldiers stationed throughout West Africa.

And third, FHB may or may not have conducted a good old fashioned purge. In 1963, 200 government officials attended a PDCI conference in which FHB announced they were all under arrest on suspicion of plotting a coup. 86 men were put on trial, 44 of whom were sentenced to hard labor, and 13 were sentenced to death. Dozens more were arrested in a second wave a few months later.

But then nothing came of it. Most of the jail sentences were commuted and not a single person was executed. Many of those released were given cabinet positions a few years later. The one casualty was the head of the Supreme Court who committed suicide in jail; FHB bizarrely read a very obviously fake confession from the guy on live tv. The judge allegedly not only tried to plot a coup against FHB and was responsible for the whole black cat Voodoo murder plot, but also had a suitcase full of magic potions and an FHB effigy. And to top off the weirdness, the party official who oversaw the whole operation (arrests and imprisonments) was the old second-in-command whom FHB had recalled from Israel after having previously been accused of trying to murder FHB with a cat.

Ultimately, no one knows if there was ever a real coup or if the whole ordeal was just a power consolidation play from FHB. Either way, FHB’s authority went utterly uncontested for about the next 25 years.

The Roaring 70s

The first decade of Ivorian independence saw an economic miracle. The 1970s were even better.

From 1970-1979:

• GDP increased from 414 billion CFA to 1.9 trillion CFA (359%)
• Export value increased from 138 billion CFA to 579 billion CFA (320%)
• Average annual real GDP growth was 7%, with a peak of 12.3% in 1976
• By some measures, the Ivory Coast briefly neared South Africa as the wealthiest African country

From 1972-1978:

• The value of coffee exports rose from 38 billion CFA to 131 billion CFA (245%), making the country the third largest coffee exporter in the world behind Brazil and Colombia
• The value of timber exports rose from 38 billion CFA to 70 billion CFA (84%)
• The value of cocoa exports rose from 28 billion CFA to 233 billion CFA (732%)

In the midst of a lot of eye-popping numbers, the cocoa data stands out the most. The cocoa-coffee-timber trio still accounted for 25% of GDP and a majority of export value, but cocoa had rocketed past the others in importance. From independence to the end of the 1970s, annual cocoa production had increased from 100,000 tons to 370,000 tons, raising the Ivory Coast from a distant second place in national cocoa production to a dominant first, with over 20% of the global production, and rising.

And the timing could not have been better. Here are cocoa prices:

Outside of the big three,  some other crops were coming along too, most notably pineapples and bananas. Light industry also seemed to be booming with government support, particularly textiles in the cities where leftover immigrant labor was soaked up by foreign-owned factories. By the mid-1970s, a substantial portion of the Ivory Coast’s export value (20%+) was from manufacturing, and the portion would have been even larger in the late 1970s if it weren’t for the cocoa price boom at that time.

Read any account of the Ivory Coast from the era or shortly afterward and it sounds the same. From the Los Angeles Times:

“Ivory Coast has West Africa’s best highways, its most remarkable city skyline, its richest middle class. All were financed by cocoa. The annual per capita gross national product of more than $600 is three times the sub-Saharan average.”

From the New York Times:

“One of the problems of analysts trying to assess economic performance of this prospering West African country last year was to find substitutes for the terms ‘stupendous’ and ‘fabulous,’ liberally used in past years.

But while commentators may be straining for fresh adjectives to describe the continuing strong expansion of the Ivorian economy, development shows no signs of running out of steam.”

The Wise One

By the end of the Ivorian Miracle, FHB was in his 70s, which was especially old in a country where the average life expectancy was in the 40s and the average age was in the teens. His age only compounded his unassailable stature both within and outside of the Ivory Coast, propelling him to an elder statesman status that Jeanne Maddox Toungara described as “virtual deification.” FHB eventually gained numerous nicknames that the Ivorian press actively promoted: “Old Man,” “Grandfather,” and “The Wise One.”

Despite his dictatorial powers, FHB didn’t look anything like a traditional African strongman. He had never served in the military nor had any rough-and-tumble point in his life. In personal conversation, he was not especially charismatic, but he was smooth, clever, and patient. Physically, he was small, hunched, sometimes described as “shrunken.” Cohen, who began meeting with FHB in 1988, described him as “a roly-poly little guy” whose feet dangled from ornate chairs when he sat down for high-level diplomatic meetings.

And yet his authority was virtually unmatched by any leader in Africa. Many contemporary commenters often compared FHB to a king or prince. Toungara argued that his leadership style could be seen as an extension of that of traditional tribal chiefs of FHB’s Akan ethnic group, which portrayed leaders as paternalist father-figures of their people. FHB’s age, which increasingly seemed ancient as his rule extended decade-after-decade past independence, certainly reinforced this perception.

I think FHB’s greatest strength as a ruler was cultivating a unique sort of friendly authoritarianism. When reading about the Ivory Coast, it’s easy to forget that it was a structurally authoritarian state. The Constitution officially permitted only a single party. FHB ruled as a de facto dictator and official president for 33 years, and didn’t allow anyone to run against him for the first 30 years. The Ivorian legislature had all of its candidates hand-picked by FHB until 1982, and then only permitted elections between party members until 1990.

The rarity and difficulty of maintaining such a stranglehold over a post-independence African state cannot be overstated. Nearly all of the 50+ post-colonial African nations saw their original governments fall. Authoritarianism of every stripe was tried, from explicit military dictatorships, to pseudo-presidential states like the Ivory Coast, to weirdo totalitarian states, to straight-up monarchies. Virtually all fell, some to military coups, some to revolutions, and some to mass uprisings. Only the pseudo-democratic Ivorian state not only survived, but prospered under FHB.

One of the main reasons for FHB’s success was what Toungara called a propensity for “negotiation and reconciliation.” While ultimate authority rested with FHB, state decision-making was shared fairly widely among a cadre of loyal lieutenants who formed a political oligarchy. Like Julius Caesar, FHB had a strong predilection for bringing enemies into his fold rather than crushing them. Throughout much of his reign, he held annual high-level meetings among PDIC officials where they were permitted to air any-and-all grievances. Such complainers usually found their issues addressed personally by FHB. The rare more hostile opponents were caught up in FHB’s 1963 purge, or typically exiled. The result was widespread contentment within the Ivorian state and complacency outside it.

All this plays into one of FHB’s greatest policy accomplishments. To spoil the story a bit, the Ivory Coast descended into an ethnic/religious civil war that killed thousands and displaced hundreds of thousands in less than a decade after FHB’s death. An incredible amount of the contemporary accounts attribute the prior ethnic/religious peace of the Ivory Coast to FHB personally. It wasn’t just that his economic policies produced tremendous wealth, it was FHB’s personal ethos that emphasized national Ivorian identity over ethnic division. Perhaps the greatest indicator of the success of this strategy is that FHB managed to rule the country for 33 years as a devout Catholic despite the Ivory Coast being maybe 1/3^rd Christian at the time, and under 20% Catholic.

With all that praise said, FHB had a dark, or at least sneaky side. In public, he was firm and serene; in private, he was hedonistic, spent way too much time partying and chilling in Paris, and as I’ll describe later, he was massively corrupt and likely looted billions of dollars from the Ivory Coast.

FHB’s foreign policy was another destructive oddity. Outwardly, FHB’s foreign policy was a low-tier isolationism where he overtly aligned himself with the United States and Western powers, but avoided getting into real fights with his paltry military and generally rolled his eyes at fantastical ideas like a United States of Africa. One exception to this low-tier isolationism was formally recognizing Biafra, the Igbo break-away state in the 1967-1970 Nigerian Civil War. The Ivory Coast was one of only five countries to offer recognition, and after the war, it took in Biafran refugees and exiles, including the rebellion’s leader. I didn’t find a detailed explanation for FHB’s policy, but it was likely inspired by French support for Biafra, which in turn was based on supporting a Christian minority against a Muslim majority government, and hoping to weaken a dominant non-French-aligned West African state.

But behind closed doors, FHB’s foreign policy was a different beast. He seemed to have a maniacal obsession with covertly meddling in other countries. Former US Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Herman J. Cohen called FHB “a master manipulator and destabilizer, but so low key as to be virtually invisible,” and wrote about him literally enjoying the process (“he loved it”) of forming conspiracies to back foreign revolutionaries or organize assassinations. FHB supported Angolan rebels against the government and he financed and organized the invasion of Charles Taylor’s rebellion in Liberia that caused a 20 year civil war and included such highlights as cannibalistic faction leaders and the Liberian president being murdered on camera. A fun quote from Cohen’s book:

“Houphouët’s response reinforced his image as the éminence grise who did his dirty work from deep behind the scenes. He knew that I knew about his heavy support for Taylor. Ivoirien security forces were transporting Libyan arms from Ouagadougou to Taylor’s lines through Côte d’Ivoire. Yet, his poker face was unchanging. He said, ‘I have never met Charles Taylor. I do not know Charles Taylor. I have nothing to do with Charles Taylor’.”

FHB took a particular interest in his northern neighbor, Burkina Faso. In 1983, FHB helped finance and organize the overthrow of the military government to put Thomas Sankara at the head of the country. FHB treated Sankara, a true-believing socialist who would become known as the “Che Guevera of Africa,” like a dumb kid and referred to him as “just a boy” privately. Western-aligned FHB assumed he could control Sankara but the 30-something kept shouting louder and louder about his socialism, so FHB allegedly (ie. almost certainly) had him assassinated and replaced by a moderate lieutenant. To this day, Sankara’s family maintains that FHB was behind the murder.

Untangling the Ivorian Miracle

Given the unprecedented success of the Ivory Coast during its first twenty years of independence, I want to dive a bit more into the nitty-gritty aspects of its economy. After all, while there have been other African states that looked economically strong on paper, these states are invariably run by corrupt regimes that rent out resources to foreigners and siphon the proceeds away in corruption, leaving the vast majority of the populations in destitution. The Ivory Coast’s resource base of cocoa, coffee, and timber was much broader, but did the wealth generated by these resources translate into prosperity throughout the Ivory Coast? Did the common Ivorian rise with the economic tide?

Sadly, the answer is “sort of yes, but not nearly as much as they should have due to terrible and largely secretive economic policies.” But getting to this answer was surprisingly difficult. Kenyon, Meredith, and even Burgis to a lesser degree presented the Ivory Coast before its economic collapse as a land of relatively widespread prosperity. But after digging into a bunch of more granular economic journal articles, I think the Ivory Coast’s economic prosperity was a lot shallower than it appeared.

But I want to try to give the country a fair shake, so I’ll go through the Ivory Coast’s mixed results in its policies regarding education, health, infrastructure, immigration, culture, and diversification before getting to the heart of the question – who really benefited from the Ivorian Miracle?

Education and Health

As with almost the entire rest of the government, the Ivory Coast adopted the French education system wholesale. Even into the 1970s, Ivorian schools were still using the official curricula set by the French government. Only at that point did “Ivorization” begin to seriously factor in, with about 50% of readings coming from Ivorian authors.

To its credit, the new government did steadily direct more funds towards education as its revenue grew, reaching 20% of the national budget by 1973. In 1960, only 20% of Ivorian children were in primary school; the figure rose to 50% by 1968. By 1971, there were 5,000 primary schools in the Ivory Coast, one third of which were private.

But the next stage of education remained extremely lacking, with only 7% of eligible students aged 12-18 attending school. By 1988, the Ivory Coast’s literacy rate was only 34%. The government attempted to expand human capital by importing French professors for new Ivorian universities (such as the University of Abidjan in 1963) and technical schools, but they never got much capacity, and a substantial portion of that capacity was utilized by the white children of the French minority (ex. in 1970, Abidjan Medical School had 88 French students, compared to 302 Africans). Meanwhile, the wealthiest Ivorians preferred to send their children abroad to France for schooling.

Nevertheless, Thomas Duval Roberts describes Ivorian education as fairly meritocratic: “The centrally administered examination system has permitted talented individuals who have entered the system to rise to the top, regardless of initial status.”

Investments in health also saw mixed returns, but from an even worse base. The government declared healthcare to be a human right and completely free, though provisions were rare outside major cities. In 1963, there was only one doctor per 20,000 Ivorians; in 1969, there was one doctor per 18,000 Ivorians (comparison – Brazil has two per 1,000 today). By 1973, 10% of the Ivorian government’s expenditure was on healthcare. Life expectancy grew from 30-35 in the late 1950s to 41 in the late 1960s.

The Ivory Coast faced a health infrastructure problem common to West Africa but amplified by the Ivorian Miracle and its accompanying population boom. The traditional health problem of the region was tropical diseases, especially malaria, which were prevalent in rural areas that still held the vast majority of the population. But while the government invested heavily in developing cleaner infrastructure in rural areas, the growing urban centers were seeing increasingly common outbreaks of newer diseases associated with high population density like tuberculosis and cholera (the Ivory Coast had its first-ever outbreak in 1970, and it carried a 20% death rate). So the Ivorian government struggled in a two-front health war and never quite made major advances.

Infrastructure

Infrastructure investment was a major government policy both before and after independence, and was quite successful. In both times, a driving force was the typical colonial policy of linking economically profitable geographic regions to the coast to make exporting easier. Fortunately for the Ivory Coast, the south was far more economically prosperous than the north, so it was fairly easy to connect a wide swath of rural coffee and cocoa farming regions via new roads. By 1971, the Ivory Coast had 21,875 miles of road, compared to just short of 53,000 miles today. I’ve seen the Ivory Coast’s roads referred to as “unmatched in black Africa,” and “today the Ivory Coast has the best roads in Africa, the most reliable source of electricity, the best communications…” In my personal experience, the Ivory Coast had the best roads in West Africa, and the best bus network.

According to Roberts, the Ivory Coast had 100,000 cars and trucks in 1969, which in my completely uneducated opinion, sounds too high, but whatever.

By 1968, there were 48 cinemas in the Ivory Coast. In my own experience, cinemas are still quite rare in West Africa. I almost went to one in the Ivory Coast, but I didn’t want to see anything that was playing.

In 1972, Abidjan’s telecommunications center linked with satellites and brought television to the Ivory Coast for the first time.

