Côte d’Ivoire

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The recent history of Côte d’Ivoire is rife with contradictions. The country that offered some of the most sustained resistance to French colonialism has in the postcolonial era become one of France’s most loyal clients. Economic growth and prosperity for elites and foreign investors has come at the price of poverty for large segments of the population. Côte d’Ivoire had only two leaders from 1960 to 1999: Félix Houphouët-Boigny, who led the country from colonial rule through three decades of independence—and his successor, Henri-Konan Bédié. Both helped build a nation of political stability and limited economic prosperity—the “Ivoirian Miracle.” At the same time, both maintained a neocolonial dependence on France and blocked effective democratic reforms. Many praised Côte d’Ivoire as a model of political stability until 1999, when Bédié was overthrown in the nation’s first military coup.

Precolonial History

Unlike many West African countries, little is known about the early history of Côte d’Ivoire. Historians believe that agriculture reached the region before Mande, Kru, and Akan groups assimilated much of its population. Fleeing from the Mali empire and the Asante, and searching for gold and KOLA nuts for the trans-Saharan trade, these groups began migrating to the area by the sixteenth century. By the mid-eighteenth century they had established five major kingdoms in the northern, central, and eastern regions: the Kong Kingdom, founded by the Jula and the Senufo; the ABRON KINGDOM; the Baule Kingdom; and the Anyi Kingdoms of Indénié and Sanwi, all established by different Akan groups. Relying primarily on subsistence agriculture, these kingdoms brought the Saharan trade to the edges of the densely forested south. Nevertheless, the inhabitants of the largely autonomous forest villages remained essentially isolated from outside influences. Dense woods in the south and a treacherous coastline protected Côte d’Ivoire from inroads by early European explorers, who made only halting contacts before the nineteenth century. The Portuguese briefly landed on the coast during the fifteenth century, and the French founded their first short-lived trading settlement at Assinie during the seventeenth century to trade guns and other European goods for gold and ivory. But inhospitable conditions prevented the establishment of permanent settlements, and thus Côte d’Ivoire largely escaped the horrors of the slave trade. In the 1840s, however, the French, while patrolling the Gulf of Guinea to block the now illegal slave trade, decided to reestablish a foothold in the region of Côte d’Ivoire. In 1842, under orders from the Naval Ministry, Captain Bouët-Willaumez signed treaties with a number of coastal groups. For an annual tribute payment, the French obtained two strategic tracts of land—present-day Assinie and Grand-Bassam—where they built forts and trading posts. As Great Britain acquired large possessions nearby, France attempted to expand in the region and during the next twenty-five years concluded treaties with almost all the major coastal villages. Despite escalating European rivalry in the area, however, defeat in the Franco-Prussian War (1871) forced France to turn its attention away from Africa and back to European affairs. But, hoping to maintain control over the region, France named a merchant, Arthur Verdier, the first resident of Côte d’Ivoire in 1878 and gave him temporary control of Grand-Bassam and other nearby ports. Although Verdier’s main interests were commercial ventures along the coast—he built new ports and started a coffee plantation—he also sought to promote France’s interests, and in 1887 hired Marcel Treich-Leplène to explore the Niger River basin and obtain treaties from its inhabitants. At the same time, the French government sent Lieutenant Louis-Gustave Binger into the interior of Côte d’Ivoire. Treich-Leplène and Binger secured treaties with nine major groups, including the Abron and Kong, and when they met up in 1889 they declared the southern region a French protectorate. Subsequent expeditions solidified French claims, and negotiations with Great Britain and Liberia further clarified the boundaries of the French protectorate. (The French repeatedly redefined the northern border until 1947, when they determined its present shape.) In 1893 France declared Côte d’Ivoire a colony.

French Colonization

France did not secure control of the entire Côte d’Ivoire until 1918. At first, Governor Binger believed that existing treaties and economic incentives would provide all of the leverage necessary to secure French colonial rule, but within months he was proved wrong. Although African leaders had signed treaties giving the French control of their land, poor communication and intentional deception by the French meant that few fully understood the treaties. As a result, French attempts to establish new military and trading posts met hostile resistance and attacks by groups such as the Baule, Dan, Bété, and Dida. The French military spent years fighting many of these resistance movements. The most famous of these was Mandinka warrior Samory Touré’s long struggle to resist French conquest. Touré, whose empire the French had previously destroyed, rebuilt at Dabakala and began extending his new empire into the northern part of Côte d’Ivoire. But the French again attacked Touré, ultimately defeating him in 1898.

