The Revolution

12^th-14^th September – Korhogo, Côte D'Ivoire

Arriving in Korhogo under heavy rain, we faced a patch of uncertainty. The minibus station was on the far edge of town and the assembled Ivorian women clucked with disapproval, concluded that there were no taxis and so refused to alight from the minibus, declaring that the driver would have to take us into the centre of town. The driver showed no such inclination and we found ourselves in the middle of a face-off which lasted several minutes. Hoping that such a drop-off would materialise, we stayed in our seats, but when the assistant started unloading the bags we saw the writing on the wall and starting trekking towards town. A passer-by indicated that the Mont Korhogo hotel, our home for two nights, was around 3km from here and, with a lighter load having left one bag in Bouaké, we walked on. The rain got heavier until at one point it formed a curtain of water before our eyes, and we scampered into a large compound containing tables under large tents. It was here that a strange event happened.

"Le Mont Korhogo"

My mother went to the nearest shack to enquire about drinks. She asked for tea, water and Diet Coke, being turned down each time and eventually asked what they had. The answer was beer, and only beer. A lifelong, resolute despiser of beer, she picked a large one up for me and contented herself with nothing.

“I'm thirsty”, she said. “Give me a bit of that”.

With a smile, I handed it over knowing that she was let one drop touch her tongue, recoil with a look of disgust and hand it back to me. Such a thing didn't happen.

“Not bad”.

I've seen many new and radical things in my lifetime but they all pale into insignificance when faced with the prospect of my mother enjoying beer. I like to be very open minded, understanding and am proud of my ability to reason with anything but this sight was just too much for me.

“What ?”

“I said it's not bad. It's refreshing.”

She even had a few more sips before the rain abated and we carried on towards the Mont Korhogo, getting directions from a friendly passing policeman and settled into this hotel, which she had stayed in in the 1970s. It had become pretty dog-eared in the meantime (Korhogo was far into rebel territory during the war and not many people must have stayed here during that time) but for my standards was still perfectly fine. We went for a small wander around town in the afternoon but the mud streets had turned into lakes with the rain and the one tarmacked street through town wasn't particularly interesting, lined with mechanics and spare parts shops for the passing traffic, Korhogo being the last town before reaching Burkina Faso and Mali. We retired to the bar when I had a couple of beers and my mother had a couple of gin-tonics. She remarked that they were quite expensive and that she would have a beer tomorrow. My jaw dropped slightly.

Dodging the puddles

While we ate breakfast the next day, we were approached by a young guy who introduced himself as Petit Solo, who outlined a few tours he could do and gave us a price. With hindsight, it was too much but we accepted and we agreed to meet again at 1pm where he would have a friend and two motorbikes to take us to Waraniénié, a weavers' village, and to “le rocher sacré”, the sacred rock of the Sénoufo people. He was quite happy to cancel everything if the weather turned and we watched the sky for a few hours before concluding that we should be OK, and eventually, the four of us got going. My mother and the friend went on ahead as Petit Solo was eating a sandwich while he was driving and decided that he wouldn't go so quickly. We caught them up at a military checkpoint on the outskirts of town, where Petit Solo showed a little bit too much attitude to the assembled soldiers when told that his lack of vehicle insurance was a problem. His bike was promptly impounded, the soldiers told us to both get on the back of the friend's bike and go where we were going. “When you come back, he will still be here, and he will give you half of your money back”, we were assured. That was that, then. 

We carried on to Waraniénié where the friend (so called as neither of us remember his name...), who was from the village, gave us the grand tour and explained the art of weaving and the collaboration between Muslims and Animists here, where the entire village has become a cooperative. Men, women and children each have separate roles in the industry and their products are sent all over Côte D'Ivoire and sometimes to France as well. Petit Solo eventually caught us up where my mother gave him a friendly lecture about the police always being right.

It does look like a sweat shop, but I can assure you it isn't

“But no one here has insurance ! Why did they single me out ?”, he protested.

He eventually accepted the be-nice-to-the-police theory but threw out some revolutionary rhetoric about how the government must make it possible for people to earn money if they expect people to buy insurance. A fair point, but you still don't tell soldiers that. We moved onto the sacred rock, which I asked (through a spiritual interpreter) to ensure that I find work soon. The interpreter threw some kola nuts around and declared that the way they fell indicated that the rock would indeed help me. He then asked what I would sacrifice if my wish were to come true, and I promised to come back and sacrifice a chicken when I found work.

“I hope you know that the rules state that you must kill it, cook it and eat it all right here” Petit Solo told me. So if anyone reading fancies a trip to Korhogo and a big chicken dinner, get in touch with me when I find work.

"I'd like a million dollars... and world peace... and a neverending plate of grilled chicken..."