Population Dynamics

Like almost all of the rest of Africa, the Ivory Coast had been experiencing a massive population boom since at least the end of World War II with annual growth rates easily passing 2%. But unlike nearly every other African country, the Ivory Coast had a growing economy throughout the 1960s and 70s, which combined with huge labor demand due to its agricultural base, resulted in large-scale immigration. The result is possibly the fastest population growth in all of Africa; I’ve seen growth rate estimates between 2.5% and 4%, nearly reaching 5% in the 1970s. For comparison, the only countries on earth with population growth rates above 5% today are Syria and South Sudan.

So, using rough estimates from different sources, I’d say from a population of about 2.6 million in 1950, the Ivory Coast reached 3.2 million in 1960, 5.1 million in 1970, and 8 million in 1980 (currently 27.5 million). Abidjan, the capital, increased from 180,000 in 1960 to 500,000-800,000 in 1973, to 1.4 million in 1980. It’s worth noting that Abidjan was, and still is by far the largest city in the Ivory Coast. In 2021, Abidjan had a population of 6.3 million; the second largest city is Abobo at 1.3 million (and is basically a suburb of Abidjan), followed by Bouaké at 740,000.

The point being that despite rapid population growth and urbanization, the Ivory Coast remained an extremely rural country. In 1961, 85-90% of the population lived in communities of 3,000 or fewer. Though by 1970, the figure had dropped down to 71%.

The interesting part here is the immigration. Aside from South Africa and Rhodesia, I don’t know of any Sub-Saharan African countries that had such a large and important African immigrant population, especially compared to every other West African country which had net-emigration at the time.

In 1960, the Ivory Coast’s population was already 13% immigrant. According to the Area Handbook of the Ivory Coast, by 1969, 25% of the country’s 4 million people were immigrants. By 1972, one third of the country’s population were immigrants, with 750,000-1 million Upper Voltans, 250,000 Guineans, 200,000 Ghanaians, and 50,000-100,000 Malians living in the Ivory Coast. (Note, this source’s total population figures are significantly lower than others, ex. here).

Compare the Ivory Coast then to the US today which is about 13.6% immigrant, or Canada at about 20% immigrant.

Why did the Ivory Coast get so many immigrants? As mentioned, the primary pull factor of these immigrants was working on labor-intensive coffee and cocoa plantations in the south, and by the early 1970s, 50%-80% of agricultural labor was non-Ivorian. Plus the Ivory Coast’s economy was strong in general and paid higher wages than the surrounding countries. Plus, all of the surrounding countries were in various states of political and economic collapse or misery.

But, as with all aspects of the Ivorian state, Felix Houphouët-Boigny deserves a lot of credit for turning the Ivory Coast into an immigrant haven. FHB was a genuine champion of liberal immigration policy, and arguably even an open-border proponent within reason. FHB believed that immigration could culturally tie West Africa together for greater peace and prosperity, and of course, that mass immigration was crucial for the further enrichment of the Ivory Coast.

FHB’s pro-immigrant policies included a proclamation of equality under the law for individuals of all national and ethnic backgrounds. This applied not just to the French whom FHB constantly catered to, but also the dirt-poor Upper Voltans, Malians, and other Africans who worked Ivorian fields. There were exceptions to this proclamation I’ll discuss later, but nonetheless, during the post-independence age, the Ivory Coast was one of the only African states explicitly guaranteeing and enforcing equal rights across ethnic and national lines.

More tangibly, FHB pushed a fairly amazing land distribution scheme. At independence, the vast majority of Ivorian land was owned by the government, and much of it had cultivation potential. In 1963, the state set up an extremely generous homesteading policy wherein individuals could apply for ownership of government land if they could prove that they intended to use it productively. (FHB was a fan of the very Lockean proclamation, “the land belongs to those who develop it”). The policy was just as open to foreigners as native Ivorians, and the result was a burgeoning class of non-Ivorian African small-holder farmers who were significantly more economically productive than seasonal laborers and kept most of their productive gains within the country.

(I really wish I could find good numbers here, but I can’t. My totally rough guestimate is that something like 20-30% of Ivorian farms were owned by non-natives.)

Most surprisingly, the legal equality between Ivorians and immigrants extended to voting; from 1960 to 1980, all West Africans could vote in Ivorian elections. Cohen, who didn’t start meeting FHB until 1987, commented on this in his memoirs:

“Houphouët dealt with the problem of immigrant families with finesse. He reasoned that as long as he was alive, he would have no significant opposition. He was supremely popular among both the Ivoirien people and the Burkinabe immigrant population. The only political dissidents who refused to be co-opted into his political family were centered in the University of Côte d’Ivoire, where the faculty constituted a left-wing intellectual opposition to his emphasis on free market capitalism.

Houphouët’s solution to the immigrant problem was to allow them to vote in presidential elections. Needless to say, he was overwhelmingly reelected every five years. With the right to vote, Houphouët reasoned, the Burkinabe immigrants would feel integrated, even though they really were not, because they were not citizens.”

African countries are infamous for ethnic conflicts (see Nigeria as one of the worst examples). So one would think that importing millions of foreigners would exacerbate internal ethnic strife in the Ivory Coast. Instead, it mostly did the opposite. Rather than fight each other, the Ivory Coast’s many ethnic groups developed a sense of solidarity in their resentment toward immigrants. In the 2000s, the Ivorian north and south would embark on a multi-decade ethnic/religious civil war that killed thousands, but in the 1960s and 1970s, the north and south were aligned against the foreign immigrant menace.

Anti-immigrant sentiment never got completely out of control, but there was tension that occasionally erupted into riots. The main point of contention was that immigrants poured into the country at such high rates that even the ample labor needs of the agricultural sector were fulfilled, and so many immigrants ended up living in squalor in the Ivory Coast’s cities. They forced down wages, formed slums, some turned to crime, and they generally added to the infrastructural burdens of the country. By the late 1960s, Abidjan had an unemployment rate of 25%, and tens of thousands of mostly immigrants were seen to be loafing around and supposedly leeching off Ivorian prosperity.

Throughout the 1960s and 70s, FHB was astoundingly popular among Ivorians, and yet even he couldn’t overcome entirely overcome anti-immigrant sentiment. In 1965, FHB broached the idea of putting virtually all immigrants on a fast-track to dual-citizenship. Normally, FHB didn’t have to concern himself with the prospect of passing laws since the legislature just rubber-stamped all his plans, but this time he faced steep opposition from more nationalistic elements of his own party. When the dual-citizenship plan was floated to the public, the result was rioting against immigrants and protests in the streets against FHB, a first in his career. FHB quietly dropped the proposal.

Cultural Detriments and Boons to Economic Growth

Most of my analysis of the Ivory Coast’s economy looks at high-level government policies and their effects on the population, but I don’t want to make the mistake of ignoring more granular cultural factors. In the beginning of the 20^th century, most of the Ivory Coast’s population lived at a medieval technology level, if that. By independence in 1960, only a few neighborhoods in Abidjan and other urban areas had anything close to modern technology and infrastructure. It should be no surprise that there were norms within the Ivory Coast that clashed with the optimization demands of a modernizing economy.

One factor that particularly fascinates me is African culture norms regarding sharing, which I also mentioned in Notes on Ghana and The Gambia. Basically, there are very strong norms in much of Africa that encourage voluntary sharing of wealth among family, kin, friends, and even strangers. For instance, my tour guide in Ghana made a lot more money than his 11 siblings, and after giving money to his wife, he seemed to give pretty much the entire rest of his income surplus to his siblings.

I’ve heard some idle speculation that this might be an underrated cause of Africa’s poverty. Economic growth is partially predicated on savings that become investments into productive activity; the sharing norm may be sapping wealth away from more productive Africans to less productive Africans, and by extension, from investment to consumption. My Ghanaian tour guide could be putting money into a savings account that is investing productively, but instead he’s giving money to brothers and sisters to be spent on food and clothing (which may also be discouraging their individual labor productivity).

Thomas Duval Roberts, writing in 1973, makes similar comments:

“The Ideal man [to Ivorian society] is one who, having made his way in this new impersonal world of money, does not forget his family and relatives and aids them all to rise with him. Loyalty to one’s subgroup is still considered a prime virtue.”

Roberts even points to some interesting empirical evidence:

“A serious impediment to the improvement of the standard of living of an individual through increasing his income is the traditional practice of sharing the wealth with all members of the extended family. New modern housing has been turned into slums by the influx of relatives who expect to share equally in the improved economic condition of one of their kin, and salaries intended to support a family of 3 or 4 often must be stretched to support 10 or more. The result generally is a lowering rather than an improvement of living of all concerned.”

(Note – emphasis mine.)

In other words, when many Ivorians made more money at work, they actually ended up poorer in the long run because family and friends would flock to them for hand-outs.

To be clear, I am not making some sort of blanket condemnation of sharing or of African cultural norms, and obviously these norms exist to some degree throughout the world. This sharing norm serves a function: it collectivizes risk. If all family members are entitled to the wealth of each other, then individual family members are better protected from misfortune and incompetence by relying on the wealth of other members. This makes a lot of sense in more unstable and unpredictable environments, such as chronically unstable and impoverished nations. However, there are clearly perverse incentives at play in such a dynamic: incompetence/laziness can be rewarded, and competence/diligence can be punished.

Perhaps even more interestingly, Roberts claims that there is evidence that Ivorians are actually less bound to the sharing norm than other Africans:

“…surveys of family budgets conducted in 1955-1956 showed a steady improvement in diet and housing accompanying higher income. In contrast to similar surveys conducted in Ghana and Nigeria which showed a constant expenditure on food regardless of overall income, the Ivory Coast surveys showed that expenditures on food increased with income and that the increase was brought about by a consumption of high-value foods such as meat, dairy products, and fresh and canned fruits and vegetables.”

In other words, though Ivorians tended to share their wealth when they made more money, they still kept enough of their wealth to improve their diets. In contrast, Ghanaians and Nigerians seemed to share so much of their wealth that they didn’t even buy better food when they earned more money. (Of course, this is based on 70 year old surveys, and I have no idea what the results would be today.)

Throughout my travels, I noticed, and many locals explicitly joked about, the phenomenon of “African time,” which I’ll describe by very delicately quoting Wikipedia: “the perceived cultural tendency, in parts of Africa and the Caribbean toward a more relaxed attitude to time. This is sometimes used in a pejorative sense, about tardiness in appointments, meetings and events.” Roberts comments:

“Attitudes toward work and time are slowly changing. While a high sense of professional consciousness and priority to efficiency is not yet established, it would be false to draw an opposite picture. Punctuality may still be a rare virtue and diligent, self-directed work unusual, but the pressure of those with moral authority are in this direction, and the new concepts and practices are spreading.”

Roberts also had plenty of positive estimations of Ivorian culture and its conduciveness to modernity. He noted that Ivorian culture was in upheaval because of its stunning economic growth, and that many Ivorians had gained the “classic values of an industrial system. They place primacy on a man’s accomplishment, rather than accidental attributes which he obtains by birth.” A lot of his descriptions remind me of modern immigrants to the West, who tend to be more optimistic than locals. For instance:

“The outlook of the modern Ivory Coaster includes the assumption that the world is improvable, and in particular that living standards, both those of himself and his family and of the nation as a whole, can surely rise, partly by effort, partly by reclaiming outside assistance which is morally due to him.”

Also:

“The outward symbols of Western bourgeoise affluence are much valued. The car, the refrigerator, the large house are signs of success; the trip abroad, the imported fruit even more so. Yet a successful man is required not to forget altogether the traditional ways and to pay at least outward obeisance to the traditional forms…”

A final note of tempered optimism from Roberts:

“There can be said to be a true ‘living in the present’ in the modern sector of the Ivory Coast. Life is enjoyed for what it can provide, and the major complaints center about the insufficiency of material comforts and rewards. Yet there is a basic optimism that there will be more in the future. Both the political system and the values of the modern elite are built around this optimism, which is fed by increasing contact with the outside world. The modern elite is determined to spread its values throughout the country and, to a considerable degree, is succeeding.”

Combating the Resource Curse

The “Resource Curse” is the concept that countries whose economies are heavily based on a single high-value commodity (ex. oil) tend to perform badly. I’ve written about the resource curse as it applies to Nigeria and Saudi Arabia, but the Ivory Coast presents an interestingly altered form of it. If you already have a firm grasp of the resource curse, then skip everything between the next two pictures to where I discuss the Ivory Coast specifically.

Imagine you’re the benevolent dictator of a dirt-poor country. Your people discover oil on your land. Great! There’s money to be made which can be reinvested into the country for general prosperity. The oil just needs to be extracted, possibly refined, and then sold abroad.

Though this boon can greatly benefit your country, it also presents many potential problems and challenges.

First, despite your best efforts, your country literally cannot drill the oil and sell it. If you were the dictator of Norway you could do that, but you’re not. Your dirt-poor people don’t produce enough wealth to be taxed to purchase the expensive equipment needed to suck the oil out of the ground, let alone refine it. And even if you somehow did have the money for all that, your country doesn’t have the expertise. Your whole country has only produced a few hundred engineers, and almost all of them actually live in America or Europe, and only a small fraction of them have experience in oil and gas, and none of them have experience building entire facilities from scratch.

Frustratingly, you have the oil, but you can’t actually use it. So what do you do?

You bring in foreigners to help. There are American, European, Middle Eastern, and Asian companies all vying to drill your oil. Great! They can come over here, invest the money, provide the experts, and extract the oil. But of course, these foreigners will want to take their cut of the profits, and since they are doing 99% of the work, and because you’re the untrustworthy dictator of a dirt-poor country, they are going to demand the vast majority of the profits and just leave you with a tiny cut to reinvest into your country.

So the foreigners come over, set up the equipment, extract the oil, sell it, and give you your cut. This situation can run indefinitely, as is basically the case in Equatorial Guinea and many other African nations. Production is steady and efficient, but the net gains to the host nation are fairly small.

Alternatively, you could let the foreigners run the show for a few years, and then nationalize production. Send in the army, seize the oil wells, throw out the foreigners, extract and sell oil under a state-run corporation run by natives who have experience working with the foreigners, and fully reap the benefits. Historically, this path has usually resulted in disaster, as evidenced by Venezuela, Iran, Bolivia, Egypt, and others. The nationalization itself pisses off the rest of the world, usually provokes economic sanctions, tanks the national credit, and indefinitely hinders foreign investment. In the long run, the natives tasked with running the oil wells tend not to be as skilled as the foreigners, resulting in steadily declining production and the degradation of material. These issues are usually exacerbated by an arbitrary state which rewards loyalty over competence and further stifles the efficiency of the oil operation.

