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Foreign Policy
Spring 1999
Les faux complots
d’Houphouët-Boigny
(The Fake Plots of Houphouët-Boigny)
By Samba Diarra
Reviewed by Howard W. French *
Almost from the moment in the early 1950s when they emerged as the preeminent indigenous political leaders of Côte d’Ivoire and the Gold Coast (now Ghana), Felix Houphouët-Boigny and Kwame Nkrumah have often been linked in the minds of historians and of the people of their region. Their determined rivalry was captured in one of the most famous episodes of their era: the public wager they made in 1957 over whose approach to leadership — Nkrumah’s socialist-oriented Pan-African nationalism or Houphouët-Boigny’s eager alignment with the capitalist West — would create the more prosperous and influential nation.
Their bet was to have been decided in only 10 years time, but Nkrumah could not stay the course. In 1966, he was overthrown. Nkrumah died in exile in Bucharest in 1972. Houphouët-Boigny, for his part, continued ruling his country until his death in 1993. Even so, Nkrumah today remains an icon of an enduring grassroots attachment to ideals of African unity and self-reliance, while outside of Francophone Africa, mention of Houphouët-Boigny, who built his region’s most prosperous and stable state, stirs few memories.
Nkrumah famously enjoined Africans to “Seek ye first the political kingdom,” promising that they would receive all manner of dividends from sovereign control of the continent’s vast wealth. But it was Houphouët-Boigny who actually devised the model that generations of African autocrats have copied to secure power.
It is precisely this latter story that most impresses the reader of Samba Diarra’s book, The Fake Plots of Houphouët-Boigny, a political prisoner’s-eye view of the dark side of a leader who is celebrated in national myth—and was much lauded in the West—as a benign nation builder, model of moderation, and man of peace. With a minimum of emotion, Diarra recounts how, from the earliest days of his rule, Houphouët-Boigny warded off potential challenges to his authority through a cunning strategy of intimidation. As the president saw it, known foes were easy to deal with, whether by arrest, execution, or banishment. The trickier task was conjuring a steady stream of traitors, whose punishment—and usually, eventual pardon—would keep his new nation in awe of him and preemptively terrify anyone from questioning his power.
Setting a pattern followed by Nigeria’s late General Sani Abacha, the Democratic Republic of Congo’s Laurent Kabila, and a legion of other African dictators, the president focused his paranoid energies on many of his closest collaborators. One of Houphouët-Boigny’s earliest and most surprising victims was Jean-Baptiste Mockey, his loyal number-two figure during the last years of French rule and, significantly, one of the few colleagues whose courageous role in the independence movement might have cast shadows over Houphouët-Boigny’s project to make himself his nation’s quasi-mythic father. Mockey, who eventually died in a suspicious car accident, was put away for several years because of the so-called Black Cat Plot, in which he was accused of planting the head of a cat whose mouth had been stuffed with the tip of a bull’s horn in the luggage of Houphouët-Boigny’s wife. The curse, it was publicly alleged, was intended to render Houphouët-Boigny impotent and eventually kill him.
Houphouët-Boigny distinguished himself from many of his African presidential peers by investing heavily in overseas higher education right from the start of his rule. But there was a high price to be paid by that first generation of graduates, who were frequently jailed on wholly invented charges when they returned home—the better to disabuse them of any ideas they might have had of enjoying power. Diarra himself was imprisoned for four years in 1963 for his supposed participation in one of a series of plots involving the first great wave of students returning from university training in France to become the new administrative and political élite of an infant nation.
Many survivors, once rehabilitated, went on to become trusted lieutenants—indeed, ardent champions—of Houphouët-Boigny’s rule, capable of giving speeches to the effect that from the time of his infancy, as one put it, the nonpareil president had been “first in everything.”