Although France fought Touré in order to protect the prosperous Baulé, the Baulé not only obstructed that campaign but went on to resist French colonization for nearly twenty years. As the French military moved through Baulé territory on their way to attack Touré, they conscripted Baulé slaves as porters. This action provoked armed attacks by the Baulé and forced the French to retreat and search out another path to Touré. Defeated and distracted by other campaigns, the French made minimal efforts to subdue the empire, but largely ignored the Baulé problem. By 1908, however, the continued resistance of the Baulé and other groups underlined the failure of the French colonial government, which had no control over vast parts of the territory and could not even raise the obligatory “head tax” from the African population. Under pressure from the French government, the newly appointed governor, Gabriel Angoulvant, launched a brutal military campaign he called “pacification” and ordered troops to “seek and destroy” all rebels, their crops, and their homes. For the next seven years, the French colonial army combed the interior of Côte d’Ivoire, killed suspected resistors, and forced local rulers to accept French colonial authority. The results were devastating—the army killed thousands of Africans and subsequent famine caused the death of many more. This ruthless campaign finally secured the entire region for France. In an effort to quell future resistance, the French filled civil service and administrative positions with either African commoners or precolonial rulers who had proved their loyalty to the French. These civil servants received the best the colonial system had to offer Africans—education, political and land rights, and economic security. In contrast, the majority of the African population felt only the burdens of French colonization. Because France had decided that its African colonies must be self-sufficient, the colonial government devised two strategies to generate revenue. First, the government offered to sell land concessions to planters for private plantations. Although the majority of these concessions were sold to white Europeans, some Africans, mainly civil servants in the French colonial administration, also purchased land, and the wealthiest of these planters created a new class of local elites who were vocal in their demands for improved transport and shipping facilities. Second, the government established state mines, lumber, and infrastructure construction projects as well as huge state plantations cultivating export crops, such as cocoa, coffee, and millet. These endeavors suffered from a shortage of labor. Consequently, the colonial government required each adult Ivoirian male to “volunteer” ten days of labor a year for state projects. Many Africans were in fact forced to work more to meet the vast labor requirements of the various projects. Still, a labor shortage persisted, and the government began recruiting workers from Upper Volta (present-day Burkina Faso), especially from the Mossi ethnic group. This labor supply ultimately proved so valuable that Côte d’Ivoire annexed the southern part of Upper Volta in order to increase the colony’s labor pool. While the labor policy satisfied the needs of the colonial administration, it fostered antagonism and resentment among the African population. These feelings intensified during World War II, when the Nazi-supported Vichy government took over the colonies and not only doubled the forced labor requirement but conscripted laborers for the military. To the detriment of the local populations, the Vichy government also forced Ivoirian farmers to donate large portions of their crops to the military. Ivoirian intellectuals, civil servants, and communists soon joined together in protest and announced their support for Charles de Gaulle’s exiled Free French government. In addition, a Baulé planter and local administrator, FéLIX HOUPHOUëT-BOIGNY, organized a coalition of African planters, called the Syndicat Agricole Africain (SAA), to protest the Vichy government’s policies. Although these organizations had little effect on the Vichy government, they did influence de Gaulle, who, in 1944, convened his exiled government and colonial administrators in Brazzaville to reassess France’s relationship with its African colonies. During the conference, the group created a progressive list of postwar colonial reforms, few of which were actually enacted. Nevertheless, the Brazzaville Conference did plant the seeds for decolonization after World War II.