There is a third option. I don’t know if there is a standard term for it, but I think of it as nativization – the native country can slowly build up the wealth, and more importantly, the expertise, to amicably transfer oil operations from the foreigners to the locals. I wrote about this in Notes on Saudia Arabia – the Saudi government agreed to let multiple foreign firms drill in their lands at enormous profit only if they began training native Saudis in the engineering and management aspects of the oil industry. These foreign firms enjoyed about 50 years of drilling while paying the Saudi state a fairly small cut, until they were amicably bought out by the government over multiple stages. Today, Saudi Arabia’s oil company, Aramco, is one of the most profitable ventures on earth and has been basically single-handedly funding the entire country for 50 years.

Nativization can work great, but the process takes decades, may be politically unpopular, and there is no guarantee that the foreigners will take the buy-out. Besides, extracting the oil is just the first big resource curse problem. The second problem is commodity pricing risk.

If your dirt-poor country figures out how to drill and sell a ton of oil, your government and economy will quickly become dependent upon the oil industry, and by extension, the price of oil. If 50% of your GDP and 80% of your government tax revenue is oil-based, then a 10% swing in oil prices (which happens quite often) can have massive impacts on your GDP, tax revenue, unemployment, credit ratings, welfare payments, and the general health of your society.

So if you’re a benevolent ruler of this once-dirt-poor-but-now-oil-rich country, you’ll want to diversify your economy, or develop other economic sectors so you are less dependent on oil.

But as with the oil extraction, diversification faces its own hosts of challenges and issues. If your country is run by smart, high-trust, non-corrupt, highly educated, professional people, then you can just start a sovereign wealth fund that invests your oil wealth around the world and generates a decent return. Again, if you’re the dictator of Norway you can do this, but since you’re running a dirt-poor country, this probably won’t work. You’re likely to end up like Nauru which wasted its phosphate wealth on dumb skyscrapers, or like Malaysia which gave $4.5 billion to some random guy who ran away with it.

Alternatively, you could invest in building up traditional developing country industries, like textiles, basic manufacturing, electricity, roads, etc. Sometimes this works, but often it doesn’t. You have to contend with Dutch Disease making your exports more expensive and therefore less competitive in the global market, and you have to find scarce capital that wasn’t crowded out by your oil industry to launch these projects. Plus, your once-poor population might not be too fond of going to work in the factories when you have all this easy oil money floating around. Plus, centralized economic planning is really hard to do efficiently and tends to be wasted on corruption.

Or you could go the Dubai/broader Gulf States route of aiming for tourism. Forget dirty factories, build sleek airports, pretty buildings, lavish hotels, establish nature preserves, and hire some Instagram influencers to take photos on your beaches. If you have a good geographic location and natural beauty, maybe you can pull it off. Or maybe everyone will think your new cities are sterile and “soulless” and will criticize the immigrant labor you mistreated to build all this new stuff.

The options are limitless, but the pitfalls are more numerous. Hence, few nations have escaped the resource curse and found prolonged distributed economic prosperity.

The Ivory Coast has (almost) no oil, but faced a similar dynamic at independence. Like a classic resource curse state, the Ivory Coast was heavily dependent on commodity exports, particularly timber, coffee, and increasingly cocoa, which totaled to around 25% of GDP and 77.4% of export value at the Ivory Coast’s independence. The prices of these commodities tend not to swing quite as much as oil, but they still have their ups and downs along with their own unique vulnerabilities to unusual weather and disease.

Likewise, the Ivory Coast had its own issues with foreigners. While the French population had a role in cash crop production (particularly timber), its more crucial contribution was to government administration and the educated workforce – the Ivory Coast’s bureaucrats, engineers, teachers, doctors, and high-level businessmen were overwhelmingly French. And while these Frenchmen made valuable contributions to the country, they also sent much of their profits back to France and they held crucial positions that could (eventually) be held by native Ivorians which would be more beneficial to the Ivory Coast as a whole.

Roberts, writing in 1973, describes FHB as having an explicit “Ivorization” policy, but one which he enacted in a slow, rational manner so as to never be “pushed at the expense of competence,” which reminds me of the Saudi state’s philosophy toward taking over its oil extraction. Supposedly, Ivorization meant that new job opportunities for Ivorians were “superimposed on existing situations” without crowding out existing labor. For instance, in the 1960s, the timber industry was dominated by Frenchmen, but in the early 1970s, all new timber concessions were reserved for Ivorians. Likewise, in 1972, non-Ivorians were banned from opening law or medical practices.

Ivorization policies overlapped with the government’s economic diversification efforts. Contrary to its international reputation as a capitalist haven, the Ivorian government took a commanding role in the economy and more-or-less managed it in the form of “state capitalism.” This meant that the state was the single-largest investor in economic activity in the Ivory Coast, and did its best to launch a light industrialization process and diversify cash crops. Ivorization was entangled in this diversification through numerous professional training programs reserved for Ivorians where government agents trained locals in business, professional skills, and how to grow specific crops. Even when Ivorians weren’t explicitly favored, the default assumption was that Ivorians would fill many of the opportunities created by the government’s diversification efforts due to their far greater numbers compared to the small French minority.

Did the government’s Ivorization and diversification efforts work?

Sort of…

For instance, from 1971 to 1975, the government launched a 5 Year Plan with the goal of reducing the percentage export value of the three key cash crops, hoping to reach 66.5% by 1980, down from a high of 90% in the mid-1950s. In 1981 alone, the state spent $122 million, a huge sum for the Ivory Coast, on developing sugar, oil, and cotton, while other land grants and subsidies boosted oil palms, rubber, pineapples, and apples.

Production of these crops did indeed increase. From 1969 to 1971, Ivorian palm oil output increased to make it the second-largest producer in Africa behind Zaire. Cotton output went from 650 tons in 1963 to 42,000 tons in 1972. That same year, the Ivory Coast became the largest banana producer in Africa, surpassing Somalia.

But the costs for the production growth never seemed worth it, like a $12 million sugar refinery plan that ultimately produced sugar at above international market rates (note – the article says $12 billion, but that’s so crazy that I assume it’s a typo). Ultimately, the new and smaller crops amounted to only 6% of export value by the early 1980s. By 1980, timber, coffee, and cocoa reached 83% of export value, largely based on the skyrocketing production of cocoa, which amounted to 5X the combined value of all the newly subsidized crops.

We can see that agricultural diversification didn’t go too well, but tracking Ivorization in agriculture is more difficult. John Dunn, writing in 1978 at the absolute apex of the Ivorian economy, notes that the government weirdly didn’t bother keeping track of a lot of agricultural statistics, like the ethnic backgrounds of farm owners. However, he did note that coffee and cocoa were widely considered to be dominated by native Ivorians (including Felix Houphouët-Boigny).

So a better domain for examining the success of Ivorization and diversification is in the Ivory Coast’s industrial sector. In 1959, right before independence, the Ivory Coast had almost no industry at all; out of only 85,000 non-agrarian workers (in a population of about 3.2 million), 25,000 were government employees and nearly all of the rest worked in transportation and commerce. Then after independence, the new state invested hundreds of millions of dollars into start-up capital and purchasing pieces of foreign industrial concessions. The government also established 25 state-owned enterprises (SOEs) that Dunn described as “springing up without careful planning and being operated with wholly inadequate financial scrutiny.” Throughout the 1970s, the government contributed 50% of all industrial capital in the Ivory Coast.

Efficiency aside, the government’s efforts definitely created some sort of industrial base. By 1971, the non-agricultural labor force had expanded to 192,000, with 142,000 workers employed by private companies, most of whom worked in some form of light industry (mostly textiles). According to the updated Area Handbook for the Ivory Coast, industrial production increased by 275% from 1970-1975, and the industrial share of the Ivory Coast’s total export earnings reached 35% in 1975. Those numbers look like diversification success.

But here’s the rub – Dunn’s look into the Ivory Coast’s economic structure makes it sound like the country was a lot closer to the Equatorial Guinea model than most people thought. It wasn’t native Ivorians starting and managing the businesses, but mostly Frenchmen:

“Ivorians have played a decidedly marginal role in the creation [of an industrial base], management and control of local industry as the suppliers of capital, as entrepreneurs, or as qualified labour and in the share of the industrial wage bill which they receive.”

For example, Dunn looked at a 1968 industrial labor survey:

In other words, almost a decade after independence and some of the best economic growth in the world, Europeans still held almost 95% of high-level industrial jobs.

Here’s how these figures break down in terms of income:

Basically, the Ivorian government was dumping tens (maybe hundreds) of millions of dollars into bootstrapping the Ivorian industrial sector, but a vastly disproportionate amount of the income generated by these new businesses was going to French owners and managers; they constituted 6.8% of the industrial labor force but earned almost one third of the income. Meanwhile, Ivorians and non-Ivorian Africans mostly filled out the low-wage menial roles.

So throughout the Ivorian Miracle, Frenchmen continued to play an outsized role in the Ivorian economy and reaped a disproportionate amount of the benefits. Did this play out because the Ivorian government gave the French unjust economic privileges? Or were the French simply out-competing the native Ivorians?

The answer is somewhere inbetween and is quite difficult to untangle.

Most sources seem to favor the “French received unfair privileges” side. Here’s a key excerpt from Dunn:

“The loss of economic freedom that the Ivory Coast government has been willing to forego through its dependence on foreign private capital is considered the ‘economic cost’ of the country’s rapid growth. Governmental efforts to foster rapid rates of return in the short-term in the quest for foreign capital, have resulted in a particularly distorted import-substitutive industrial structure characterized by a lack of inter-industry flows, a lack of local value-added, small sized industrial units and important transfers abroad with increasingly serious balance of payments effects.”

In other words, the Ivorian government set up a bunch of laws to permit the continued economic dominance of foreign (overwhelmingly French) businesses. This has helped the Ivory Coast continue to grow and has attracted more foreign investments for industrialization, but at the expense of organic local growth, especially in economic domains that typically grow in emerging economies.

Then there’s the matter of access to government resources. The Ivorian state spent hundreds of millions of dollars trying to build up and diversify the Ivorian economy, but according to Dunn, the vast majority of these funds simply weren’t accessible to Ivorians. This wasn’t due to any explicit discrimination, but simply the reality that Frenchmen had disproportionately more capital and therefore were in a better position to apply for and utilize government investments. So a substantial portion of the tax-payer funds intended to launch new factories and cash crop plantations ended up in the hands of already wealthy French businessmen. From Dunn:

“Although no formal barriers prevent Ivorian peasant producers from growing oil palms, rubber, sugar, pineapples or anything else in addition to or in place of the crops with which they are familiar – although they are free to dispose of their produce through the same marketing channels, and on the same terms as European producers of the same crops; although African producers can also, for a minimal fee, receive technical help from a variety of French technical service companies operating as agents of the Ministry of Agriculture, such opportunities remain essentially formal. Few African small-holding peasants are in a position either to meet the cost or to face the psychological challenge involved in utilizing such facilities. Indeed French private enterprise in agriculture has apparently increased since independence mainly by expanding already existing non-agricultural business. Of the eight principal products of diversification, oil palms, rubber, cocoa, pineapples, timber, cotton, rice and sugar, five (all except rice, cocoa and cotton) are grown, harvested, processed and marketed essentially by Europeans without – at the extreme – the need of any peasant participation at all.”

A broader, more abstract argument could also be made that by not penalizing the French nationals more, the Ivorian government was basically allowing Frenchmen to retain privileges they gained through colonial injustices. Sure, an Ivorian could theoretically outcompete a Frenchman for a high-paying professional or bureaucratic job, but the vast majority of Ivorians grew up with substandard nutrition, education, and healthcare compared to even the poorest French expats.

However, Roberts seems to have a more charitable take on the French. The French really were doing most of the key jobs in the Ivory Coast, and continued to carry a heavy share of the investment, so it’s perfectly reasonable for them to be better compensated than the natives. Also, a naive but common reading of the Ivory Coast’s legal structure at independence suggests that it favored France, but that’s not really true. The Ivorian laws and business regulations simply didn’t arbitrarily punish foreigners, as the laws of most other post-colonial African states did. If anything, there were still some minor penalizations of foreign investment, such as the requirement to reinvest 10% of profits into the Ivory Coast.

Even Dunn admits that there were significant non-legal factors impeding the Ivorization process. He partially attributes the European dominance of the new cash crops to “the psychological challenge” faced by many Ivorians in cultivating new crops or utilizing widely available government support systems.

I have to admit that I’m somewhat sympathetic to FHB’s economic policies and the French. Ivorization is good in the long run for the nation, but FHB saw country-after-country collapse into economic ruin as they alienated their European benefactors. Meanwhile, the Ivory Coast boomed and raised living standards across the board with the help of the French (and Americans and Lebanese). Sure, the foreigners got a disproportionate share of the profits, but that’s a price worth paying for widespread prosperity. Right?

The Dirty Secret of the Ivorian Miracle

Martin Meredith and Paul Kenyon portrayed the Ivorian Miracle as a genuine economic wonder that created Africa’s wealthiest economy until it suddenly collapsed. Writing in 1973, Roberts has a similarly highly positive view of the progress in raising living standards made within the Ivory Coast. This seemed to be the consensus I found in numerous sources, even if there were often caveats about French dominance.

But Dunn and especially Robert Hecht revealed that unfortunately a lot of this progress was illusory. The Ivorian Miracle was far hollower than contemporaries and even most historians realize.

The growth figures were not fake (as far as anyone can tell), but they concealed the reality that the vast majority of the real economic profit was siphoned away into terribly designed government investments and plain old, ordinary, tragic African corruption. There were real increasing benefits for the average Ivorian, but at only a small fraction of what they could have been if the leaders of the Ivory Coast had been less corrupt, more competent, or more permitting of free market investment.

The first major indicator of the Ivorian Miracle’s true weakness was the growth in farmer incomes… or lack thereof.

Recall, Ivorian real GDP per capita increased by 7.3% annually from 1960 to 1978, and most of this growth was on the back of cash crop agriculture. Tiber, coffee, and cocoa boomed throughout the 1960s, and cocoa in particular took off to stratospheric heights in the 1970s, with a 732% increase in export value from 1972 to 1978.

According to Hecht, throughout this time frame, the average annual income growth for small-holder coffee and cocoa farmers, who constituted 98% of all coffee and cocoa farmers, was… about 2.3-3.3%.