Those individuals deemed less cooperative were harshly condemned in show trials or tirelessly humiliated, whether through beatings in front of visiting African heads of state or warnings to their wives that they should take other husbands because their current ones were unlikely to be of much use after release from the political prison of Assabou. The most famous victim of this type of treatment was Ernest Boka, the first president of Côte d’Ivoire’s Supreme Court. In 1964, the jurist had refused to condemn political detainees against whom there was no evidence and so was arrested himself and, according to Diarra, savagely beaten in front of Houphouët-Boigny. Untreated, he died a short time later of his wounds.
Stories such as these have made the book a big seller in Côte d’Ivoire and throughout the region, where, even if such events have been discussed with ever greater openness since the advent of multi-party elections in 1990 and especially since Houphouët-Boigny’s death, they had never before been chronicled in such an exhaustive way.
What emerges, though, in Diarra’s recounting of how so many “political opponents” were created, punished, and then, quite often, coopted is less interesting for its revelations of the president’s misdeeds than for the rough schematic it provides for the consolidation of power in postcolonial Africa.
In less capable hands, Houphouët-Boigny’s model often turned to grand tragedy or tragic farce. Yet, as evidenced by the steady stream of visits from African peers—including both more famous leaders such as the late “Emperor” Jean-Bedel Bokassa of the Central African Republic or Mobutu Sese Seko, the deceased dictator of the former Zaire, and relatively obscure microdespots such as Presidents Gnassingbe Eyadema of Togo and Omar Bongo of Gabon—the Ivorian leader’s approach to building unchallenged one-man rule was broadly influential.
As a member of the Baoule, a large but hardly majority ethnic group, Houphouët-Boigny quickly sought to put Côte d’Ivoire’s other ethnic groups on notice that power was not up for grabs. What better way to do that than by inventing coup plots to jail their most ambitious members. And lest the Baoule themselves feed resentment, or begin to think of power as an entitlement, Houphouët-Boigny used his last major wave of arrests (in 1963 and 1964) to prosecute another group of supposed plotters that included kinsmen as close as nephews and cousins who were sentenced to death or long terms of imprisonment.
By 1966, the Ivorian leader’s project of establishing an uncontested autocracy replete with a personality cult run by effusive sycophants was complete. From then on, a progressive relaxation began. By the early 1970s, Houphouët-Boigny felt secure enough to acknowledge publicly what no other African tyrant has—namely, that the charges pressed against his enemies were almost all cooked up. Not by himself, of course, but supposedly by overly ambitious underlings. In a private meeting with one of Houphouët-Boigny’s many victims, Jean Konan Banny, a fellow Baoule clansman and former defense minister who served four years at Assabou, the author quotes a contrite Houphouët-Boigny explaining away the minister’s imprisonment in these terms: “Between disorder and injustice, I chose injustice. Injustice can always be repaired, whereas disorder can have unpredictable consequences. In any case, these [jailings] had a positive side to them: They allowed me to exterminate in egg any thoughts of a coup plot in Côte d’Ivoire.”
For the remainder of his life, Houphouët-Boigny worked tirelessly at promoting an image of himself as an apostle of peace and of his country as a kinder, gentler corner of a mean continent. His efforts included building the world’s largest basilica near where the Assabou prison once stood and giving asylum to political refugees from all over the continent.
Diarra rejects Houphouët-Boigny’s pretensions to a George Washington-like stature in his country’s history. Indeed, The Fake Plots of Houphouët-Boigny is destined to contribute to an Africa-driven reconsideration of independence-era leaders that in some cases will highlight how far their respective countries have come and, in others, stress what a vast, uncharted stretch of road ahead they still have to travel. Yet, Côte d’Ivoire undoubtedly remains a haven of relative peace and prosperity in a region of much poverty and turmoil. And at home at least, the country’s first leader remains widely revered.
Endnotes
*: Howard W. French recently completed a four-year assignment as West African bureau chief for the New York Times. He is currently a visiting scholar in Japanese and Korean Studies at the University of Hawaii and will be assigned by the Times to Tokyo in August. Back.