Decolonization

After the defeat of Germany in 1945, de Gaulle offered France’s West African colonies greater political representation and allowed each to elect two delegates to the French Constituent Assembly, one representing the African majority and the other the European minority. Campaigning to end forced labor, Houphouët-Boigny won the African seat for Côte d’Ivoire. When the assembly convened in early 1946, Houphouët-Boigny secured passage of legislation ending the forced labor system—a major victory for the Ivoirian population. This success guaranteed Houphouët-Boigny wide popular support throughout the colony. Upon his return he organized his supporters, including members of the SAA, into a new political party, the Parti Démocratique de la Côte d’Ivoire, or PDCI. In October 1946, he attempted to further increase his political leverage by joining the PDCI with the new multicolony party, the Rassemblement Démocratique Africain (RDA). Led by Houphouët-Boigny and other prominent French West African leaders, and supported by the French Communist Party, the RDA lobbied for parity between African and French citizens. Although the organization supported widespread reforms, it did not press for decolonization. By 1948, however, the Communist Party had lost its place in the governing coalition, and France faced armed independence movements in North Africa and Indochina. Consequently, the French government began to view the RDA, and by extension Houphouët-Boigny and his PDCI, as a threat. For the next year Houphouët-Boigny and his party members faced harassment and persecution, including arrests. To regain French favor, Houphouët-Boigny decided to break with the Communist Party. By early 1956, he had won French support and become the strongest African advocate of de Gaulle’s vision of a French Union (later named the French Community)—a federation of internally self-ruled countries under the executive control of the French president. But because the African population demanded complete independence, Houphouët-Boigny abandoned this plan for limited self-rule. As decolonization became inevitable, Houphouët-Boigny solidified his political power, and in November 1960, only two months after France declared Côte d’Ivoire independent, he was elected president by a landslide.

Côte d’Ivoire under Houphouët-Boigny

During his first three years as president, Houphouët-Boigny built a centralized and highly personalized regime that successfully quelled dissent and political competition. At the same time, armed with French aid and a civil service full of French technocrats, Houphouët-Boigny engineered an economic boom, often called the “Ivoirian Miracle,” that helped build his popularity not only in the international financial community but among the Ivoirian population. Meanwhile, rumors of a coup d’état prompted Houphouët-Boigny to further consolidate his power in a “benevolent,” authoritarian one-party state. In 1962 an adviser warned him that PDCI members were plotting a coup. Houphouët-Boigny ordered the arrest of more than 125 people, forty-five of whom were convicted and imprisoned. The supposed discovery of another plot in 1963 led Houphouët-Boigny to purge the PDCI of more than 200 dissenters and limit the power of his closest advisers (and potential rivals). At the same time, he began crafting an intricate power system that maintained power by both silencing and co-opting dissenters and by creating a group of loyal politicians who were personally indebted to the president for their positions, prestige, and wealth. Throughout the next two decades, Houphouët-Boigny used this system to monopolize political power. The president controlled access to all government positions, including those in the military, civil service, and local government. At the same time, he maintained popular support and the guise of free speech by holding public forums that offered a chance to speak to him in person. Advertised as an opportunity for constructive dialogue with the receptive and concerned president, these forums were, in fact, nothing more than an opportunity to diffuse popular discontent. Houphouët-Boigny subsequently maintained the appearance of accountability by lavishing inordinate amounts of money and attention on select problems and by scapegoating inadequate government officials, whom he promptly fired and replaced.