So from 1960 to the late 1970s, the Ivory Coast’s economy expanded on a per capita basis by almost 8%, and the economy was based on cash crop exports, and cocoa was by far its largest crop… but somehow cocoa farmer incomes increased at less than half that rate. How is that possible? Especially when cocoa prices looked like this:

Maybe individual cocoa farmers weren’t making much more money because the growth in total cocoa production was driven by an expansion of farmland rather than an increase in individual farmer productivity.

That’s definitely part of it. In 1959, there were 200,000 small-holder coffee and cocoa farmers, which were by far the two most important cash crops. By 1975, after 15 years of homesteading, government subsidies, and other genuinely promotive government policies, there were 450,000 small-holder coffee and cocoa farmers, plus thousands more large-scale holders. 98% of these farmers held fewer than 20 hectares (49 acres). So total coffee and cocoa production was definitely driven more by adding farmland than increasingly per-hectare yield.

But there were some per-hectare yield gains. Hecht finds that during the 1960-1978 time frame, the average annual per-hectare increase in coffee yield was 0.75%, and for cocoa it was 1.78%. I’m no agronomist, but that actually doesn’t sound too bad for an extremely poor country. And that only adds to the mystery – how did Ivorian cocoa farmers have such meager annual earnings growth when they were slightly increasing their annual yields on the same amount of land?

The answer lies in the Bank for the Stabilization of Prices and Agriculture, which has a cooler name in French, but which I’ll call the BSPA.

The BSPA was the Ivorian analog to Ghana’s Cocoa Marketing Board, though the former also handled coffee and some other crops. Both institutions were established by the government to manage the internal cocoa market and raise tax revenue for the state. They did this by establishing a legal monopoly that forced all domestic cocoa producers to sell their cocoa to the institution at below the international market rate, then the institution would sell the cocoa to the global market at the international market rate, and then the price difference would go to the state as tax revenue.

Starting with Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana’s Cocoa Marketing Board infamously paid its farmers an extremely low price for their cocoa as a means of raising more revenue for the state. But this only discouraged cocoa production and incentivized many Ghanaian cocoa farmers to smuggle their cocoa across the border into the Ivory Coast where the BSPA paid higher prices.

However, the BSPA also did not pay Ivorian farmers anywhere close to international market rates. From 1965-1975, the BSPA paid cocoa and coffee farmers only around 25% of the international rate. Meaning, for example, the BSPA might pay a farmer $1 for a pound of cocoa and sell it for $3.62 on the global market. After costs, the government siphoned 38% of cocoa export value and 31% of coffee export value into its own coffers. In 1977, at the peak of the Ivorian Miracle, the BSPA brought in $1 billion to the government, amounting to 16% of the Ivory Coast’s GDP.

This is how cocoa farmers saw a far slower rise in income than the general economy despite being the basis of a rapidly growing economy. As cocoa prices increased, the BSPA held the price they paid to farmers mostly constant. Cocoa farmers only gained a small percentage of the upside on price gains, and the rest of their income gains came from small marginal improvements to per-hectare yield.

Coffee farming, which like cocoa farming, was heavily dependent on small-holder Ivorian farmers, followed the same trend. Coffee farming income growth throughout the miracle was about 1.3-2.3%, and may have trended negative in the 1970s. Though the BSPA took a smaller share of coffee profits (closer to 1/5^th), coffee farming profits were also heavily siphoned off to the state.

The (in my opinion, tragic) effect of this policy was to strangle private capital accumulation for small-holder farmers. The cocoa and coffee farmers who built the Ivorian Miracle could have seen far higher incomes than the vast majority of West Africans. This wealth could have been saved and invested to compound their gains. Perhaps the Ivory Coast could have created a genuine middle class based on production and investment. Instead, these small-holding farmers existed as little more than peasants. Sure, their incomes were still relatively high for West Africa since they had their own land to work, but their incomes remained at levels that Westerns would consider impoverished.

The best evidence for this trend is the lack of individual farm expansion. Presumably, if a lot of these small-holder farmers were generating high incomes and savings, many of them would purchase more land to expand production and income. Instead, the Ivory Coast’s statistics indicated that individual farmland expansion was meager. Hecht looks at data that estimates an average annual expansion of hectares of 0.5-1.5%, but suggests even that is likely an overestimate.

Taking a step back, this paints a confused picture of Ivorian policy. The government, under FHB’s extremely liberal land and immigration policies, made it incredibly easy for anyone to become a small-holder farmer. But then through the BSPA, the government made it extremely difficult for any of these farmers to rise above small holdings. Whether purposefully or not, the Ivorian legal system strongly incentivized the creation of a large peasant class.

So how much money did cocoa and coffee farmers actually make? Hecht found that in 1975, the average Ivorian cocoa and/or coffee farmer household had 5.4 hectares (13 acres) of farmland. Typically, 30% of the land was used for newer, non-yet-yielding crops, leaving 70% of the land yielding cocoa and coffee valued at an average of $1,850. The BSPA would pay about 25% on average, bringing the pre-cost earnings to $462.50. Adjusted for inflation, that’s a little under $2,600 today.

That’s actually not bad for West Africa; the per capita GDP of the Ivory Coast is a little over $2,500 today, almost 50 years later. But keep in mind, the farmers had production costs (fertilizer, often labor, transport, etc.) and a single farming household would be splitting the income across a large extended family, which Hecht puts at a conservative nine members on average. With that factored in, Hecht speculates that the average cocoa/coffee farmer in the Ivory Coast may very well have had a lower income than the average Ivorian. Which is absolutely bonkers given the context of the Ivorian Miracle.

What about the large-scale cocoa and coffee farmers? 97.9% of farmers had under 20 hectares of land, but that still leaves 2% with larger holdings, among whom was Felix Houphouët-Boigny as probably still the largest cocoa farmer in the Ivory Coast (and maybe the world?) by the late 1970s.

According to Hecht, these large-scale Ivorian farmers did better than their poorer compatriots, but not by much. Hecht’s figures say that the average income for a 30-40 hectare (74-99 acres) farm was $8,118-$10,824, which I’ll average to $9,471, which in 2023 USD is about $54,000. That’s also a lot for West Africa, but it’s not exactly an aristocratic income, especially when divided by nine for the average farming household.

Based on my reading of Hecht and other sources, this indicates a really interesting distance between perception and reality regarding the Ivory Coast. Many contemporary and modern scholars of the Ivory Coast, including Paul Kenyon of Dictatorland, portrayed the Ivory Coast as being run by an aristocracy of large-scale farmers who organized the entire economy around their interests. They were called the “planter bourgeoise” and assumed to be riding FHB’s economic policies to prosperity.

However, Hecht reveals that the large-scale farmers and the Ivorian elite were actually two overlapping but fundamentally unrelated categories. Many of the Ivorian elite did indeed own farms, but they didn’t actually do any farming, at least not since before they became elites. The largest land-owners, like FHB, were absentee farmers who had massive estates run by managers to make supplemental income and put forth the image of being good, honest, salt-of-the-earth Ivorians.

But if they weren’t really getting rich off farming, then how did the Ivorian elite really make their money?

According to Hecht writing in 1983, just past the peak of the Ivory Coast’s prosperity, the ultimate beneficiaries of the Ivorian Miracle were not the small-holder farmers, not the new urban dwellers, not the immigrants, and not even the small class of large-scale farmers.

Instead, the ultimate beneficiaries of the Ivorian Miracle were… politicians and bureaucrats.

The Ivorian Elite

Tragically, despite all the explosive economic growth and wealth and appearances that the Ivory Coast truly was the unique success story of Africa… beneath it all, the Ivory Coast was just another resource state where elite politicians looted the economy. Here’s how it worked:

1. Farmers produce lots of wealth.
2. The BSPA siphons off a huge chunk of this wealth.
3. The BSPA gives this wealth to the government.
4. The government declares that it is investing this wealth in the economy. It creates a ton of new corporations and takes legally mandated stakes in existing corporations.
5. The government assigns leadership of these new state-backed corporations and their shares of existing private corporations to various politicians, bureaucrats, and their friends and families. These individuals reap incomes, profits, and/or sale value from their ownership stakes.
6. (Optional) Just directly embezzle a ton of money from the state.
7. Profit.

By Hecht’s telling, there once was a time when Ivorians could get rich off of cocoa, coffee, and timber. Under French rule, that was actually the only way for Ivorians to get rich since they were almost entirely excluded from political life by the colonial administrators and from other avenues of economic prosperity by discriminatory European-dominated capital markets. So the cleverest and most ambitious Ivorians became cash crop barons with massive tracts of land growing the crops that the Ivory Coast is best known for. Chief among these figures was the wealthiest man in the nation, Felix Houphouët-Boigny.

But things changed in the 1950s. The French restructured to give more local autonomy to colonial administrations and their colonies. Ivorians naturally became more involved in their own rule, particularly those Ivorians who had gotten wealthy off the cash crops. It was at this point, in the mid-1950s, that the BSPA was established and began to confiscate a heavy portion of cash crop earnings. Farmers generally didn’t like this, but there were relatively fewer farmers at the time (maybe 25% as many as in the late 1970s) and they were placated by the revenue going to a government that was increasingly dominated by elite farmers through FHB and his organizations, the SAA and the PDIC.

Over time, the dynamics began to shift. The BSPA took so much of the cash crop profits that farming was no longer a way to make lots of money and get into the elite. Whether intentionally or not, the Ivorian elite that had come to wealth and power through farming had effectively barricaded access to power through that route. Instead, access to the elite became based on political power. That meant rising through the ranks of the PDIC, getting elected to the national assembly, being close to FHB, or at least holding some sort of local administrative post in the provinces. Over two decades, while the Ivorian Miracle ran its course, the Ivorian elite slowly transformed from a bunch of quasi-aristocratic farmers who at least initially came to power through ambition and business acumen into a bunch of political sharks who came to power through influence and deal-making.

The result was that the Ivory Coast’s economy resembled a sort of scam where the bulk of the population was discretely looted by the elite political class. This exploitation was rationalized and concealed as ordinary economic policy by a developing nation. As mentioned, the Ivorian state spent the majority of economic investment in the Ivory Coast throughout the Miracle, and a full 1/3-2/3rds of that investment was financed by the BSPA. But very little of this investment was actually productive and it largely functioned as a covert way to transfer wealth from Ivorian farmers to politicians and bureaucrats with the right connections.

For instance, a significant chunk of state investment money was supposed to be reinvested back into farming. That would make sense – cash crops are a comparative advantage of the Ivory Coast. And the government indeed had programs available for freely or cheaply providing capital to Ivorian farmers to purchase machinery, fertilizer, etc. However, these government programs were de facto unavailable to the vast majority of farmers due to various regulations and simple disparities of knowledge. Instead, funds went almost entirely to the richest farmers. Quoting Hecht:

“Average cocoa and coffee yields have remained low since the 1950s because many farmers, deprived of investment earnings and/or officially-administered loans, have not been able to intensify their production. In the three Dida villages studied, only four of the 325 small-holders – the wealthiest in Gbehiri – obtained investment loans in 1979 from the Government’s agriculture development bank. These loans, used to purchase high-yielding cocoa varieties and spraying equipment, and to hire extra labor, were an integral part of the wealthy farmers’ strategy of intensifying output. In 1979, average cocoa yields for these affluent peasants in Gbehiri were 594 kg/ha, 24.6 per cent above the national average and 50.7 per cent above mean yields for the village.”

Even if the agricultural investment funds had been distributed more evenly, they still represented a paltry portion of the overall taxes paid by the 450,000 small-holder farmers. For instance, in 1981, Hecht calculates that out of the $770+ million taken in by the BSPA, only $40.8 million was invested back into agriculture by the government.

But for the politicians and bureaucrats who most profited from the Ivorian Miracle, industry was the real score. At independence, the Ivory Coast barely had an industrial sector; by the late 1970s, it constituted 35% of national export value. However, as mentioned, organic Ivorian industrial entrepreneurialism barely existed. The vast majority of industrial businesses in the Ivory Coast were either founded and run by Frenchmen or the government, or often, jointly between the two. By 1979, the state owned 33% of all Ivorian industrial capital, including a 12-25% stake in all private firms.

In other words, it wasn’t business-savvy and ambitious Ivorians profiting from these hundreds of millions of dollars being invested into industry, but politically connected Ivorians who amassed corporate ownership as a source of passive income. From Hecht:

“…directorships in public enterprises became an important source of political and financial influence. M.A. Cohen’s study of 88 state firms showed that by 1969, 62 per cent of the company directors were government officials, including 23 national assembly deputies and 14 ministers; as many as 23 of these held three or more directorships concurrently.”

Another common maneuver was partnering with (or arguably extorting) foreign companies:

“In addition, government and party officials have also been appointed to top posts in foreign companies operating in the Ivory Coast, and a number have obtained minority shares in these subsidiaries. This kind of arrangement has worked to the mutual benefit of both parties. Overseas firms have gained an Ivorian ‘insider’ well-placed to advise them on, and perhaps to influence, government decisions on business taxation, tariffs, public contract awards, and so on.”

Hecht admits that it’s difficult to track down a lot of these connections because the Ivorian elites were usually smart enough to conceal their business dealings through layered accounting and shell companies. But that wasn’t always the case. In 1979, a major French conglomerate had 23 subsidiaries operating in the Ivory Coast, which combined were the second-largest business entity in the country. The heads of the three largest subsidiaries, operating on pineapples, lumber, and a supermarket chain, were three of the highest ranking members of the PDIC, FHB’s political party.

The Ivorian elite didn’t bother much with cocoa or coffee farming, but quite a few high-ranking party members owned massive pineapple and banana operations, including FHB’s second-in-command, Phillipe Yace who produced 10% of Ivorian pineapples. Why did the elites focus on these crops and not the classic cocoa/coffee? Because these cash crops operated outside of the regulations and taxation of the BSPA, so they could be sold at high international market prices. Plus, these farms were extremely heavily subsidized by the government in its efforts to diversify the economy. And because poor Ivorians were almost always excluded from these subsidies, elite Ivorians could operate with little competition.

How else did politicians and bureaucrats make money? There were probably a million other tricks for the clever, politically-connected Ivorian. Hecht mentions that they used their authority to gain control over transportation companies which moved all the cocoa and coffee but weren’t subjected to the BSPA. They also speculated on Abidjan real estate, likely with foreknowledge of where and when the state would inject money into new housing developments.