We stopped off in the carvers district of Korhogo on the ride back and got co-opted into a wedding where the old ladies instructed us to dance with them. As soon as we started, the entire assembled congregation of women burst into tears of laughter. We were assured that this was not because they found us ridiculous but because they were unused to seeing white people dance, which I was sceptical about, although the fact that they all wanted to dance hand in hand with us as well convinced me that it might possibly be true. As we left, a girl asked for my hand in marriage and, sad as it was that I had to decline, it was still a delightful ego-boost to end the day with. She wasn't bad looking either. Ha !

The sculptors' quarter

The evening was spent in the maquis (an Ivorian open air restaurant, usually by the roadside but in this case inside the grounds of the hotel) of the Mont Korhogo and had probably the best meal so far – an enormous helping of grilled chicken with an equally enormous helping of attiéké, a tasty couscous made from cassava. True to her word, my mother had her beer. The revolution was complete. 

"Ceci n'est pas une bière"

House Hunting Exercise

Bouaké, Côte D'Ivoire - 9^th-12^th September 2012

As happens so often on African road journeys, the beginning was uneventful. We moved up the main road in our classy, air-conditioned Chinese bus (of the same brandwhich seems to have been bought by bus companies all over Africa) and watched the banana plantations, forests and rolling hills move by. A short stop in Yamoussoukro apart, it was plain sailing and the traffic on the road was light. So it was with a bit of surprise that I noticed us slowing down and come to a stop somewhere between Yamoussoukro and Bouaké. Murmurings came through the bus and reached us at the back – Ivorians often speak in a creole of various African languages and French making it easier for the toubabou to understand them – a mention of a truck-related incident was made and I got off the bus to investigate.

Keep on truckin

The spectacle in front of me was something I had never seen – a truck lying on its side across the road, with the cab sticking straight up into the air. This was an impressive crash if ever I've seen one and even the other passengers on the bus, who I would have thought would be more used to trucking accidents, turned to me with a look of amazement and comments suggesting that they were as amazed as I was at this display. By some turn of fate, a track disappeared off into the bush just before the crash and emerged back onto the main road some 500m further up the road, and soldiers were on hand to direct traffic. The track was barely large enough for one vehicle to pass and the state of it led to the passing trucks and buses hurtling along it, sending people scattering in all directions. One vehicle from each side trying to go through at the same time would likely had led to further carnage but the soldiers, with willing help from the masses of bystanders, made the system work. A bunch of guys were unloading the sacks from the trailer and a kid was siphoning from the now exposed petrol tank. About an hour after coming across the scene, with smiles and excited chatter, everyone piled back onto the bus and we arrived in Bouaké with no further ado...

Bouaké is where my grandfather lived and worked for several years and we had two missions for our two full days there. The first was to find the old house (using my mother's vague memories) and the Loka dam which he worked on (using my mother's vague memories). Our base for the three days was the charming hotel Mon Afrik, home to an owner known as the “wife of the rebels” for her close collaboration with them during the war and who was happy to tell her endless stories of those days. It was also home to Princesse the antelope and Caroline the tortoise who would both wander around the garden and occasionally wander into the restaurant looking for lunch.

The first of the two days was to be the house-searching day. My mother remembered the name of the district it was in, and also that one had to turn right off a main road going uphill. It promised to be a still challenge – Madame Delon, the hotel's owner, said she had lived in the same district for many years but could now not find her own house. We wandered off through town to the Air France district armed with two photos of the old place and, in time, found a street which seemed to be a likely candidate. In the meantime, though, much had changed in Air France (as it had in Bouaké and Côte D'Ivoire as a whole) and the spacious gardens were no more, instead filled with smaller buildings. We walked up and down the street, showing behaviour that would probably have gotten us into trouble in Europe (peering over walls, eyeing buildings through gates and so on), but failed to find anything which looked good. 

No luck so far...

Peeping Toms in Air France

We showed the pictures to anyone old enough to be able to remember the 70s – one of them was the right age but was born in Senegal, another had only moved to Bouaké recently, and a couple of old women sat by the road had a long look and an equally long discussion with each other about them, but couldn't help either. One house had similar-looking (but not identical) tiles on the patio and as we looked, a couple of girls came from the house and said hello. We showed them the pictures but too many things didn't match up. The door was in the wrong place, the windows were the wrong size. They said it was probably in this area but it wasn't that house. We went back to the main road. The house may have been modified beyond recognition or it may have been destroyed during the war or in order to build more, smaller houses. It might still have been there but been hidden by new buildings. We went for a beer to contemplate the defeat and rounded off the day in Mon Afrik's pool. A good end to a slightly disappointing day.