A strong economy supported this autocratic system. In 1960 Houphouët-Boigny had inherited one of the most developed economies in West Africa. But the Ivoirian economy remained heavily dependent on the export of crops, particularly coffee, cocoa, pineapples, and bananas. Although pre-independence completion of the Vridi Canal and the Abidjan port, one of the largest in West Africa, had helped bolster the economy and raised new revenues, few efforts had been made to promote sustainable economic growth. After independence, Houphouët-Boigny took up this challenge. Having maintained close ties with France since the colonial period, he asked the French government to encourage investment. Foreign investment, coupled with efforts to divert revenues from export crops into other economic sectors, such as manufacturing, helped boost economic growth to an annual rate of 10 to 12 percent during the 1960s. The discovery of oil further stimulated foreign investment, and by the early 1970s agriculture accounted for only 25 percent of the gross domestic product. It seemed that Côte d’Ivoire had successfully engineered sustainable prosperity. But the worldwide recession of the late 1970s and early 1980s undermined the economic progress of Côte d’Ivoire and caused severe problems in Abidjan. The city, until then a focus of investment, had experienced a huge influx of rural villagers seeking stable wages. The sudden economic slowdown caused rampant unemployment, and exacerbated tensions between Abidjan’s rich and poor that soon erupted in protests. Demonstrators attacked Houphouët-Boigny’s failure to “ivoirianize” the public sector, much of which was still run by French expatriates. At the same time, the recession depressed the price of Côte d’Ivoire’s two main exports—cocoa and coffee. The price drop hurt rural farmers and plantation workers, many of them unskilled laborers whose migration from other African countries had been encouraged by Houphouët-Boigny’s government. As a result, tensions between Ivoirian and migrant farmers escalated into violence throughout the late 1970s and early 1980s. Meanwhile, decades of exploitation had reduced the southern forest reserves and curtailed profits from another valuable export—hardwood—and exploration proved that the once-celebrated oil reserves would yield nothing more than a short-lived boom. Rampant inflation and increasingly severe droughts between 1973 and 1985 further exacerbated these problems. At first, Houphouët-Boigny was able to deflect public unrest and criticism onto other government officials. As the situation worsened in the early 1980s, however, he responded to critics by “ivoirianizing” the public sector and decentralizing municipal governments. Nevertheless, the government remained a target of widespread protests, organized by teacher and student unions and opposition groups such as the Ivoirian Popular Front, led by the exiled Laurent Gbagbo. As these continued, Houphouët-Boigny returned to his former policy and dissolved the unions, closed the universities, and arrested the protesters. Facing few serious threats, Houphouët-Boigny had little incentive to change the system that maintained his power and enriched him and his family.

External pressures, however, forced the president to introduce the reforms that internal protests had failed to secure. In the late 1980s the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank pushed Houphouët-Boigny to implement austerity measures that further taxed the impoverished nation and brought new protests. At the same time, foreign supporters began pressing Houphouët-Boigny to open the system to potential successors. In April 1990, Houphouët-Boigny announced the first multiparty elections in Ivoirian history. Disadvantaged by the short notice and encumbered by bureaucratic restrictions, the opposition nevertheless nominated a candidate, Gbagbo, who ran in the presidential election. Although Houphouët-Boigny won with an 81 percent majority, Gbagbo won a seat in the National Assembly in the elections that took place a month later. But electoral reforms failed to bring substantive change to the Houphouët-Boigny system, and the president again sought to quell opposition and dissent.

Contemporary Issues

The need to identify a successor to Houphouët-Boigny soon overshadowed the repressive actions of the Ivoirian government. Already in weak health, in June 1993 Houphouët-Boigny was diagnosed with prostate cancer. He ruled the country from the hospital until his death six months later. Despite expectations of a violent and prolonged power struggle, Henri Konan Bédié succeeded Houphouët-Boigny smoothly. Bédié continued many of the policies of his predecessor. His government refused to implement electoral reforms in the 1995 presidential election, and an opposition boycott tarnished Bédié’s victory. Like Houphouët-Boigny, Bédié took measures to silence dissent and criticism. At the same time, he benefited from a healthy economy and made strategic economic concessions to key groups, such as civil servants and rural farmers, in an effort to strengthen the position of the PDCI. With support from France and other foreign donors, the PDCI’s system of “one-party democracy” seemed a model of African political stability. Growing unrest in the late 1990s, however, led to Bédié’s overthrow in a December 1999 military coup. General Robert Gueï, the coup leader, organized October 2000 presidential elections that pitted Gueï against Gbagbo. After early voting results showed Gueï trailing, Gueï dissolved the official election commission and declared himself the winner. A popular uprising swept Gueï from power, and Gbagbo declared himself the rightful winner. In the days after the election, at least 200 people died in political violence. Despite his attempts to consolidate power, Gbagbo faced an attempted coup in September 2002. Intense fighting and the suspected covert involvement of Burkina Faso and Liberia caused Gbagbo to request military help from France and from West African allies. In January 2003 rebel leaders were granted ministerial posts in a new unity government, but prospects for civil and economic stabilization were short lived. The rebels refused to disarm, and soon military strikes against them recommenced. A new peace deal was signed in 2007.