Born in Gold

In Notes on Ghana, I concluded that dictator-turned-democratically-elected-president JJ Rawlings was most likely one of the extremely rare non-corrupt African leaders, probably because he was genuinely patriotic and wanted to set a good example. His much earlier predecessor, Kwame Nkrumah, was also a genuine patriot, but that didn’t stop him from getting extremely rich from embezzlement, bribes, and all manner of corrupt dealings while in office.

Felix Houphouët-Boigny was a far more extreme version of Nkrumah. From my readings of him, he was another genuine patriot who believed he was doing good for his country and people. But, he also really, really loved living like a king, and once describing himself as having been “born in” gold. FHB was the son of a chief, became the wealthiest man in the Ivory Coast, lived a life of high luxury in Paris, and only upgraded his lifestyle as he returned to the Ivory Coast and seemed to run it to astounding prosperity.

Despite his pre-rule personal wealth, FHB likely stole billions of dollars from the Ivory Coast. A document from the French nonprofit Terre Solidaire cites FHB’s net-worth near his death in 1993 at between $7-11 billion, which he obviously didn’t make by farming cocoa.

By the end of his reign and life, FHB owned around ten homes in Paris, one of which was valued at 18.3 million Euro in 1998, and another of which reportedly had 6.6 million Euro worth of furniture. FHB also owned homes in Castel Gandolfo, Italy, and Chene-Bourg, Switzerland, two places I had never heard of before presumably because I’m not unfathomably rich. FHB owned shares in various lucrative Swiss businesses, including jewelry stores, a watchmaker, and high-end real estate companies. His art collection included paintings by Vincent Van Gogh and Pierre Bonnard. And all of this is just stuff FHB owned outside of the Ivory Coast.

It’s difficult to estimate the magnitude of FHB’s corruption because, even by the standards of African rulers, he was extremely liberal in blending personal and state finances, even at an official level. A lot of FHB’s corruption was on quasi-legal terms where he simply used his political power to direct official funds in his direction. Here’s Martin Meredith quoting a 1961 magazine article:

“Far and away the most splendid residence of Africa is that of the Ivory Coast’s President [Houphouët-Boigny]. Over three million pounds has already been spent out of French aid funds and further work on the landscaping of the grounds is likely to cost a further million at least. In keeping with Houphouët’s unflamboyant nature, the palace doesn’t look so extraordinary from the street. It is in three separate buildings: the presidency, the residence, and the reception halls. Not until the dinner-jacketed guest penetrates to the latter past fountains, cascades, statues and descends a regal staircase into a vast marble reception hall, there to shake hands with his host and his beautiful wife, does the extent and beauty of the place register. Nothing is missing, from chandeliers and antique-style furniture in subtly contrasted colors to embossed chinaware and cutlery for over 1,000 guests, and a single table that seats hundreds. Many visitors, both tax-paying Frenchmen and less favored African states were, I am told, shocked at such extravagance.”

A larger instance of this sort of quasi-corruption was Yamoussoukro. Recall, FHB’s hometown was a small village in the middle of the Ivory Coast with nothing of note besides some particularly valuable cocoa farms. But in the 1970s, FHB began to spruce the place up with some modern infrastructure and buildings. Throughout the 1980s, FHB poured hundreds of millions of dollars into his hometown, building a new legislative assembly building, a new university (named after himself), a new international airport, a new golf course, massive 4+ lane avenues, gardens, parks, artificial lakes (filled with imported crocodiles, FHB’s favorite animal), financing new housing, hotels, and businesses. In 1983, he announced that Yamoussoukro was officially the Ivory Coast’s capital city, even though Abidjan was where the vast majority of political and business activity resided.

The crowning glory of this beautification was the Basilica of Our Lady Peace, the (by many metrics) largest Catholic Church on planet earth. Not the Notre Dame, not the Seville Cathedral, and not even St. Peter’s Basilica – the Ivory Coast was to have arguably the greatest site of Papal worship in the world, built by chocolate and coffee money.

Technically, the Basilica of Our Lady Peace was funded by FHB’s personal money, but everyone knew where that really came from. The government spent somewhere between $150 million to an astounding $600 million – which could have remained in the pockets of small-holder farmers, or been spent on education, healthcare, infrastructure, or anything economically productive – on the largest Catholic Church in the world in a country that was, at the time, about 12% Catholic. Throughout the new capital’s construction, spanning over a decade, it consumed a full 1/3^rd of the national urban investment fund.

FHB’s more personal embezzlement was far harder to track. He was a smart guy and very well-versed in corporate accounting, so most of his theft came straight from the BSPA through various tricks. Sometimes it was as simple as fudging the books to claim that national production of cocoa was lower than what it really was, and then FHB would sell the hidden surplus and profit off the proceeds, usually with kickbacks paid to lieutenants and agents.

Sometimes it was even easier than that. According to Kenyon, FHB kept as much as 10% of the BSPA’s enormous reserve funds in his personal bank accounts. Embezzlement was as simple as writing a check.

But, despite his best efforts to conceal stolen funds through various shell companies and foreign accounts, it was so massive in scale that it became something of a running joke in the Ivory Coast that FHB would periodically get busted, apologize, swear to stop, make a grand gesture of amends, and then get busted again.

For instance, on one occasion, a reporter revealed some embezzlement, so FHB apologized and then declared that he was giving away all of his farmland to the state to completely end his business interests forever. But according to Kenyon… he didn’t. FHB just waited for the story to die down and for people to move on. Then, a few years later, FHB got busted again, so he declared he was giving all of his farmland away again, and then he just didn’t… again.

The joke of it all hit its apex in 1983 when FHB went on stage to give a speech to quell a massive teachers strike. This was past the peak of the Ivorian Miracle and at the start of the national decline. To this crowd of underpaid teachers and allied protesters suffering under inflation and dropping wages, FHB got a little carried away in his oratory and opined whether “there is any serious man on Earth not stocking parts of his fortune in Switzerland.”

In another instance, FHB publicly bragged that 25% of the deposits in Abidjan banks were personally his. This was actually intended to demonstrate his loyalty to the Ivory Coast and his confidence in its economy. If he didn’t believe in the country, why would he risk so much of his own money in its financial institutions?

How did FHB get away with all this corruption? He stole at an enormous scale and was obviously unable to hide it.

Kenyon describes the public’s forgiving response with two beliefs. First, FHB was considered to be doing such a good job at running the Ivory Coast that people didn’t mind if he skimmed off the top. Second, corruption was simply the Ivorian (and West African) norm, especially for leaders:

“Rumors of presidential corruption were of little concern to most people who reasoned they would do the same in his shoes.”

Jeanne Maddox Toungara adds that other cultural factors enabled FHB’s corruption. In Akan tradition, tribal leaders treated official state property as synonymous with personal property. FHB’s cultivation as a prince-like figure gave him the clout to similarly exploit the Ivorian government’s wealth and property with little pushback.

Tragically, just as everywhere else in West Africa, corruption in the Ivory Coast became utterly endemic to every part of the state and society. FHB’s personal corruption only amplified its omnipresence. The great cash crop economy was stuffed with police checkpoints, government regulators, and dockworkers who extorted their cuts. According to Kenyon, middle-class parents purposefully sought jobs for themselves and their kids with “bribe-potential.” The rare individuals who didn’t take bribes weren’t seen as unusually brave or moral, but as “deviants” since they clearly didn’t care about making more money to take care of their families. Kenyon again summarizes:

“If someone secured a job in the civil service, at whatever level, it was their duty to make it pay.”

Downfall

Recall this Ivorian GDP per capita chart:

The fall of the Ivorian economy started very suddenly in 1978-1979. What happened then?

The answer is a fairly complicated mixture of unpredictable external factors leaning on the structural flaws of the Ivorian economy until it began to buckle. Then the Ivorian leadership, primarily FHB, made some catastrophically bad decisions until the economy broke.

At the forefront of the turn was commodity prices. 1976-1978 was the peak of the Ivorian Miracle. The economy was seemingly firing on all cylinders, and the crowning burst was an almost 4X spike in global cocoa prices after bad weather conditions hit Central America and destroyed a chunk of the global cocoa supply.

In 1978, prices fell sharply as weather conditions normalized, and then continued to fall throughout most of the rest of the 1970s and 1980s. Sources say that this was a matter of supply-and-demand. The Ivory Coast had massively increased production throughout the 1970s as cocoa prices rose, and by the end of the decade, the nation accounted for about 20%+ of global production. Seeing the profits, other countries began to invest in cocoa as well, notably Ghana (getting back on its feet under Dictator JJ Rawlings’s Economic Recovery Plan), Nigeria, Indonesia, Ecuador, and Brazil. The global supply of cocoa rose, prices fell, and while the Ivory Coast remained the global production leader, its market dominance diminished. Similar trends followed for the Ivory Coast’s two other main exports, coffee and timber, and a commodity slump was felt throughout the world; from 1980 to 1987, annual commodity exports from 66 developing nations declined from $62 billion to $33 billion.

While key commodity prices fell, other negative external factors hit the Ivory Coast in succession. The US dollar lost about 20% of its value from 1975 to 1980, which was bad news for the Ivory Coast since its foreign exchange reserve was sitting on hundreds of millions (or billions?) of USD accumulated from years of exports and a positive trade balance. Over the same time span, OPEC tightened its supplies (again) and almost tripled oil prices, which hit much of the world, but especially hurt the Ivory Coast which was banking on developing its own oil industry (with some speculation that it would become the second-largest producer in West Africa behind Nigeria), only to find its reserves were minor and fuel-imports would remain the norm. Finally, after more than two decades of almost continuously great harvests, the Ivory Coast was hit by a drought that greatly hindered the 1983-1984 growing season, which was ironically right when cocoa prices were moderately rebounding and the US dollar was massively rebounding.

While all of the above was bad, the government’s response to falling cocoa prices made it much worse. Recall, the price paid for cocoa within the Ivory Coast was controlled by the BSPA, which bought all cocoa production and then sold it abroad at a profit. When cocoa prices began to tumble after 1979, the government froze their internal prices to support farmers. Eventually, the international price fell so low that, for the first time ever, the BSPA began to operate at a loss.

Normally, if an industry is operating at a loss, supply/production decreases. But in this case, the BSPA was shielding cocoa farmers from these losses, so production not only remained on track but was incentivized to increase. Hence, Ivorian cocoa production doubled throughout the 1980s only further compounding the BSPA’s losses. A not insubstantial portion of this production growth wasn’t actually from the Ivory Coast, but from Ghana, whose longstanding smuggling routes across the border became even more popular as Ivorian prices separated from the global marketplace. And so the BSPA became even more of a subsidizer for Ghanaian cocoa farmers, but now at a loss instead of a profit.

But if the BSPA was operating at a loss, who paid the costs? At first, the BSPA was expected to pay for itself. After all, one of its ostensible functions was to smooth out commodity price variability by maintaining reserves of both cash and cocoa that could be deployed during surpluses and shortages. But when the BSPA opened its war chest that had allegedly been built up over 20+ profitable years… they found it was nearly empty. The cash accounts, that were supposed to hold hundreds of millions of dollars, had already been thoroughly looted by various corrupt officials, likely including FHB.

So the BSPA’s losses transferred to the government. Which, on top of all their other problems, caused a catastrophic increase in debt. The Ivorian government had unknowingly drifted into the classic resource-cursed state trap of spending too much when times were good and then being unable to cut spending when times were bad. The result was this:

The Ivorian government had built up remarkably little debt throughout the Miracle despite high spending because they were collecting so much tax revenue. Falling commodities prices + weaker USD payments + more expensive economic inputs (ie. more expensive oil) + a few bad crop years = skyrocketing debt. By 1982, debt servicing consumed 34% of the government’s budget.

A brief bump in cocoa prices in 1984 had given some hope of recovery, but it was dashed as prices tumbled again the next year. Against the advice of international advisors, the government held internal cocoa prices firm and kept picking up the bill. Even though farmers were shielded from the global price, they too saw the writing on the wall and felt the economic depression as investments flatlined. The state instituted dramatic austerity measures in the early 1980s: in 1981, the government cancelled all Independence Day celebrations; in 1982, 29 out of 36 wholly-owned government businesses were shut down, and general spending was cut by 11%. By 1987, even after slashing state investment to the bone, the Ivory Coast was nearing bankruptcy.

In yet another first, the Ivorian state parlayed with international creditors to find debt relief. The once ascendant economy that served as by far the greatest case for independent African prosperity had been reduced to begging for money like every other failed state. FHB took out his rolodex and flew around the world to get help from the London Club (private creditors) in December 1987, and then from the Paris Club (government creditors) in March 1988. According to Jeanne Maddox Toungara, FHB’s personal diplomacy skill deserves an enormous amount of credit for getting these debt deals, especially on such good terms.

The debt relief helped but ultimately only kicked the can down the road. The Ivory Coast’s problems ran deeper even than debt, which was ultimately more of an effect of economic problems than a cause. Cocoa, coffee, and timber were less valuable than before, but still functioned; the rest of the economy couldn’t say the same.

For decades, the government had spent hundreds of millions of dollars to start and boost import substitution industries and services, the former of which reached 35% of national export value in 1975. The problem was that most of these new industrial and service-based businesses weren’t efficient. Most major companies had been created by government money and many of them operated on government subsidies. The state could justify this during the Miracle as a way to provide urban employment and diversify the economy (while covertly generating income for connected politicians who grabbed corporate stakes), but after 1978, these loss-making ventures were cutting deeper-and-deeper into state coffers for even less benefit. The same trend applied to the new cash crops like pineapple, bananas, and sugar that the state had spent a fortune to launch but never managed to make competitive on the international markets.

The fault lines in the economy were starting to become obvious. Everything was built around the profitable cash crops, and now that those crops were less valuable, they couldn’t support the inefficient edifice. One-after-another, the government reluctantly cut off subsidies or shut down state-owned companies or ended land-grant programs. Each time, the government’s fiscal situation was marginally improved, but another chunk of the economy died.