Living the hard life

The dam-hunting was, on paper, an easier prospect than the house-hunting. Besides the obvious size difference, people had heard of the Loka dam and we rented a car for the day to aid in the search. Two men showed up with the car – one was the driver and the other was Monsieur Koné, the company boss. Monsieur Koné explained that the driver was ill and so he would be driving us himself. First stop was a petrol station where he put in twice as much petrol as we needed and, naturally, billed us for it, and we then headed off into the countryside. Monsieur Koné was quite a character and very chatty, although he obviously had not done much driving himself and seemingly had no idea where anything was. After asking many people by the roadside (“he who asks rarely goes wrong”, Monsieur Koné liked to say) we finally ended up on a dirt road, and then a smaller dirt road, and then parked in front of a track that was too small for a car to go down. A 2 kilometre walk later, we finally reached the dam and concluded that it would probably have been easier to approach from the other side. But no matter – we'd found what we were looking for. 

Monsieur Koné explained that he did sports every morning...

La Loka

 La Loka part 2

 La Loka - part 3.

On the return, we tried to find the village of Tanou Sakassou, recommended to us by Madame Delon as a great place to buy pottery. True to form, Monsieur Koné had never heard of the place and, having asked directions a few times while repeating his mantra about he who asks, we ended up going to the village of Wassou, which also did pottery. We bought a few pots and got given one for free as we were leaving, although only two of the six were to survive the potholes and baggage handlers in Abidjan and Istanbul and eventually make it back to Europe.

 "I am a tourist just like you !" - Monsieur Koné's first visit to Wassou

Generic white-guy-with-Africa-kids picture #29299930083

Monsieur Koné, maybe worried that we'd report back on his petrol-grabbing to Madame Delon, offered to take us to the minibus station the next morning, from where we headed to Korhogo, in the country's far north.

Ivory Towers

Abidjan, Côte D'Ivoire - 7^th-9^th September 2012

Côte D'Ivoire has been a small family project for many years. My grandfather worked here in the 1970s and my mother visited him several times. She hadn't been back since 1979 and 2012 was to be the year that she took me along to revisit memory lane – finding the old house, the dam my grandfather worked on, and various bits and pieces that she remembered seeing back in the day. Our first port of call was Abidjan, a huge sprawling city set around some lagoons poking inland from the Atlantic. The “Paris of West Africa” back in its day, Abidjan is a little more dog-eared than it probably was but is still the nerve centre of the country, despite not having been the capital since the 1980s. It's also home to the international airport, which is where we landed after a 16 hour trip with a short layover in Istanbul.

As we were planning to come back to Abidjan at the end of the little tour, the one full day here was more a question of finding our feet than seeing anything in particular. We were planning to head up to Bouaké the next day and spent the morning exploring our transport options – loosely translated, we went to the train station to see what day the train left and would take the bus if it didn't suit us. The station is in Treichville, the next district along from Zone 4 where we were staying, and so we set off by foot along the Boulevard de Marseille (which was possibly named after the city in question because it's dusty and dirty). The timing of the trip left us landing at the end of the rainy season and we were reminded of this after a short time when the heavens suddenly opened and we were forced into a roadside shack for shelter. We had to persuade the owners that we would buy a drink from them as they told us they were quite happy for us just to take shelter until the rain subsided. 

Taking shelter

As I reflected on the paradoxes of Africa (you are hassled to buy things when you don't want to, but in cases like this you are politely told that it really isn't necessary to buy anything), we watched the potholes fill with rainwater and the dust “pavement” turn to mud. My mother then asked what was to be her favourite question during this trip - “is this rain going to last long ?”. We then got the same answer we were given every time this question was asked. “Probably not...”. The worst of it passed and my flip flops did battle with the new swampy conditions as we headed on our way. The train to the north left on Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday mornings. It was now Saturday morning. The decision was made, and we made plans to take the bus.

"Pissing forbidden - 5000f fine"

An afternoon wander around the Plateau district was similarly punctuated by rain although this didn't seem to bother the tens of thousands of orange-clad Ivorians gathering in huge crowds slowly moving towards barricades manned by soldiers. This could only mean one thing. There was a football game of sorts on. As it turned out, Côte D'Ivoire were playing Senegal that night. The Plateau district is where move of Abidjan's high-rises are and the huge building-top advertising hoardings greeting those coming across the bridge from Zone 4 masked an entire district of these buildings – some of them were tasteless 70s buildings and some, such as “La Pyramide” were symbolic of a slightly more daring style of architecture. Le Plateau might not win any modern design awards but it's impressive in its own way and a pleasant place to wander around. It's also Abidjan's business district though, and as it closed down during the early evening we headed back to Zone 4 – just in time to see Côte D'Ivoire destroy Senegal 4:2 at “Le Rallye”, the bar-resto attached to the hotel.

"La Pyramide" - original building, unoriginal name

Singing in the rain

More Plateau

An early morning departure to Yopougon bus station was on the cards for the next day but we weren't worried – there was plenty more of Abidjan to see and a few more days towards the end in which to do so...

Foot hygiene - a high priority