The Ivory Coast: Old and New Exist in Awkward Mixture

Adzope is one of a score of drab, sprawling towns which you pass on the Ivory Coast's main highway north of Abidjan. The West African countryside is absolutely flat, and in the thick coastal forest the town is invisible until a turn in the road brings you into the center. Then suddenly the wall of the trees opens up, and there is a glimpse of long dirt roads, gas station signs and telephone poles, laundry spread out on the grass to dry, and people walking past rows of identical shops stacked with bright plastic washtubs. The reflection of the equatorial sun is painful. Round another bend, the trees close together again, and the view is all woods and vines for ten miles more.

Adzope happens to be a little bigger and richer and more important than most of the other towns. It prides itself as an important center for cocoa, coffee, and bananas. MG trucks load up in the surrounding forest with giant teak and mahogany logs for the export market. The town is the administrative seat for the surrounding sous-prefeture--a government unit including about 65,000 people. There are four sizable schools, bureaucratic offices, chain stores, a post office.

This means prosperity, here, and Adzope's dullness does not hide all the signs of its relative affluence. The local delegate to the Assemblee Nationale has a chauffered Mercedes, and dozens of people buzz around on Mobylettes.

But the fact of Adzope's is its ugly plainness, its disorganization. Drivers on the highway drive by, heading either for Abidjan's stores and skyscrapers or for the upcountry north for a look at wild Africa. This isn't worth a stop--it's too dirty to be sophisticated and too civilized to be picturesque.

But Adzope, or the hundred towns like it, is going to be far more crucial to the development of the Ivory Coast than the capital or the villages. The capital, Abidjan, everyone there says, is beautiful, but no more African than Marseille. The glamor of the villages quickly becomes boring--progress avoids them. The success or failure of the country will be decided outside both areas: outside Abidjan because it is such an anomoly, outside the villages because nothing ever happens there.

Political and social development, then, revolves around the Adzopes all over West Africa, the countless ugly towns of 15 or 20,000 people.

The writer spent last summer working in the Ivory Coast with Operations Crossroads.

That seems a hopeless place to start, with such disorganization. It is hard for a visitor to try to resolve any pattern in daily life, any sign that people care about the country, or the government, or any kind of unit bigger than a family. Adzope has the accouterments of civilization, but that often appears very irrelevant. It has had enough French education to be able to go through the motions, but occasionally something happens to show how thin the veneer really is.

On the eve of Independence Day, August 7, the sous-prefet held a buffet dinner for all the important people in town. Everyone showed up in his best, either a suit or an ornate robe, and chatted pleasantly or danced during cocktails. Then a servant came out to announce that dinner was ready, and instantly the place was transformed. People jammed through the door, shoving each other out of the way to get in, shoveling enough food onto their plates to last the week. Last man got nothing.

Is the whole act of modernization just that: an act. It seems that way, at times like the sous-prefet's party or times when a traveler is randomly rounded up by the police. Then Adzope appears shapeless, with its bits and pieces acting out their meaningless Western jobs under no particular plan.

Finding any organization here is a gradual process. People passing through almost never do it. But there is organization here, and eventually some of it becomes clear.

Nationalities show up most quickly. Most of Adzope is African, of course, but the people have surprisingly wide backgrounds. The Ivory Coast itself counts some 64 dialects, and different quartiers in town speak different languages. Economic prosperity has drawn settlers from poorer neighbors to the north--Mali, Niger, and Guinea.

There is a sizeable white community, too. The French, who ruled the country until seven years ago, are still around. Most of them are priests, doctors, technical advisers, or teachers at the secondary schools; mostly they stick to themselves and save up to go back to France during the summer vacations. They are guests of honor at all official functions, but they have long ago abdicated from any influence on the way Adzope is going.

The Lebanese are everywhere, and they all do the same thing: operate identical general stores with identical merchandise. Adzope has an even dozen Lebanese stores, and if you can't find something in one of them you can't find it anywhere. They sell to the Africans and leer at the French women, but no one talks to them except other Lebanese.

Since the Peace Corps, a few Americans, Canadians, and scattered other nationalities have come upcountry. Adzope had four volunteers this summer, who taught or traveled to outlying villages giving health lectures, advising mothers, and administering vaccinations. The unmarried Frenchmen date the girls, but they're lonely too.

All these foreigners, it seems, matter very little. Those who want to can cultivate emigre mentalities; the rest just joke about the place. Although they are all doing jobs which are technically important, for all their nudging and advising life in Adzope goes on by default on Adzope own terms. It has to work out its own broad solutions.

Any direction which is being supplied here is coming from the government. The sousprefeture complex, with offices and a meeting hall, the gendarmerie: the post office; a propaganda showroom; and some offices in the center of town: these are what the leadership has to work with. It isn't much, and where many people cannot read and no one has a choice of how to vote, it tends to fade out of most people's sight.

Its touch with the mass of older people in Adzope is weak, and it really only shows in the occasional festivals and public rallies. August 7th, or any day when a politician passes through, Adzope sprouts orange-white-and-green flags, people dress up in their best, and dance troupes show off special costumes, songs, and folk dances. Someone makes a party speech--for the one party, the Parti Democratique de Cote d'Ivoire--the sous-prefet shows off his glittering best uniform, party faithfuls collect medals, Adzope's wheezing brass band coughs the national anthem, and people go wild dancing in the streets. It's a gala.

But government influence shrinks mightily once the crowds go home. In the end, the families, and seen through them, the quarter and the tribe, remain one large day-to-day influence on most people. The dance troupes are organized along family lines. Families work together to raise vegetables and bring them into market.

The regime has been scrupulous about eliminating any wider influence of tribalism, which has seen such disastrous effects in the dissection of Nigeria. Monsieur Kouassi, the sous-prefet, is not an Atye as are his constituents. Like the hundred-odd other sous-prefets, he has been chosen from a different tribal area of the country so as to prevent him from encouraging localism as a means of building up his personal power.

And so all but the ceremonial trappings of tribal influence have been minimized. But since this has not changed its central importance in the daily routine, the primary result has been to keep most people politically passive. The government remains irrevelant. This remoteness, in the long run, may tend to undercut stability as much as regional friction.

There is the momentum of too much past behind these ways to expect much change now. The Ivory Coast's government recognizes the limits to what it can do, and has focused most of its programs on youth. Probably the two most important offices in town are the ministries of education, and of youth and sports.

Students in Adzope form a variety of strong groups. Youth and sports Supplies equipment to several soccer teams, which play matches in nearby towns, aiming for a chance to compete in the big stadium at Abidjan.

There are regular hang-outs for youth. Every few nights the Palace Theater shows a movie--Hercules or the wild west or a bad Indian film. Once or twice a month there is a dance at the Centre Technique with rock-and-roll or hi-life music.

Everyone showed up in his best for the party. Then a servant announced that dinner was ready. Instantly the place was transformed, people shoving each other out of the way to get at the food.

To give a physical focus for student activity, the government is constructing a youth center in the middle of town, and for the past few summers has been inviting French and American student groups like Operation Crossroads to work with local students on the building. Progress is excruciatingly slow, but when it is done it will include a large meeting room, a library, a youth hostel, and a bar. Meanwhile, students converse over their shovels.

Of course the central fact of being a student is going to school. But so far, the government has not been able to reach advanced students there to give them any great feeling of nationality. A desparate teacher shortage has kept French instructors in control of nearly all the secondary schools, and much of the say over what is going to be taught still comes from Paris. The lycees teach more Cartesian logic than Ivoirian problems, dispensing much that means little to life so far from France.

And so, by and large, the government has had to work at the schools from outside. A construction program gave Adzope a new secondary school last summer. The state printing house has begun to supply special textbooks written for Africa. And most of all, it politicizes its advanced students.

Attending secondary school or a university becomes an intensely political experience, as the government props up student unions and factions to infuse a little nationalism into its future leaders. Much of this concern filters down to the Adzope level, especially during the summer when lycee or university students come home for vacation. Last July, President Felix Houphouet-Boigny spent over a week crisscrossing the country, holding local meetings with students to try to iron out any grievances which they might have.

Every now and then, the Youth and Sports minister rounds up as many young people as he can find, and insists they get organized and name some leaders. But modernization in Adzope is such a humdrum thing that nobody seems much to care.

The harder it tries, the larger the dangers are likely to become. In attempting a little political sophistication, in taking a quasi-French model, the local leaders are prone to become impatient with Adzope's "Africanness," and to toss out many of the traditions. Putting on a Western face, this attitude is tending to make many of its young people uneasy about their own background. But the new system is still a fragile organism, and it may not be able to stand the strain if the traditional culture is toppled.

The students seem to be much more aware of the need for balance than the government--which is a hopeful sign for coming years. In Adzope, Robert-Jean Seka, who was elected leader of the youth, is probably the most articulate advocate for a fusion of both systems.

Bob's great-grandfather was the last of the powerful Atye chiefs in the Adzope area; his grandfather, now 85, owns huge plantations in the forest outside of town. A superior student, he attends the lycee at Bouake, concentrating in art. His hope is to study painting in Paris, then to return to the Ivory Coast as an artist.

Bob's ego is massive; as a student, a tribal noble, and an artist, he claims at least three distinctions. People who talk with him talk on his own terms. To other Ivoirian students, he is sophisticated and French. To outsiders, he is a passionate defender of the Atye ways.

At one of Adzope's dances, he took the microphone to sing French translations of the Beatles. Then a few days later, at dinner, he sat his guests in a circle and offered bangui, palm wine, in a traditional ceremony. People tend to forget the observances and even the shell of custom, he told the guests. "My great-grandfather is buried on the hill, and now the school has covered over the grave. Things have been changing quickly. But this is all right," he said, "as long as people remember that the bones are still there.