The Ivory Coast was normally known for a culture of optimism and cooperation backed by its economic prosperity. As the 80s rolled on, cynicism and strife began to sink in. Strikes became commonplace as factories got shut down or civil servants were hit with pay cuts. Sometimes these strikes rolled over into anti-government protests that had clashes with police. Anti-immigrant sentiment flared up and the government launched a crackdown on illegal immigrants; in a two-week period in 1981, police rounded up 10,144 individuals, 46 of whom (Ghanaian fishermen) died of suffocation after being packed into a six-man cell overnight.

Public support for the government wavered. FHB distanced himself from the party, blaming the economy on politicians in a “swamp of personal interests and egoistic ambitions” who “went their own sweet way and tended to look after their personal interests before the general interest.” In 1982, FHB decided to clean house in a rather clever way. In yet another Ivorian first, legislative elections were held with actual competition between party members rather than just having FHB select individuals to run unopposed for seats. 53 out of 80 incumbents lost.

The political maneuvers helped a little, but FHB couldn’t keep entirely above the fray. It didn’t help that he was still being hit with periodic public revelations of corruption, and that he was spending a conspicuous amount of time in his Parisian mansions, sometimes six months out of the year. There was nothing close to outright rebellion against FHB, at least not yet, but after 30+ years of practically divine reverence in the Ivory Coast, it must have been uncanny to suddenly see his people protesting against him in the streets.

By the mid-1980s, the Ivorian government was confronted with two broad options:

One option was to let the internal cocoa price decrease to match global levels and let the inefficient sectors of the economy fall. This would mean lots of large industrial and service businesses entering bankruptcy, and mass urban unemployment, and an admission of the failure of Ivorian economic policy over the previous 20+ years. But at least the fiscal situation would be salvaged. The budget could be balanced and the economy would crash until it hit a healthy base from which to be slowly rebuilt. National credit would undoubtedly be damaged, but likely recoverable.

The second option was to keep the internal cocoa price artificially high and try to wait the bad times out. The government could plug the holes in the losing sectors, burn through their cash reserves, and juggle creditors until external economic conditions returned to favorability – higher commodity prices, higher domestic production, and better exchange rates.

Felix Houphouët-Boigny not only chose the second option, but doubled down with some of the riskiest financial betting ever seen from a national leader.

The Cocoa Power Play

By 1988, Felix Houphouët-Boigny was 83 years old. He had ruled the Ivory Coast for 28 years and had been phenomenally popular throughout almost the entire span, along with a decade before independence when he represented the colony in Paris. He had grown unfathomably rich, shooting well-passed billionaire status, and spent many months of each year in Paris at one of his dozen properties in unimaginable luxury.

And yet, FHB always felt a connection to the Ivorian farmer. He had made his early fortune as one, he had built his political career from their support for the SAA and PDIC, and had ridden the Ivorian Miracle on their work. Now, when they were finally facing tough times, he felt a genuine sense of obligation to support them. The international markets had turned against the Ivorian cocoa farmer, but FHB would not.

When describing government action, it can be easy to fall into the trap of ascribing the decision-making of many individuals or large committees to single leaders. But in this case, much of the key economic decision-making was literally FHB’s. In the words of one economist: “Just about any decision of any importance in cocoa goes to the president.”

Throughout the 1980s crisis, FHB was said to obsessively watch tv to get the latest changes in commodity prices. He read in-depth reports trying to divine weather patterns and global production shifts. Even as the economy went south, FHB’s authority remained supreme in the Ivory Coast, and he took it personally upon himself to guide the nation back to prosperity. But as the brutal 80s neared its end, this was looking less and less likely. In 1987, cocoa prices fell to their lowest point in 13 years, and didn’t look to be bouncing back. The internal cocoa price freeze had pushed the state to the brink. Drastic action needed to be taken. So FHB channeled all of his intelligence, resources, and diplomatic skill toward a daring economic maneuver.

The Plan –

1. Launch a semi-boycott of the global market by declaring that the Ivory Coast won’t export cocoa under a set price above the current global market rate. Since the Ivory Coast produced 1/3^rd of the world’s cocoa, this should crash the global cocoa supply chain and spike prices.
2. Get all the major cocoa-producing nations together and convince them to form a cocoa OPEC.
3. Use the Ivory Coast’s position as the largest cocoa-producing country in the world to take over this cocoa OPEC, like Saudi Arabia.
4. Use the cocoa OPEC to further constrict the global cocoa supply and drive prices even higher. Show the European and American chocolate makers (who buy all the cocoa) who’s boss.
5. Negotiate a deal between cocoa OPEC and the chocolate makers to set an artificially high global price for a set number of years.
6. End the cocoa boycott, sell the built-up cocoa reserves at an artificially inflated price.
7. Watch the money pour back into the Ivory Coast. Pay off the national debt. Keep subsidizing the other sectors of the economy. Become known as the greatest economic steward in African history. Keep not-so-secretly making billions of dollars.

This was gambling in the grandest sense of the term. Shutting down Ivorian cocoa exports would send an already terrible fiscal situation into freefall. The Ivorian state, which had just negotiated fiscal restructuring with one group of creditors and was in the process of doing so with another, was essentially betting both itself and the entire Ivorian economy on FHB’s play to diplomatically and economically seize control of the global cocoa market.

The Plan began in January 1988. FHB announced to the world that the Ivory Coast would not sell its cocoa abroad for less than $2 per kilogram. The global price at the time was about $1.50, so American and European chocolate manufacturers and their middlemen mostly ceased buying from the Ivory Coast.

Ivorian cocoa exports immediately fell by 50% and the international markets did indeed feel the effect. But before FHB could rejoice, he had to contend with the logistical problems he had brought upon the nation.

Over the following year, the backing up of the Ivory Coast’s largest supply chain became a national concern. Even before the embargo, the port cocoa storage facilities were nearly filled due to overproduction. With the embargo in place, they positively overflowed. Giant truck lines grew in and around the ports where drivers idled for hours or days while their cocoa cargo began to rot in the tropical sun as they waited to offload.

Exports fell dramatically, but everyone still got paid – the cocoa farmers, the drivers, the stevedores, the government officials – all kept getting payments from the state through the BSPA. Meanwhile, in the first five months of 1988, cocoa export earnings declined from an already depressed $453 million to $220 million. In May, the government stopped paying $10 billion in debts. Third party Ivorian debt re-sale value fell from 50% to 33%. Several major banks in Abidjan, cut off from expected cocoa export revenues, went into bankruptcy.

Projected Ivorian government cocoa losses for 1988-1989: $520 million.

Average Ivorian income at the time: maybe $600-800.

The next step in the disintegrating Ivorian supply chain was to run out of trucks. If all the trucks were sitting around the ports waiting to be unloaded, then there were no trucks available to pick up cocoa and coffee from the fields. So eventually, the farmers stopped bothering to harvest their produce and just let it fall and rot where it was grown.

Until this point, the farmers had been mostly shielded from the economic collapse because they were still getting paid inflated prices for their production. But if their cocoa and coffee wasn’t being picked up and brought to the ports, then they weren’t getting paid by the BPSA.

When the money stopped, a 30 year trend suddenly reversed: Ivorian cocoa farmers began smuggling cocoa across the border into neighboring Ghana. Extra slack was picked up by French and Lebanese merchants who ventured into small inland villages to buy huge quantities of cocoa at a small fraction of international rates. Smuggling and fraud became rampant. The Ivorian state responded by instituting harsher penalties: “20 years and fines up to the equivalent of $170 million – for traders caught paying less than the ‘just price.’”

Despite the Ivorian state’s efforts, the distance between their “just price” and the real international price only grew. Despite cutting exports by more than half, the global price of cocoa had only decreased. In late September 1988, more than nine months after the start of the semi-boycott, cocoa futures reached a 13-month low.

The upper echelons of the government began to crack. The famously cool and pragmatic FHB ranted about international speculators who “amuse themselves by playing with our cocoa as if they were at the race track or cockfight.” Other times he blamed the chocolate manufacturers for running a cartel and fudging their numbers. His ire was reinforced by foreign advisors and officials who condemned the internal cocoa price freeze and recommended cutting the Ivorian internal price in half. In 1987, after rebuking FHB, the International Monetary Fund suspended a $228 million lending program to the Ivory Coast, and the World Bank slowed approval of $550 million of new loans.

And yet this didn’t stop FHB from reaching out to his foreign contacts during his hours of need. To ameliorate the internal cocoa glut, FHB coordinated with the French government and Sucden, a major French company, to buy 400,000 tons of cocoa reserves (about a 4 month global supply) stagnating on the docks, and warehouse half of it. The maneuver bought FHB’s gamble another precious few months, but then the financially-strained Sucden stabbed FHB in the back by dumping the entire cache onto the market and further inflating the global supply. FHB could only watch it happen.

Increasingly, FHB’s greatest ire was being directed toward other cocoa-producing countries who he accused of lying about their cocoa reserve levels to deflate global prices. More accurately, he (correctly) asserted that countries like Brazil, Ghana, and Nigeria were profiting off the Ivorian cocoa embargo by dumping more of their reserves on the global market to take advantage of the supply gap. To FHB, they were greedily hamstringing his attempt to corner the global market to all their benefits. He just needed to get them in line and be patient until they could break through against the chocolate manufacturers.

In November 1988, FHB was scheduled to attend a conference in Lome, Togo, to meet with the Cocoa Producers Alliance (CPA), which he hoped to reform or jump off to form his cocoa OPEC. The attendees were representatives of Togo, Brazil, Cameroon, Ecuador, Gabon, Ghana, Mexico, Nigeria, Peru, Sao Tome Principe, and Trinidad and Tobago. Combined, the represented countries accounted for more than 80% of the global cocoa supply, though notably absent were rising market players, Indonesia and Malaysia.

As FHB stayed glued to his tv watching international financial programming, he caught a glimmer of hope that finally, after nearly a year of pushing his country further into the hole, his plan was working. A few weeks before the conference, cocoa futures leapt to a three-month high, a 27% increase from its September low. Apparently, the markets somewhat expected FHB to wow the CPA and get all of its cocoa-producing member states to back his embargo, thereby cornering the market and forcing the cocoa prices through the roof.

Then the CPA meeting came and went, and despite his negotiation skills and undisputed standing as the most august leader in West Africa, FHB’s boycott was not adopted. The other countries simply saw no reason to join. Sure, if FHB’s plot succeeded, they could make more money on higher prices, but they were already making more money with more exports as the Ivorian boycott created a supply gap. Joining the boycott would mean a massive loss of money (for a group of mostly very poor nations) on top of alienating their buyers. Plus, the roughly 20% of cocoa suppliers not in the CPA would dump more cocoa and take a bigger chunk of the market share.

So the other members of the CPA kept selling and FHB kept boycotting. The supply lines in the Ivory Coast completely collapsed, and the air in the docks was said to smell of rotting produce as piled cocoa melted under the sun. With the logistics in shambles, the farmers, the drivers, the stevedores, the bankers, the usually bribed government workers, and everyone in between mostly stopped working. Not that the state could afford to pay them if they were working.

In early 1989, the Ivorian government stopped paying interest on its national debt, again, effectively declaring bankruptcy. The state essentially couldn’t afford basic operations anymore. By 1992, even after several rounds of defaults and renegotiations, the Ivorian government’s total debt level reached $20 billion, the highest per capita in all of Africa.

 

The Edge of Abyss

On July 1, 1989, FHB surrendered. He announced that the internal price of cocoa would be cut by almost 50%, a level still above the norm for farmer prices, but far closer to the global rate.

The Ivory Coast’s enormous cocoa reserves built up from a decade of oversupply and 1.5 official years of international boycotting were dumped onto the market. Cocoa and coffee revenue at the BSPA fell to 25% of their annual value compared to a decade ago. In effect, the Ivory Coast had played the market in reverse: it had held on to cocoa when prices were high, and sold when prices were low.

The decade-long downward spiral started to hit truly dire levels. By the early 1990s, the glittering skyline of Abidjan, long considered the greatest in Africa, was being hit by periodic rolling blackouts. Soon after, civil servants started missing paychecks. Unemployment was well into the double-digits. Vagrancy and street crime became serious everyday concerns for many Ivorians. Slowly but surely, the once glorious Ivory Coast was starting to look like just another African basket-case.

Student-led protests about specific issues (terrible living conditions, high unemployment, etc.) widened into general dissatisfaction with the Ivorian state. This merged with omnipresent malaise to exacerbate ethnic tensions. The long-dormant north-south divide began to awaken and anti-immigrant sentiment flared up. During the cocoa boycott, there were unconfirmed rumors of impoverished rural Ivorians killing Lebanese merchants for supposedly profiteering off their misery. In 1993, “scores of Ghanaians” were murdered by Ivorians after Ghana defeated the Ivory Coast in a soccer match.

At first, complaints were directed toward the government in the abstract sense or toward specific ministers, but eventually even FHB couldn’t escape blame. For the first time in 30 years, public opinion began to seriously turn against the president of the Ivory Coast. For a decade now, he had been promising that the prices and fortunes would return to the good old days, but things had only gotten worse.

It really, really didn’t help FHB’s case when he unveiled the Basilica of Our Lady Peace in 1990. Months after gambling away the last of the Ivory Coast’s fortunes, FHB opened arguably the largest church in the world in his hometown at the cost of possibly up to $600 million. FHB personally attended the ceremony where he gave the church to Pope John Paul II, who, by many accounts, was personally disgusted by the display of affluence in such an impoverished country.

At 85 years old, FHB’s health was failing him. By this point, he was losing his sight and didn’t have the energy to fling himself around the country for speeches and business meetings. But people who knew him said he still had a sharp mind. In response to his rising unpopularity, FHB decided to legalize opposition parties for the first time in the history of the Ivory Coast. In November 1990, in the midst of the cratering economy and near-insolvency of the state, FHB made one final gamble – he held an open election where he would have to go on a real campaign and persuade the Ivorian people to keep him in power.

FHB’s challenger was Laurent Gbagbo. He had tried to start an underground socialist party in the early 1980s, but when FHB found out, Gbagbo’s group was suppressed and he was exiled. In 1988, FHB was publicly asked if he was still mad at Gbagbo, to which FHB (awesomely) replied “the tree did not get angry at the bird.” Gbagbo took this as a signal that it was safe to return from exile. In 1990, he hastily threw the Ivorian Popular Front (IPF) together as a left-leaning opposition party. While running for office, he repeatedly campaigned on the platform that FHB was super fucking old and would probably die soon. FHB did little to combat this accusation, and ran a reclusive campaign that heavily relied on television advertisements that showed him making great speeches back in the good old days.

The result – FHB got 82% of the vote.

Was the election fair? That’s unclear, opinions at the time were all over the place. Some commenters said that there was no way FHB still had so much support given the economic conditions. Others (including Kenyon) said that FHB was basically god in the Ivory Coast and could never lose an election. Others said that FHB’s numbers were boosted because his extremely well-established PDIC had far better campaigns and organization. Others said the opposition had low turn-out because they assumed the results would be rigged anyway. And yet others said that turnout was low because Ivorians hadn’t voted in national elections in 30+ years and weren’t used to it.

The next month, the legislative election had basically the same results – FHB’s PDIC won 72% of seats, compared to the IPF’s 20% and the more left-leaning Ivorian Workers Party’s (IWP) 9%.

Maybe FHB really was still that popular, or maybe it was another clever trick by the old man. Either way, his authority was reestablished by the 1990 election and he ostensibly wouldn’t have to run for president again until 1995.

But FHB wouldn’t have to worry about that. On December 7, 1993, FHB died of prostate cancer. He was officially 88 years old, but may have been lying about his actual birth year for decades and “was widely believed to be much older.”

FHB had ruled the Ivory Coast for 33 years, making him the longest-serving leader on earth at the time behind North Korea’s Kim Il Sung and Cuba’s Fidel Castro. FHB was the only leader left from the African independence era, with most of his cohort, like Ghana’s Nkrumah, dying decades ago, and the last of them, like Guinea’s Sékou Touré or Tanzania’s Nyerere dying off in the 1980s. FHB had taken power when President Eisenhower was in office, and died during President Clinton’s first term.

Evaluating Felix Houphouët-Boigny

Was Felix Houphouët-Boigny a “good” leader?

I think that’s a very difficult question to answer, but, gun-to-my-head, I’d say he was a net-good for the Ivory Coast.

In retrospect, his deficits as a leader are far easier to identify. He built up a quasi-Ponzi scheme economy that came crashing down once commodity prices and his luck ended. This economy may very well could have been successful and sustainable in the long-run if he hadn’t turned it into a looting machine for himself and his lieutenants. Billions of dollars were wasted on developing unproductive assets and straight-up raw corruption; imagine if that money had remained in the hands of Ivorian farmers or even French businessmen, and had been reinvested productively into the economy. The Ivory Coast could have been the economic success story of Africa instead of another tragic failure, and FHB’s personal decision-making, especially in the 1980s, played such a massive role in that.

And as I’ll discuss in the next section, FHB completely botched his succession, leaving a nation leaderless after 33 years of undisputed authority. This shouldn’t be entirely blamed for the chaos that would consume the Ivory Coast for the next two decades, but it certainly catalyzed it.

However… the Ivorian Miracle wasn’t all hollow. The road network is real. Abidjan’s skyscrapers are real and mostly still standing. The cocoa and coffee farms are real and mostly still function. For 30ish years, Ivorians really did make (somewhat) higher incomes than their neighbors. Millions of immigrants escaped the destitution and instability of their homes for the (slightly) greener pastures of the Ivory Coast. And the Ivory Coast is still a bit wealthier than most of the continent. FHB deserves credit for all of that, especially for his extremely pro-immigration policies.

And while the violent aftermath of FHB’s reign can be partially attributed to him, he also deserves the lion’s share of the credit for the peace during his reign. With its ethnic/religious divide (a nearly even north/south Muslim/Christian split), the Ivory Coast could have gone the way of Nigeria or Mali or Liberia or dozens of other African states that tore themselves apart, but instead it remained united under a genuinely benevolent figure. And even the local reaction to a huge influx of immigrants, peaking at over 30% of the population, was fairly tempered and never resulted in widespread civil conflict.

So… I consider FHB to have been a net-good for the Ivory Coast. At the very least, he was better than the average or even above average African leader of his era. He definitely wasn’t as good as JJ Rawlings, but wasn’t as bad as Kwame Nkrumah, let alone Sékou Touré or any of the dozens of sunglasses-wearing military thugs who took over the continent’s countries.

The Abyss

As a leader, Felix Houphouët-Boigny had done many good and bad things, but after his death, one of those bad things suddenly became very apparent.

Bafflingly, FHB had absolutely no succession plan. Constitutionally, the successor in case of the death of the Ivorian President was the Vice President, a position FHB had conjured in 1980. Except… there was no Vice president. FHB simply never chose one. He also never left a will, not even concerning his personal property, which resulted in a multi-year legal battle between his wife and the government over how much of FHB’s embezzled money she could keep.

For awhile, FHB’s informal second-in-command and presumed successor was Philippe Yacé, but they had a falling out in 1980 and Yacé was sidelined. Fortunately, FHB had told one of his other top lieutenants that he was his chosen successor. Unfortunately, according to Cohen and other sources, FHB had also told a dozen other lieutenants the same thing.

Why did FHB do this? No one knows.

Regardless, the result was exactly what you’d expect. The Ivorian state, for all its faults, had been a remarkably stable and even fairly competent institution for 33 years largely due to the will of a single man. Now that man was gone and there was no indication who should succeed him, a power vacuum emerged.

From 1993 to the present day, leadership of the Ivorian government has essentially been a war between three people – FHB lieutenant Henri Konan Bédié, outsider Alassane Ouattara, and FHB’s only ever presidential competitor, Laurent Gbagbo.

Within hours of FHB’s death, Henri Konan Bédié announced that he was assuming the presidency. His legal authority to do this was questionable. But he had been the National Assembly President for over a decade, and was a high-ranking member of the PDIC, and so he was in the right position to take the initiative and arbitrarily seize power.

The first of many power struggles ensued, though this one was peaceful and behind-the-scenes. Within hours of Bédié announcement, Prime Minister Alassane Ouattara attempted to curry support from within the party to usurp him. Ouattara’s claim also lacked direct legal legitimacy, but Prime Minister was generally considered closer to the Presidency than National Assembly President, so he arguably had a better claim than Bédié.

But Ouattara’s problem was that he wasn’t popular. He had only been Prime Minister since 1990 and was put in place mostly by the International Monetary Fund (where Ouattara used to work) as a condition for the Ivory Coast getting a bailout. Ouattara had introduced a bunch of liberalizing reforms into the dying economy which probably helped in the long run, but exacerbated economic pains in the short run by cutting subsidies, lowering welfare benefits, and allowing more inefficient government-backed companies to fall. This unpopularity was compounded by allegations that Ouattara had tried to take de facto control over the government as FHB’s health failed.

We don’t know what happened behind closed doors, but Bédié thwarted Ouattara, and the latter resigned. But Bédié only promised to carry out the remainder of FHB’s presidential term, so elections were set for 1995. From his position as president of both the Ivory Coast and the PDIC, Bédié tried to consolidate power, but he was no FHB and found that bribes could only get him so far. Ousted Ouattara formed the Rally for Republicans (RFR), a new opposition party which found a base of support in the Muslim north where FHB had always been relatively less popular.

Both sides were nervous about their prospects for the 1995 election given the national instability without FHB at the helm. Naturally, Bédié and Ouattara both responded to their incentives and proceeded down the tragic path of so many African states… ethnic strife. The RFR became the party of Muslims and northerner tribes, while the PDIC, which had always strictly maintained a sense of unifying nationhood under FHB, was twisted into an “ultranationalist and exclusionary” party that promoted the Christian south as true Ivorians exploited by northern Muslims and foreign immigrants.

Over the next two years, the economy and fiscal state actually improved slightly, but remained depressed. Ethnic tensions, which had already boiled over into violence under FHB, heated up to a crisis level. Partnership between the two parties became less-and-less of a possibility. Not wanting to take any chances, Bédié opted to use the PDIC and the state to rig the 1995 election in every way he could, which included a rather novel method.

Bédié and the PDIC pushed a law through the legislature requiring both parents of whoever held the Ivorian presidency to be born in the Ivory Coast, which was still about 1/3^rd immigrant. The obvious target of the law was Ouattara, who happened to be born in a town on the border of the Ivory Coast and Burkina Faso that had switched nationalities multiple times over border negotiations.

The government officially declared Ouattara’s lineage suspect and banned him from running for office. Ouattara and his party challenged the law in the courts but got nowhere. The RFR saw the writing on the wall and boycotted the 1995 election entirely, and the smaller third party, the Popular Ivorian Front (FPI) led by Laurent Gbagbo, followed suit.

The result – Bédié won the presidency with 96% of the vote against the Ivorian Workers Party. The PDIC won 148 out of 175 legislative seats. Thousands of protesters took to the streets across the country and hundreds were jailed. Bédié remained in power, but his already scant legitimacy only further weakened.

The same trends continued for the following four years. Bédié relied on ethnic tensions to maintain a core of support; the usual Ivorian government corruption transformed from an amoral technocratic slush fund to an ethnic spoils system where Bédié and his allegedly true Ivorians profited while the Muslim north and immigrants were largely excluded. The economy improved somewhat, but it was hard to tell if that had anything to do with policy or if the Ivorian GDP had simply fallen so far that it was bound to bounce back a little.

In December 1999, a long-forgotten Ivorian faction entered the scene – the military. For decades, the Ivorian military served faithfully under FHB where it saw little conflict, was always paid on time, and was kept small since the French would do all the heavy lifting if anything serious happened. But by the end of the millennium, the Ivory Coast was rounding another corner in its transformation from the beacon of African hope to another depressing failed state as the Ivorian military launched the nation’s first successful coup.

A group of soldiers revolted, stormed Abidjan, seized the legislature and presidential palace, and called upon an old FHB loyalist and retired army general, Robert Guéï, to lead the National Public Salvation Committee, a newly formed junta. In the prior year, Guéï had been ordered to restrain protestors against Bédié’s regime, but he had refused on the grounds, “the army does not intervene unless the republic is in danger.” I guess that condition had been fulfilled; in a short television address to the nation, Guéï made the generic coup promises of striving for normalcy and restoring democracy. His claims that the coup was widely welcomed by the Ivorian people were well-corroborated by accounts of celebrations on the ground.

Bédié escaped the coup with his family, fled abroad, and set up a government in exile. Meanwhile, Ouattara publicly applauded the coup; though he had no part in it, he took Guéï at his word that the coup was meant as a JJ Rawlings-style “housecleaning” of high-level corruption, albeit with less violence, to put a floundering country back on track.

In the chaotic aftermath of the coup, Guéï quickly made a deal with Gbagbo and the FPI, who had been the third-wheel since FHB’s death. Gbagbo and his lieutenants joined the new military government and helped prop up its legitimacy with at least some institutional support.

True to his word, Guéï announced that there would be elections in 2000 to restart the civilian government, but unexpectedly, he would be running for president. Bédié, despite being overthrown and contesting the legitimacy of everything happening, threw his hat into the ring, as did Ouattara and Gbagbo, both of whom were eager for a fair election. It looked like the Ivory Coast was facing a four-way election between the country’s most powerful politicians, along with 15 other aspiring candidates.

But then Guéï changed the game. His new constitution enshrined Bédié’s anti-foreigner election provision, which disqualified Ouattara from running. And then Guéï’s government announced that Bédié couldn’t run because he was a corrupt criminal. The PDIC put up another candidate, but he was disqualified as well. In fact, most of the 19 candidates were disqualified. The only heavy-hitters left were Guéï and his ally, Gbagbo. According to a Washington Post article, the disqualified candidates represented about 75% of voters. While not a ton is known about Guéï’s motives, most observers think he was “seduced by power.”

Bédié’s, Ouattara, and the entire international community condemned the election and made public statements about corruption, but it didn’t matter. Guéï went to the polls confident that he had secured pseudo-democratic legitimacy for his reign.

But that didn’t go to plan. It turned out that this random general from a tiny military that no one cared about had no real base of support, especially while running as an independent. And with both the Christian PDIC and Muslim RFR out of the election, and their constituents calling mass boycotting of the results, that left only Gbagbo. Amazingly, the long-time socialist rabble-rouser snaked his way into a national presidential victory with almost 60% of the votes.

As the results came in, Guéï attempted a last-minute rigging but it was too much to hide. Protests and counter-protests erupted throughout the country. Within weeks, nearly 200 were killed. Guéï gave up and fled to Liberia for awhile. With no opposition, Gbagbo took power and then his IPF seized a narrow plurality in the legislature.

But the Gbagbo regime had no legitimacy. Everyone knew he only came to power because the two major parties were quasi-legally excluded from the election, and Gbagbo never had large-scale popular support despite hanging around Ivorian politics for 20 years. Seemingly purely as a stratagem, Gbagbo took up the nationalist mantle and positioned his regime as the new leaders of true Ivorians against the northern Muslims and immigrants. There was probably little Gbagbo could have done to maintain power, but stoking ethnic tensions definitely didn’t help what was to come.

In 2002, the Ivory Coast finally reached the low point of its 20+ year downfall. While being decommissioned, about 750 soldiers revolted and attempted to storm Abidjan and two other cities to seize power. The soldiers were mostly northerners who believed they were being squeezed out of the military to cement Christian Ivorian control.

This kicked off the first Ivorian Civil War, a messy multi-layered conflict that can only roughly be described as a fight for control over the country between the northern Muslim rebels and the southern Christian government. The initial push for control of Abidjan failed, so the rebels, who were a loose confederation of minority parties and militias unified more by opposition to the government than shared goals, seized much of the north half of the country and established a splinter-state. Sporadic fighting mostly between small bands of soldiers would persist for years.

On the first day of the war, General Guéï, who had returned to the Ivory Coast, was executed while having lunch in Abidjan under mysterious circumstances. Ouattara and his RDR party didn’t join the rebels, but were broadly sympathetic to them, which was enough to get his house burned down by a pro-government mob. French soldiers intervened to protect the 20,000+ French citizens still living in the Ivory Coast, and they inevitably got entangled in fighting on both sides. Peace deals started and stopped every few months. Fighting continued until a treaty was signed in March 2003. An uneasy peace reigned briefly, but tensions continued to boil over and the country remained under the control of two de facto governments. In March 2004, anti-Gbagbo protesters flooded the streets of Abidjan, and in the ensuing crackdown, 120 were killed.

The peace broke down. Many Ivorians within the government’s territory opposed peace and saw it as a capitulation to French influence. Gbagbo covertly stoked anti-French and patriotic sentiment, and his agents led a 100,000-man protest in Abidjan. In the midst of increasing international tension, the Ivorian air force carried out an attack on a rebel base and killed 9 French soldiers. The government denied intending to hit Frenchmen, but nevertheless, the French responded by destroying the entire (admittedly small) Ivorian air force. Low-level fighting continued amidst slow peace talks for the next few years and the nation remained split in half under hostile states.

The total death toll wasn’t too bad by African civil war standards, maybe 1,000-2,000 dead. But hundreds of thousands were displaced, internal trade and logistics tanked, and a country that had been remarkably peaceful for 50+ years was suddenly torn apart by war, which included massive riots, pogroms, burning down entire villages, and occasional gun fights in the streets of Abidjan.

In 2005, Gbagbo refused to hold elections over alleged security concerns. This did not help what little legitimacy he had left. By 2007, his regime was worn down enough to make a compromised peace. Guillaume Soro, a former cabinet member of Gbagbo’s regime who had been ejected and then took command of part of the scattered rebel forces, was brought into the government as Prime Minister. Though this was a reach across the aisle, it was also a maneuver to undermine Ouattara, who was more popular nationwide than Soro and typically seen as Gbagbo’s true antagonist.

With the conflict ostensibly ended, elections were declared for 2010 and it promised to be an exciting showdown of all the major players. Gbagbo was running for reelection, and while he still wasn’t popular, he had the entire state apparatus at his disposal for whatever rigging he could get away with under international scrutiny. Ouattara and Bédié were back, and through surprising reconciliation, they agreed to form an alliance where they would run separately in the first round, but support each other in the second round if only one made it through. Soro was officially barred from running as part of the peace agreement, but may or may not have had a secret alliance with Gbagbo.

The result – a total mess. All sides tried maximum rigging. Voting was so fucked up that multiple conflicting official results were announced, but the international consensus was that Ouattara won. Eventually, both Gbagbo and Ouattara declared victory and swore themselves into office in separate ceremonies. In the aftermath, mass protests broke out across the country, resulting in 300 deaths.

This kicked off the “Second Ivorian Civil War.” Though it was mercifully brief compared to the first, it was bloodier in its time, with thousands of civilians killed in protests, pogroms, and massacres in a matter of months. The international community and much of the Ivory Coast backed Ouattara, who gathered the support of the former rebel forces to seize control of the north and then launch an assault on Abidjan to overthrow Gbagbo, who responded by shutting down electricity and water for millions of northerners. While French support waffled during the first civil war, this time its side was clear: French military forces assaulted government facilities on Ouattara’s behalf, and French special forces entered Abidjan side-by-side with the rebels. Gbagbo held out for a few months until most of his forces defected. He was arrested, spent a decade in various international prisons and trials, and was eventually acquitted. Gbagbo currently lives in the Ivory Coast and runs a small political party with no power.

Meanwhile, Ouattara emerged as the winner of the Ivorian game of thrones. He was reelected in 2015 with a suspicious 84% of the vote after most of his competitors boycotted the election on grounds of suspected rigging. In 2020, Ouattara bowed out due to constitutional term limits and put up his Prime Minister as the party’s candidate… until he changed his mind. On flimsy technicalities and over widespread protests, Ouattara ran again and won with an even more implausible 95% of the vote. Ouattara’s only initial serious opposition was Soro, who was living in France at the time. But then Soro was charged with a bunch of crimes and sentenced to 20 years in prison in absentia. Bédié also ran, and got 1.7% of the vote.

And that comes to today. Ouattara is still in power, now for 13 years and counting. He is almost certainly a de facto dictator and there’s a decent chance he will illegally run again in 2025 (though he’s 81 years old now).

How has Ouattara done as president? Well…

We Are So Back

I just dedicated a lot of words to Ivory Coast-related doom and gloom. Now here’s the good news – recently, the Ivory Coast has been doing very, very well. I wouldn’t quite call it a Second Ivorian Miracle yet, but maybe someday. Here’s per capita GDP in constant 2015 USD since the end of the second civil war in 2011:

Granted, a lot of this growth is just recovering loses from the Ivorian Miracle collapse and the civil wars:

But compared to its African neighbors…

…the Ivory Coast is killing it. This data set gives the country a 60% per capita GDP increase over 11 years, but that’s dragged down by weak growth during the pandemic; 2012-2019 saw an 8.2% real GDP growth rate.

A significant portion of that growth is still based on cocoa production. Not only have cocoa prices been high for over a decade (and are recently skyrocketing), but the Ivory Coast’s market power is as dominant now as it has ever been with 30% of global cocoa production:

The Ivory Coast also recently beat out India as the largest cashew producer in the world. Just as importantly, China has become a major trade and investment partner with $7.5 billion in investments by 2022, including an almost $1 billion port project to make the Ivory Coast the major regional export hub.

Say what you want about Ouattara and his de facto dictatorship, his economic policies have been pretty good as far as I can tell. He cut his teeth at the IMF and seemingly remains a basically neoliberal, internationalist, broadly free trade advocate. He’s not exactly Milton Friedman, but he’s on the right track, especially compared to the vast majority of African leaders.

Travelling through the Ivory Coast

With all of that history out of the way, I’ll briefly cover some of my travel experiences in the Ivory Coast. To be honest, my Ivorian travels were not as varied and interesting as I’d hoped because it was the last stop in a lengthy West African trip, and so I spent quite a bit of time watching Netflix in a wonderfully airconditioned Airbnb with flawless wi-fi, a luxurious rarity I hadn’t experienced in months. Even still, the Ivory Coast did stand out compared to other West African states for its infrastructure and obvious (if highly decayed) economic progress.

Abidjan

As mentioned in Notes on Guinea, it is literally impossible to get a tourist visa for the Ivory Coast unless you arrive at Abidjan’s airport, which I did. I noticed that the airport is called the Felix Houphouët-Boigny International Airport. This is not to be confused with Abidjan’s Felix Houphouët-Boigny Stadium, or Abidjan’s Felix Houphouët-Boigny Bridge, or Abidjan’s Felix Houphouët-Boigny University, or Yamoussoukro’s Felix Houphouët-Boigny National Polytechnic Institute, or Yamoussoukro’s Felix Houphouët-Boigny Foundation for Peace Research, or the Felix Houphouët-Boigny Boulevard in… Casablanca? And another in Pakistan?

I guess an argument can be made for putting FHB’s name on anything because the Abidjan that he left in his wake is indeed by far the most modern-looking city in West Africa, easily beating out Dakar, Lagos, and Accra. It’s the only city that has what could be accurately described as a “skyline.” Abidjan was and still is the de facto capital of the Ivory Coast, even if Yamoussoukro holds the technical distinction. As a city of 6.3 million people, it sure feels like not only the most important city in the Ivory Coast, but all of West Africa.

However, this metropolis is obviously past its prime. The skyscrapers all look like they were built 50+ years ago and have not been well-maintained, though they aren’t nearly as dilapidated as the high-rise apartments in Guinea’s Conakry. The sidewalks are often cracked and overgrown with weeds, even in the center of the city. There are parts of downtown Abidjan that legitimately look like New York City, but… ya know, the not great parts. Still, it’s interesting to walk through, gives a real vibe of lost affluence but with enough bustle on the street to still feel promising.

St. Paul’s Cathedral is a highlight. It’s a very modern, stylish Catholic cathedral, lots of smooth curves and a beautiful amphitheater set-up. I’m not sure I’d say that the entrance is “shaped like an anthropomorphic giant” but it’s one of the most interesting churches I’ve seen in Africa.

In my opinion, the best indicator of Abidjan’s current affluence is its nicest mall, the Playce-Marcory, which has Western fast food (including a Burger King), fairly high-end clothing stores, and a Carrefour. It looks and feels like a standard North American or Western European mall, which is pretty remarkable for West Africa. There is literally nothing like this in any other West African city, except maybe Lagos or Accra. I have no doubt that the people shopping there were all among the upper-crust of a nation where the average person still only makes a few thousand dollars per year.

Similarly, I stayed at an Airbnb near an international high school and I was surprised by the quality and costs of the restaurants nearby, which included a boba tea place and 50 million coffee shops. Speaking of which, 3.5 USD for a coffee? 5 USD for a beer? 10 USD for a pizza? Are you fucking kidding me? I didn’t come to Africa to pay these sorts of prices.

Ivorians

I had quite a few very good conversations with Ivorians, far more per day than I did anywhere else in West Africa. This was likely a function of where I stayed (in an affluent neighborhood in the wealthiest city in the wealthiest country), but still, I was impressed. English-speaking was common among educated Ivorians and they were extremely eager to talk to an American. Some memorable things I heard:

• An Ivorian told me about how his mother left the country in the early 2000s during the first Civil War after she was nearly shot on the streets of Abidjan coming home from work.
• Despite the Francophilic reputation of the Ivory Coast, public opinion of France seems low. The French are generally seen as meddlers and exploiters, and are considered partially responsible for the Ivory Coast’s historic woes. However, many Ivorians expressed wanting to move to France, even more so than America, as is the norm throughout the rest of West Africa.
• Lots of economic optimism. There is a sense that the Ivory Coast is on the upswing, lots of new jobs and businesses coming in, especially finance and service jobs in Abidjan.
• There’s a thriving artistic and entrepreneurial scene in Abidjan. Lots of young, educated people trying to build something.
• I sensed a touch of superiority when Ivorians talked about neighboring countries. There was this notion that the Ivory Coast is still more successful and stable than others.
• I met a half-Ivorian half-French woman who applied for her current corporate job in Abidjan with her French passport, thereby garnering a 4-5X higher salary than she would get as an Ivorian national.

Yamoussoukro

Yamoussoukro, the technical capital of the Ivory Coast, was one of my most anticipated travel destinations in West Africa, and it did not disappoint.

The city really is a weird ghost town. FHB intended Yamoussoukro to become the beautiful glowing metropolis of Africa’s premiere country, but he built it up right when the economy was collapsing. So the city has the infrastructure and a few major sights of a metropolis, but none of the actual people and nowhere near enough buildings. It doesn’t just feel empty, it feels depopulated.

The first thing you notice are the massive, dead-straight six-lane highways extending through the city into the horizon and… there’s practically nothing on them. Almost no cars, almost no pedestrians, often no buildings. Just giant roads stretching into nowhere operating at 5% capacity. At least it was nice to find an African city with no traffic.

There’s one small downtown section of Yamoussoukro that looks like a normal African city with 10 bajillion people meandering around shouting at each as they weave around cars and through pedestrian lanes lined by market stalls. But then everything around that area is sparse, open, depopulated tracts of land wedged between the giant empty highways or smaller four-lane streets that are way too long and perfectly straight and are lined with a million streetlights, half of which don’t turn on at night. It all feels dysfunctional and it’s a nightmare to get around on foot because everything is so far apart, but it’s not unpleasant. There are far more trees in Yamoussoukro than other African cities, and even a big artificial lake wrapped through part of it. The city is kind of pretty in areas, also a rarity for African cities.

Then there’s grand buildings intended to dot the sky of a booming capital city. There’s the Presidential Palace, which you can’t go inside, but you can see the crocodiles in its lake. There’s the Hotel President which looks like a creepy Soviet military base. There’s the Felix Houphouët-Boigny Foundation for Peace Research (a 14-syllable name that just rolls off the tongue), which is… honestly, I’m not sure what it is even after taking a tour through it. I guess it’s a conference hall/occasional legislative session hall/FHB museum/office building. Regardless, it has a cool brutalist look and the very nice tour guide repeated everything in English even though I was the only one of eight people on the tour who didn’t speak French.

But of course the crown jewel of Yamoussoukro, and the Ivory Coast, and all of West Africa, is the Basilica of our Lady Peace, FHB’s $150-600 million Catholic church. Its dome is 518 feet high (Big Ben is 315 feet high), seats 7,000 with 11,000 standing capacity, stretches over 320,000 square feet, and costs $1.5 million in annual maintenance.

It is arguably the largest church in the world, and I mean that very arguably, because apparently church size is one of those comparison things where there are 50 different ways to measure it, like height, dome diameter, internal square footage, external square footage, congregant capacity, etc. At the very least, its dome is higher than St. Peter’s Cathedral in Vatical City because FHB purposefully built it that way despite the Pope literally asking him not to.

This thing absolutely dominates Yamoussoukro. It looms over the city. You can see it from pretty much everywhere in the distance, especially since there are rarely any other tall buildings. The church is so large that there’s an optical illusion where you walk toward it, and it never seems to get any closer.

Inside, the church is as grand as you’d expect in terms of scale, but it’s honestly a bit plain if you’re used to the larger Catholic Cathedrals in Europe. It’s still nice though.

There was barely anyone inside, maybe ten people. I saw a cute French girl in a short skirt taking dozens of (presumed Instagram) photos of herself in various poses. None of the bored workers seemed to mind. Supposedly, the church barely gets any actual congregants, which is expected of a church in the middle of nowhere in a depopulated city in a country that doesn’t have many Catholics.

The best part is going up on the roof. There are gorgeous views of Yamoussoukro and its surroundings that truly demonstrate how remote this place is. About half of the land around it is forests and farms.

Maybe it’s just because I know the history behind it, but the Basilica of our Lady Peace gives off sad vibes. It’s a beautiful building and the scale, especially in that setting, is stunning. But there are cracks on the roof and in the pavement. I don’t know how to describe it, it just feels weird.

Man

I don’t have anything to say about Man except that it has an unusual name with shitty SEO and it’s maybe the most naturally beautiful city in West Africa.

Miscellaneous

• Despite the name, there are only about 200 elephants left in the Ivory Coast.
• Like Pablo Escobar’s hippos in Colombia, FHB’s imported crocodiles have escaped captivity, reproduced, and are now terrorizing the locals.
• FHB’s family members, including five children from three women, are still knocking around and all seem to hate each other. Only one or two of his decedents live in the Ivory Coast while the rest live in luxury abroad. He left no will, so they all fought each other for parts of the inheritance that the Ivorian state didn’t claim. Key quote from FHB’s wife about a Swiss banker: “[He told me] instead of spending your time at a funeral, you should have rushed here like the others: your daughter-in-law has already taken everything.”
• Also, one of FHB’s nieces or granddaughters married a rapper.
• The Ivory Coast’s flag is Ireland’s flag in reverse. Just to fuck with you, I’m not going to say which one is which:

• Here are some public service announcements from the city of Man: