Finding a place in Abidjan (5 and end)

_{Is it happening, at long last…?}

More contacts with more agencies yielded nothing. Most of them working online have a clientele that can easily afford €1,000 a month as a starter rent and that clientele does not include me. 

One of the agencies serving the filthy rich is the one that – incredibly! – I paid my rent to when I lived in Ouagadougou. I recognised the logo – AICI. I had no idea that I was paying an agency that had once been run by…Côte d’Ivoire’s First Lady and now by one of her close friends, who also runs the country’s annual Who’s In – Who’s Out event, the Children of African Gala Dinner. We just had the latest edition in the glitzy Sofitel Hotel Ivoire, early March. (I wonder if one of the members of the namedropping family I described earlier showed up there…) Anyway, little surprise, then, that AICI (with branches in Abidjan, Paris, Ouagadougou, Yamoussoukro and Cannes, that hotbed of the Moneyed, the Great and the Good) rents apartments starting at three million francs…that’s €4,600. Per month. In Abidjan. Obviously, AICI would not get away with charging these outrageous amounts in much (much!) cheaper Ouagadougou… But this is just to give you some idea of the insane yawning gap between the rich and the poor. 

On we go and I promise you we’re nearing the end. 

Another restaurant staff member told me her brother works for…another housing agency. Before I could think “here we go again” I made a decision to go and see him. I got his number and we agreed to meet in front of Café Versailles, Ivorian reggae star Alpha Blondy’s old place. I don’t think he’s got anything to do with it any longer, which may account for the atrocious American autotuned r&b dross the place vomited out as I was arriving. It was hot and they were late (I assumed, correctly, that brother in question would not come by himself). 

Eventually, they arrived, on two motorbikes. Hopefully this was not going to be yet another installment of ‘Hello We’re From the Kingdom of Vagueness and our Job is Showing Up…’ But no. My new contact was indeed the restaurant staff member’s brother and the other man was his colleague. Off we went to see the place, which they were in the process of readying for the next locataire. 

_{Yes, Rivièra Palmeraie would have been really nice but then you can’t always get what you want…}

Apparently, the process of getting the place ready involved leaving a godawful mess for said next locataire to clean up. That could be me: I walked around, liked what I saw (one smallish room, one slightly larger, one salon with space to play with, two toilets, balcony with a nice view, kitchen) and thought: this, I think, will do for now. It’s the top floor of a nice, solid looking older building and the view is towards Le Plateau and its behemoth government tower, a landmark mosque and my beloved Deux Plateaux. At €381 a month I’d be reasonably safe financially. 

So this is it, then. I could finally get back to the hotel, bring my accumulated wad of cash and take it to the office of the agency managing the building. But the two gentlemen insisted that they’d take me to the office themselves, for the paperwork. This turned out to be a mere five minute ride but my biker mate got stuck in a rut while trying to cross a busy road (yes, another one) and was so unstable that I declined any future lifts. Walking is a lot safer, thank you. Incidentally, both men ended up demanding Showing Up Money after all, so that’s where the Right To Visit Fee I thought I had kept in my pockets for once eventually went… I did tell the gentlemen that I expected them to remove their piles of wood chippings, wooden low chair, plastic bottles, plastic bags, empty paint jars, rags and assorted other crap that has nothing whatsoever to do with me. I’ll get rid of the paint and the dust and grime on the floor, no worries – I ran my own places and kept them clean for decades. 

Now that I knew where the agency was (a ten-minute walk, tops, from what was now going to be MY apartment, yay!!!) I could easily wander back to the hotel, a mere 40-minutes away on foot, along the boulevard Latrille, into the Rue des Jardins, as I cleared my head. All I had to do was come back with two month’s rent, two month’s caution and admin costs. This looked like a small but bona fide family business. The genial owner invited me into his office for a chat, just to get to know his new tenant. Journalist, hey…. His daughter is doing the admin and lives next door to the apartment complex, so if anything were the matter all I have to do is call her. 

In short, I have a place, a contract, this desk I am working at right now, one very recently acquired table and four chairs, a mattress, water, electricity, Orange Money with which to pay the water and the electricity, and that balcony. Not bad for an all-too-frequently penniless hack… Highest urgency – something to make decent coffee with.

One drawback I have already spotted: the concierge. This role is taken by two lovely young fellows but both of them go to sleep at the impossible hour of 10-11pm, while this whole area is filled to the brim with watering holes, eateries and maquis offering food from here, Lebanon, Congo, Cameroon, China, Italy, Vietnam, France… There’s also a very French sounding coffee place that never closes… As many of you know my time to come alive is at night. Having said that, I have made it a point to be in before midnight at the latest – but even at that early hour our concierge will already be sleeping. I find this…slightly awkward. This is a family complex; people go to bed early. Should I just go: sod it – if I feel like coming in at 2am I should just bloody well do it…? That would be rude, would it not? A slight dilemma, which a future fridge will partially solve, if and when the means to acquire such arrive. 

Speaking of awkward. As I was checking out of my hotel, the staff member whose brother finally got me this place wanted to know whether I was going to hire her for cooking and cleaning. I had to tell her that there was really no need. I will eat outdoors for the time being (prices being ridiculously cheap if you know where to look) and I do my own cleaning. She wasn’t too disappointed – I hope. Oh and the brother in question accosted me recently in a nearby street as I was minding my own business, breezily telling me that his cousin had just died in Yopougon… I cut him off before he could ask me for the taxi fare. I am out of your clutches, gentlemen and some ladies from the Kingdom of Vagueness. With or without an office. Or cousins. Or a daughter to marry off. Or Right To Visit Fees. Or any of the gazillion other schemes and cock-and-bull stories you have in your inexhaustible repertoire. Au revoir (peut-être)!

_{In my office, I have a handwoven sash carrying the Ivorian national colours, courtesy of master weaver Yao Mathieu from Bouaké, who I will be paying a visit. And then I want to go to San Pedro and Korhogo and Odienné and Man and Daloa and Jacqueville and Kong and Abengourou and…everywhere in Abidjan. The picture on my desktop is in honour of one of my previous cities for which I retain a hard-to-explain but nevertheless very real fondness. Bamako.} 

Finding a place in Abidjan (4)

I had taken to mailing tons of agencies, most of whom never bothered to reply. But one of them had something in an area called Abatta. Not my favourite part of town, even though I had an option, an eternity ago, to a place that gave the most brilliant view of the city. (Cue remark about not getting an apartment to stare out of the window…all true.) But I had already stayed next door to Abatta, a collection of blocks of flats plonked down at an angle in the most unimaginative way possible, making for a completely soulless part of town. Besides, it’s on the road to the hot new property market of Bingerville, a place I considered in the past but have rejected because of the absolutely murderous traffic situation. 

There are two basic things to understand about Abidjan: water and traffic. Apparently, no city on earth sits next to more water than Abidjan. The Ébrié Lagoon, which stretches some 200 kilometres from end to end, as long as The Netherlands is wide, envelops this city, which can be more aptly described as a series of islands with an ever growing inland area attached. This means that there are limits to the places traffic can go, even when some of the pressure is lifted by the lagoon ferry services. Some of these places are called bridges. Natch.

There used to be two, linking Le Plateau to the sprawling southern suburbs of Treichville and further down Marcory, Koumassi and eventually Port Bouët. They date back to the 1950s and 60s. Only ten years ago a third was added, linking Marcory/Koumassi to Cocody. Another, still under construction, will be the most eagerly awaited link from Yopougon, Abidjan’s most populous suburb, to Le Plateau. The only road you can take there now doubles as the main route to The North and is permanently choked by the most monstrous of traffic jams.  There is already a fifth bridge in place, a prestigious work modelled after modern structures like the iconic Erasmus Bridge in Rotterdam. It was used as a symbol for Côte d’Ivoire’s progress at the opening ceremony of the African Cup of Nations. It also serves virtually no other purpose, linking the affluent parts of Cocody to Le Plateau, both already served by a network of six-lane roads. 

_{Yay!! The caption function has suddenly re-appeared… Anyway: this is the road leading up to that brand new bridge, the contours of which you can see slightly left-of-centre. The colossal thing on the right is the giant new government tower, to be completed in………no one knows. The other towers are the older government office blocks, all on Le Plateau.}

So it all boils down to this: when you are looking for an area to live and work, Think Traffic. Not the rock band but the colossal amounts of time you will waste when you live in Yopougon and work at the airport, say. Or when you have appointments on Le Plateau but have decided to stay in Abatta…

Oh yes! I was heading to Abatta and after leaving the hotel and getting into yet another taxi I immediately regretted even going there. It was afternoon and the minute we were on the motorway it was Stand Still Time. Of course, everybody working on Le Plateau, in Cocody-Angré, Vallon etc was already leaving, hoping to beat the more monstrous variety of this jam. I texted the démarcheur I was supposed to meet outside a supermarket that I was going to be late. He said: no problem – he was leaving anyway and would find a replacement. Charming. 

It took an eternity, even when the taxi driver, ever inventive when it comes to using Abidjan’s many backroads to beat the worst of the traffic, managed to gain a little time. Many a driver has told me that at this time of day they point blank refuse to take passengers on this stretch – not worth the wait, the waste of petrol and time. 

I arrived at the supermarket where my contact was no longer waiting. His replacement did not pick up the phone when I called. This was turning into Mission Impossible in a place I did not even like that much… After three more attempts he picked up and said that I should cross another extremely busy road and find the place where three palm trees were standing. “I am sitting there.” 

There was someone sitting under said palm trees but this was clearly not the person waiting for a house-hunter. In fact, he gave the very distinct impression of someone who was not waiting for anyone – at all. I turned left into the next street, a sand-covered stretch lined by shops and square blocks, half-finished or already inhabited, three to four storeys high. On the veranda of one of these shops (selling electronics as it happened) a small cluster of men was hanging out, not doing anything in particular. One of them was faffing about with a mobile phone and a cable. This turned out to be my contact. His name was Diallo. 

Hello Diallo. Name’s Bram. Nothing. This is going swimmingly. We wandered off to wherever this thing was located in this decidedly uninspiring part of town. 

“By the way,” the man at the agency had told me on the phone. “Do not pay any Right To Visit Fee. We don’t allow it. Please remember this.” 

The first intelligible sentence out of Diallo’s mouth was: “The Right To Visit Fee is 5,000 francs.” I said nothing. Turned away from him and into the direction from where I had come. Never looked back. Kept walking. Wandered along the road and then flagged down a cab back to the hotel. And every time I see pictures of those horrible traffic jams I think: thank heavens I let that go…

Finding a place in Abidjan (3)

One of my good journalist friends here had a right old chuckle when I told him about Mr No Office. “You were absolutely right. You’ve avoided a disaster there. He would have run off with the money and you’d have zero recourse. But yep – they dress to the nines and are very convincing actors…it’s all part of their game.” He went on to explain that because of the massive numbers of people wanting to come here, there is an incredible housing crisis, a colossal building spree and prices are out of control. People don’t just arrive from all corners of this country – where Abidjan has Mythical Status – but also from its crisis-ridden neighbours to the north: Mali and Burkina Faso, currently saddled with terrorist insurgencies and violently intolerant and inept military juntas. Indeed, the entire West African region from Senegal to Nigeria by way of Guinea and Liberia comes into Abidjan, likes it and stays – often in the less affluent sections of neighbourhoods like Abobo, Adjamé, Williamsville, Yopougon or the giant sprawl at Port Bouët, behind the airport. When the recklessly overzealous governor of the Abidjan District recently knocked down hundreds of homes in Yopougon, the spokeswoman for the people he had made homeless had this surname: Ouédraogo. You don’t get more Burkinabè than that…

So sadly, this really is the Wild West. Witness, for an example, the rather frighteningly frequent building collapses, always new buildings and often not even finished. Yes, you must present your work sheet to the relevant authorities but once you have obtained your building permit, legally or otherwise, you can do whatever you want. And that includes cutting corners. Or building over underground water reservoirs. Where Abidjan now stands used to be dense tropical rainforest. Some of it still exists, as do the groundwater bodies that used to feed the trees… Building on top of those involves extreme risks. Nobody cares. In short, then, there is an astonishing number of people involved in the housing business, from building to distribution. There’s hardly any regulation, which explains the dizzying number of agencies, be they bona fide operators, conmen or outright criminals. “This is encouraged at the highest level,” my friend ended his tour d’horizon. “Of course, politicians and bureaucrats and high-ranking military are in up to their necks in this business. They are the ones cashing in. They don’t want to regulate anything!” 

Yes it’s pretty but there’s more to this city than just the façade. Much more. 

By now, the hotel staff is getting interested in my case. One of them tells me that she knows someone who lives in a building where two apartments have been empty for quite some time. Off we go again, to an area not that far from that not-so-very-nice apartment I had rejected earlier. 

It took me a while to locate it while walking and talking on the phone: yes…at this petrol station (on a very busy four-lane road, a bit like the one I used to live next to in Dakar)…right, so now I need to find a sandy little street going steeply up (DO NOT go past the pharmacie, you’ll have missed it)…got it…good…can you see a building marked [insert name] on your left? Now take the next street to your right…by the time I had reached the building following my host’s instructions I had run out of phone credit. And breath. 

The building had a really nice vibe to it. Even the moody concierge warmed to me when I told him I had been to the northern Ivorian city where he came from. 

“I live on the fourth floor,” my host told me cheerfully, as her three-years-old daughter stamped her feet on every step of the staircase, turning her head to make sure that everybody was watching and appreciated how good she had become at negotiating this monster. My place was on the second floor of this large complex, built around an inner courtyard. “We do all sorts of things here,” my perhaps future neighbour went on to explain. “We gather in the evening and sit on the roof.” A community of people having rooftop gatherings and probably parties? Niiiiice….. If the environment was pleasant enough I was prepared to compromise on the quality of my own place (at €305 a month), provided a few repairs were made. That, the concierge assured me, would be done. 

So off I went the next day to an office that turned out to be attached to the Ministry of Justice. I was ushered into a tiny room kept at a temperature reserved for soft drinks. There was an old style wooden window that gave on to an office, out of which came a very nice bespectacled elderly lady with a form that I had to fill in in order to qualify for the roof top parties…I mean the apartment. 

It all looked very official. I filled in the form, including the mandatory and recently acquired local telephone number (phew!!!). But I sensed other snags ahead. I had to fill in something relating to the date of the incorporation of my business. Er…..1992? Where? Netherlands? Mozambique, where I did my first reporting? 

Would I, at long last, land? Not so fast…

If you are in what is nominally francophone west Africa and you hear the phrase “Il y a un petit problème” it means that the proverbial excrement is about to hit the fan. 

I needed a physical address for my one-man enterprise, the very nice lady said, once she had re-emerged from the office where she had gone with my completed form. I understood that the entire establishment where my soon-(not?)-to-be apartment was located was indeed run by the state and that the conviviality was almost certainly due to the fact that everybody living there worked for the same employer. Anyway, my physical address…that would be the one where I will be living once I have the keys to this apartment, right? 

Wrong. We need a physical address now. Well I am staying at an hotel if that’s any help, while looking for a place to install myself and business. Not going to work. “So, this is a classic Catch-22, right?” I think she understood the reference. As I walked out I felt angry and dejected for the first and only time. So near and yet so far! 

Finding a place in Abidjan (2)

After the depressing Palmeraie episode it was clear to me that staying in the €200 – €250 rentage range would only get me more of the same. I had to choose between staying well inside my financial comfort zone but live in what amounted to a suicide-inducing squat or up my game. Abidjan is most definitely not Bamako, where this modest amount got me a bloody 4-roomed villa with a huge patio and a roof terrace. But that’s the thing: there are far more people wishing to live in Abidjan and the housing market is a lot tighter as a result. 

Cue the next installment, a few months after Palmeraie. I am staying at this nice –sortalike affordable – place in Deux Plateaux and once again looking for that elusive apartment. (Forget about villas here, unless you’re a millionaire or an expat working for a company, an NGO, the United Nations or a government.) One evening, I am walking down a street not far from the hotel when I spot a simple outdoor place that has a sign planted on its grassy lawn. The sign says “Pizza”. I like pizza. They also have beers. Do they have my favourite, Beaufort? Yes, they do. A pretty charming young woman is running the place and she explains that they also do open air grillades, where fish or chicken or meat are barbecued to Ivorian perfection. Attiéké (fermented cassava pulp that has been grated or granulated, thanks Wikipedia) is mandatory. You are in Côte d’Ivoire, and you shall eat attiéké. It is combines effortlessly with grilled fish, chicken, meat and veg. 

The pizzas, she tells me, come from her mother’s restaurant on the main road, Rue des Jardins, close to the giant Carrefour supermarket. Pizza it is, tonight. The taste is good, the beers are cold and the bill does not break the bank. All good. I’ll be back. 

On my next visit, half the family – including Mom – sits outside and I am invited to the family table. The conversation includes politics and I notice a fair bit of name-dropping (a Monsieur le ministre they appear to know, a politician they are supposedly related to, an important director of something or other). Next, they describe their luxury palace behind the wall we’re sitting outside of: very famous artists stay here, you know, which would help the daughter of the house get free tickets to these otherwise ludicrously overpriced events in Five Star resorts and hotels. Daughter in question, whose job it seems to be to run the place, look pretty and keep her mouth shut when Mom is talking, just nods as the latter reels off the names of the famous people she knows. 

Nope, not looking for a place like this but you may find the people the family is discussing coming over for a swim, here at the Hotel Ivoire, the city’s most expensive hotel. If you fork out €22,50 you can swim there, too. 

Then the subject turns to finding a place to live. Well it just so happens – of course – that Mom has a friend who runs…a housing agency. Abidjan has thousands of those but never mind, I get the number and the friend in question directs me to the sympathetic elderly gentleman who proceeded to escort me to that €381-a-month spot I did not like very much. 

Mom’s housing agency friend shows up in person at my next visit. “Well, you know,” she intones peremptorily, “you cannot get anything good for any less.” I am pretty well aware of the price/quality issues around here, thank you very much. The fact that you have inflated the rent of your less-than-stellar apartment to a level it does not merit means that you are contributing to the city-wide house price crisis. And don’t give me that spiel about there being the African Nations Cup, making things more difficult. People who come to watch the tournament use AirBnB, stay in hotels or with friends, rent fully furnished apartments and go away after six weeks; they don’t explicitly ask for places where they can stay for a year or longer. 

Then Mom chimes in and asks if I would be interested in…coming into her pizza restaurant. To do what? Oh, just sit there. She even hinted I would be getting paid for this. Why? Well, having a white man in your restaurant would bring in more customers. There’s a gazillion restaurants of all kinds here and competition is cutthroat – but really? You can’t be that desperate – or just plain weird.

It was time to extricate myself from this increasingly elaborate web of intrigue, which in my nagging estimation had also begun to include what I suspect to be another one of Mom’s schemes – pairing me off with her daughter. So we can both sit in her restaurant? All told, the whole episode yielded one unsatisfying apartment visit and, of course, as an offshoot, Mr Smooth Real Estate Agent Without An Office. And if you think this is beginning to look like a cast of characters from a classic Russian novel, you’re not wrong. And we’re nowhere near the end…

Stay tuned for Part 3…

Finding a place in Abidjan (1)

“I’m not going to lie to you. There is no address for the agency’s office. It is…mobile.” 

Smartly dressed, sporting an immaculately maintained designer beard, eyes behind fashionable spectacles and carrying a small stack of important looking files and documents under his arm…this man looked every inch the smooth-talking real estate agent and convincingly acted the part. We were standing in the main room of a fairly pleasant three-roomed house, looking at a garden that was not attached to the house. 

(I had begun to notice the habit of these agents to make me come to the window and admire whatever view there was, as if I was going to spend my days looking out windows instead of being half-folded over a laptop, getting work done.)

“You will have the sun in your room every afternoon,” Mr Smooth told me. Sure, nice. And yes, it was conveniently located, had a nice feel to it and with a proposed rent of CFA200,000 a month (€305) comfortably inside my freelancer’s budget. It was in an area I already knew from earlier visits, too; nice restaurants and maquis were not far away – but then again: show me a part of this town where these are not in evidence…

I was nearly convinced. 

So, would I then be able to bring the equivalent of €1,300 from my hotel over in Deux Plateaux to this place and would I be able to do this very very quickly? Three months’ rent, two month’s rent worth of caution money and something for the administration. (In fact, paying six months’ rent upfront in cash is considered normal practice in many parts of Abidjan.)

Ah yes – the paperwork. This was the moment when it occurred to me to ask smooth-taking real estate man for the address of the agency managing the property, so we could sort this out, if not today then surely tomorrow morning. This last idea got him slightly agitated: “No, no, no – it must all be done today. You know how fast things move here…”. Yes, I knew. So no problem, I offered: we can go to the office today – this afternoon. 

At which point he offered his “I’m not going to lie to you…” spiel. 

I pondered this as I walked off the premises and walked onto the nearby road busy with taxis that would take me to the hotel. The fact is, dear reader, I did not take any taxi. At all. Instead I walked up a hill to a nearby shopping centre and pondered the situation some more. Something was off: why is he in such a hurry and why is there no agency with an address attached to his operation? What if I run into problems? I desperately wanted an apartment but not so desperately that I was prepared to walk into any old trap. I took out my phone and called Mr Real Estate With No Address. 

“I am terribly sorry,” I began. “I have just arrived at my hotel and I felt the need to check my email. And I received one from my most important client, who is keeping my little business afloat, essentially. He has just informed me that he’s filing for bankruptcy. I am devastated. Need to re-think my entire business model and even my reason for being here.” 

Interestingly, he did not respond in any way to the dramatic content of my message. All he said was: “So, this is over then. We shouldn’t bother…” His disappointment was profound, absolutely palpable, even through the crappy phone connection we were using. My instincts had been correct. 

_{House Hunt Central. All efforts started – and ended – here…}

Everything had started reasonably innocently; not entirely but that’s another story I will tell you later. I had been looking at yet another apartment, a second-floor thing in a building just off a very busy road in a part of town that was still being developed and I had not really liked it. I found it dark, a bit cramped, not particularly well-maintained and sitting in an old building, which can be an advantage provided it is well kept. It was not. So all in all, I was not feeling it and especially at €381 a month I found the price/quality balance tilting in the wrong direction. 

So I told the sympathetic elderly man who had been showing me the place that this was going to be a “no”. Would he know other places? He immediately said: “Oh but I have a friend I can ask and he may have something for you at a slightly better price.” Of course I was interested but then I ended up with smooth-talking No Office Man… 

Luckily though, neither apartment came with the dreaded droit de visite, the latest invention in Abidjan’s Wild West housing market. (Well, ok, I had to leave the equivalent of €3,00 to No Office Man as he got himself a soft drink waiting for me to return with the cash, which never happened…) The Right To Visit Fee is 5,000 CFA (or €7,50) per visit. This can shoot up pretty fast, especially when you are house-hunting in earnest. I had already found this out half a year earlier, when I was in Rivièra Palmeraie, a truly wonderful part of town. I would have gladly settled there had I not made the terrible mistake of staying within the €200 to €250 rent-per-month bracket, for which Palmeraie, home to wonderful maquis and lovely eateries, offered a limitless supply of the most dank, decrepit, depressing, dark, windowless, soulless, spaceless caves imaginable. I was transported from one walled-in hovel to another concrete-surrounded nightmare by taxis (paid for by…have a guess…), having to fork out one Right To Visit Fee after another and after the seventh or eighth of these places I had enough and called it quits. None of the places did what I wanted it to do: provide space to work, occasionally relax and sleep. 

_{The big Riviera 2 underpass and roundabout, looking east. Follow this road down about two kms and turn left –Palmeraie is there. What this picture does not show is the never-ending traffic jam nightmare on this road. People have rejected living in parts of town further down this throughfare because of the traffic. I’m one of them.} 

During my Palmeraie exploits I had become acquainted with the Abidjan equivalent of le démarcheur. These are men (always men), who work on a commission basis and whose job it is to get you to like what they show you. A démarcheur specialises in sending you, through WhatsApp, highly pimped up pictures of the apartment with pictures taken at such an angle so as to make rooms larger than they actually are. Fish-eye lenses help, obviously. His job is also to get you to accept the conditions. In Palmeraie, this typically means six months’ rent in advance (it’s a popular area) and admin plus caution. Bring cash, the adverts say. These things are then sorted out by the agent that’s managing the property and rest assured: anyone who comes with a stuff-and-nonsense story about ‘a mobile agency’ is a conman. Sadly, there are tons of them about, as this is West Africa’s most coveted city. Everyone wants to live in Abidjan. 

Usually, when a démarcheur takes you to visit a place, any number of other men (always men) suddenly turn up out of nowhere and start walking along. It was never made clear to me what on god’s green earth their actual jobs were, apart from Showing Up. Whenever I asked the obvious questions (What’s he doing here? Why is he here? What’s his job? Maintenance? Showing up is a job now?) I never got a straight answer. It looked a bit like those young men in Plateau and Deux Plateaux who have assigned to themselves the job of Parking Place Indicator. Which, given the insane number of cars here is not such a bad idea. But what this miniature army of hangers-on was doing as I was visiting yet another depressing cave was far less clear. Fortunately, almost none of them asked me for a Show Up Fee, which I guess they could have done (don’t give anybody any ideas!). 

to be continued, even ended, eventually…

A screaming trip to Bouaké

It is Thursday morning in my very nice little and affordable (!) hotel in Vallon, Cocody. Work is made impossible by an almighty racket: men are attaching an extra skin made of aluminium (a very loud metal) to the roofing connected to the wall enclosing the courtyard, where two ladies run a restaurant with a combination of sweet pleasantness and steely determination. But I need to go: Bouaké and the second edition of a – hopefully – annual festival – Bo Balo – let’s have fun, are calling. Bouaké is 346 kilometres from Abidjan says Google. Google is an idiot, as we all know. 

Taxi to the Adjame ‘bus station’ and it is as busy, rundown and badly organised as the last time I was here. This is a disappointment. At an intersection close to my leave-taxi-get-on-bus point my driver, an enthusiastic young man sporting an outrageous thick-rimmed white pair of spectacles runs into one of the ubiquitous Chinese tricycles that transport absolutely everything. His problem: the tricycle is made of hard steel – the outside of his Toyota is not. Some heated exchanges and arguments ensue but it all ends pretty quickly. 

Through the maze of market women, ambulant vendors, les coxeurs (nice ones for a change), pedestrians milling about in huge numbers, buses, minibuses of the gbaka variety, taxis, private cars and men carrying impossibly large loads on their heads and backs we make it to the UTB bus station, from were a bus leaves to any destination in the country pretty much every ten minutes. Union des transporteurs de Bouaké (hey! that’s where I’m going) runs hundreds of mostly Chinese-built buses all around the country and are a household name. Hard job trying to break their stranglehold on the market but STBA seems to be doing a good job of it (aha – it means Société Bonkoungou d’Agneby…does this mean the very well-connected Burkina Faso construction and infrastructure + hotels + supermarkets + private airline tycoon is behind this one…? That would explain its success…)

From the bus on the road, late afternoon

There is a four-lane trunk road from Abidjan via the capital Yamoussoukro to Bouaké but getting ON that road takes some time. You see, you’re actually already on that Great Northern Road but you are also on the road that links the giant Yopougon suburb to Abidjan and here this only means one thing: monstrous traffic jams. So while the trip all told may be a good 450 kilometres if you go by Yamoussoukro (not Google) it will take you an hour and a half at least to get going. We take ages to leave the ‘bus station’, blocked by passing traffic and then some more ages to get out of the street now entirely made of mud (of course it is raining) and then some more ages to finally leave the neighbourhood ready to join the Yopougon traffic jam…

Barely properly on our way – at last! – a man emerges from the driver’s compartment and posts himself right next to the row where I am sitting. As I try to concentrate very hard on the spectacle of the sun setting outside my window, ‘Pastor Chris’ launches into a diatribe about Jesus. He promises his shouted sermon will take 15 minutes but in point of fact takes – again – ages. I’m sure he is doing good work, asking for discarded clothes so he can help orphans but he laces his sermon with screamed exhortations to “Give Your Heart To Jesus”, which my right ear that sustained damage in a self-inflicted audio accident in a self-op cabin at Radio Netherlands cannot support. I am making hugely unsuccessful attempts to shut my right ear and remain sortakinda neutral. And take pictures of the sunset. 

Bus is flying at this point…

The pastor has interesting ways to put his audience’s life experiences into perspective. He shows a video of a young white America man who was born without limbs but testifies that god’s calling prevented him from killing himself. Invoking Jesus for the seventieth time (it’s still early) the pastor, rather unsubtly in my view, demands to know whether his audience members still think they’ve got problems…

Next up, as if to belabour his point some more: a particularly graphic film of the crucifixion of a blood-covered Jesus with grotesquely overblown dramatic effects of his suffering face, mouth open in terrible gaping grimaces as the Roman nails go into his hands and feet and the wailing disciples and girlfriends (you do remember, do you not, that he was “a very naughty boy”), followed by another screamed exhortation from Pastor Chris to “Give Your Heart To Jesus, I Am Begging You”. As his cross goes up and the bus hurtles along I find myself strangely unable to get the film song featuring that whistle out of my head…

It was an apocalyptic moment, lived both vicariously and at a satirically safe distance… Reader, two passengers were converted on the spot. I was not among them.

The rest of the trip was uneventful, perhaps thanks to Pastor Chris blessing our voyage yet again as he left the bus. As the driver sped along some more, my neighbour took to playing passages from the Koran on his mobile phone, loudly. He clearly needed a differently denominated but equally fictitious blessing. Whatever floats your boat, I say. The bus was using the new four-lane motorway into Yamoussoukro and again the brand new one between that city and Bouaké but also bits of the much smaller old road, for passenger delivery. At the same speed. We got there, a little after 10pm. Thank you, Jesus, or Pastor Chris or my Koran-playing neighbour (or maybe all three). 

Bouaké is not as insanely busy as Abidjan but lively enough, which is pleasing to know. It has come from very far, being the capital of the Ivorian rebel army between 2002 and 2011 and having seen dreadful standoffs between rival factions of that army. People fled en masse, the town emptied out and entire streets got boarded up. It’s all looking much better now. I took an (invariably slightly overpriced) taxi ride to the Hôtel Paradis Du Centre, which turned out to have no WiFi but more importantly had Monsieur Kouakou, who stayed in late for me and other clients arriving still later, took less than 20 minutes to find a spicy chicken – attiéké – salad combi that is a maquis classic here and also served up a nice fresh Beaufort beer for instant recovery from the trip. The room: clean, basic and pleasantly Old Skool with the exception of the flatscreen television – with only about a dozen channels. Lovely. 

The Festival Bo Balo, which is why I am here, starts tomorrow. Sunday I shall be on the same trip back. Hopefully Pastor Chris will stay off the bus…even though you should never underestimate the power of the Other World in these zones…

It’s business, st*p*d!

James Carville’s house slogan (“It’s the economy, stupid!”) for Bill Clinton’s election campaign never gets old and can be applied in a lot of situations. For instance here, where I will be trying to explain, in ways less flippant than Carville’s great one-liner suggests, why the West’s obsession with ‘jihadism’ in the Sahel is mostly misguided.

There are still buses doing the long trip from the Malian capital Bamako to the major town of Gao in the country’s remote northeast. On that 1,200 kilometres long trip, they will go from a good tarred road into Ségou, to a fairly OK but still tarred road into Sévaré (where there have been several attacks against army bases) and then on to a road hardly worthy of the name past Douentza, Hombori and Gossi and finally into Gao. This report was made three years ago; there is nothing to suggest that the situation has improved.

But buses continue to run the full gauntlet into Gao. How is this possible, on long stretches of virtually non-existent road through areas that are infested with self-defence militias, self-styled jihadist groups and their splinters, khalifate-creating fanatics and bandits with their guns and their roadside bombs? (The category “bandits”, by the way, almost always overlaps all the others.)

Simple: the companies pay. Any business working in areas these gangs control does the same. What we are seeing here is the Sahelian variant of the protection racket. And it has been spreading, along with the armed turbulence that began when Algeria threw its armed ‘jihad’ gangster problem across the fence into Mali in the late 1990s and was then made ten times worse when France, the UK, the USA and NATO plunged Libya into the chaos from which it has never recovered. And even in Algeria it was not entirely over. What was the original business these original ‘jihadis’ were in? Banditry: smuggling contraband and kidnapping Westerners; this last they did safe in the knowledge that the governments of rich white countries pay to have their citizens released. Even the late Hissène Habré, the butcher of Chad, knew this.

Habré gained notoriety in the 1970s as a rebel leader and hostage taker. His hostages were West German and French, whose governments paid good money for the release of their citizens. That did not stop the United States and France from sponsoring Habré all the way to the Chadian presidency, a post he took by force of arms, flown in from the USA by way of Monrovia’s international airport, as former US Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Chester Crocker explained to me during an interview in Washington. In the eight years (1982 to 1990) that he manhandled his country, Habré arranged for the murder of 40,000 people and the torture of many more, crimes for which he was belatedly convicted in a Dakar court, in 2016. He died in a Dakar hospital, aged 79.

So, hostage taking is an old business, probably as old as running protection rackets. The former were at the origin of the self-styled ‘jihadist’ groups. The latter are – in tandem with theft, extortion, and artisanal gold extraction – at the core of these groups’ business today. Smuggling, meanwhile, has been an absolute constant throughout, from cigarettes to drugs.  One of the earlier leaders of these armed ‘jihad’ gangs, Mokhtar Belmokhtar, was nicknamed Mr Marlboro and you get no extra points for guessing why that was. People smuggling, I understand, is an entirely different branch and has no inherent connection with the violent armed gangs who are busy shutting down the Sahel. Which stands to reason: people smugglers get paid to get people to a destination. They do not set out to kill people; even though they very often fail in their trips across the unforgiving Sahara desert the objective is to get people to their destination alive.

Today, nothing much has changed. Islamic State mines gold in Burkina Faso and Mali, it and other armed gangs set up roadblocks and extort money from the travelling public, raid buses if the companies running them have not paid enough or on time; they steal cattle – a deliberate and deeply destructive act – and still smuggle drugs and contraband.

Their methods for recruiting foot soldiers come straight out of the gangster rulebooks that were used in Liberia and Sierra Leone at the end of the last century: find young, marginalised men with little or no prospects, manipulate them with lies, false promises, ply them with drugs and then tell them what to do: rape, kill, burn, steal, pillage, loot, pilfer, extort. How did West Africa’s jungle soldiers, some as young as 7, refer to these activities? I will tell you because I asked them this question. And their answer was: they considered doing these things their job. The self-styled ‘jihadist’ gangs we see in Mali, Burkina Faso, Nigeria, Niger, Libya, Chad, Cameroon and now also in Togo, Benin and Côte d’Ivoire operate in exactly the same way. These are at their very core criminal organisations, working towards the creation of what one general from Mauritania once memorably called “a Boulevard of Crime, from Tripoli to Abidjan…”

Vandalism in Timbuktu, 2013

But what about the religion then? Because none of what you have read so far sounds terribly religious. Correct: it does not sound religious because it isn’t. But there are most definitely religious zealots in the ranks of these violent criminal gangs and some, like the notorious Amadou Koufa in Central Mali may even be a bona fide religious warlord. This is logical: using Islam as a recruitment tool resonates with folks who are, in the majority, deeply religious. Often the only ‘education’ young kids can afford is going to the Koran school, where they learn to recite the entire Holy Book back to front and nothing else. They are often sent onto the streets of all the main cities to beg for money, to be delivered to their Koran teacher. Some education…

You see? This is the mechanism Taylor used, with a new twist. Allah does not give you food; you must work for it. And so, when I see this flag, I do not think “Jihadists” or “Islamist extremists”. I think: “Pirates.”

Source for this image: Lawfare.

Cast your mind back to those forest wars between 1989 and 2003. Two of the most notorious warlords, the late Foday Sankoh and the imprisoned war criminal Charles Taylor both went to training camps in the late Muamar Ghadaffi’s Libya to learn the strategies of revolutionary terror. But did they bring The Revolution to their countries, as the name of the Revolutionary United Front in Sierra Leone suggested and one of Taylor’s former female generals told me in person? No of course they did not. It was a pretext. Some may have believed in it, for sure. But for most it was…just a job. We’re only in it for the money. How did the boys call their looting sprees, anyone? Yes, you at the back? Correct! They called their looting sprees ‘Operation Pay Yourself.’

And so it is with the religious element we are dealing with here. Those kids that were smashing the shrines and the statues in Timbuktu would not be able to cite the Koran passages justifying their vandalism if their lives depended on it. Both sets of violent gangs share the same methods.

Barbarism. Islamic State executes Housseini Hamma Cissé, aka “DJ passant” because of his mobile musical services for the community that adored him. Murdered in cold blood, near Ménaka, November 28.

And these methods are? Gratuitous violence. Or have we forgotten that summarily executing people in the most gruesome ways did happen frequently in the forests and towns of West Africa, from the mass murders in a church in Monrovia, Liberia to the repeated carnage in Freetown, Sierra Leone; the vicious fights in Guéckédou, Guinea and the massacres in Duékoué, Côte d’Ivoire? The religious (in this case Islamic) element does not add another layer of horror to these acts. The horror is already there and it has the same purpose: terrorizing people into doing what the terrorisers want.

But remember also that the perpetrators operate mostly in armed gangs. These are not kingdoms or republics with large repressive systems at their disposal, capable of genocide or industrial scale mass murder, such as the Belgians committed in Congo, the Germans in Namibia, the British in South Africa and Kenya, the French in Niger, Cameroon and Algeria, the Italians in Ethiopia. Taylor and his goons ruled Liberia for six years; Sankoh never got the presidency of Sierra Leone. One criminal gang of terrorists with an overlay of religious fanaticism is holding sway in a shrinking part of northeastern Nigeria. Another is establishing an (undoubtedly short-lived) ‘khalifate’ in the remote northeast of Mali and they are only able to do this because the colonels mismanaging Mali from their suites in Bamako are not serious about defending the country; they prefer to take soldiers from a neighbouring country hostage or boring the United Nations to death with frivolous charges about France helping Al Qaeda. The Russian mercenaries of the Wagner PMC they have hired for an eye-watering amount of money to do the job they are supposed to be doing are singularly uninterested in taking on the armed gangs, who as a result do pretty much as they please. They fight Wagner – for the control of the artisanal gold mines. It’s business, st*p*d!

And where do they intend to take their business? What is the final destination of the Boulevard of Crime? To reiterate: the coast. Why? This I covered recently. Suffice to say that reaching the coast would obviously mean a colossal expansion of their business. The amount of loot to be had in, say, Abidjan dwarfs what can be stolen in Ansongo, Djibo and Tilaberi combined. And of course many West African coastal cities have direct air links with that well-known murky international hotbed of dodgy business, Dubaï.

An appropriately murky picture – by me – of a distinctly murky place.

Clearly, nobody outside these armed gangs wants this and there may finally be some concerted action under way to ensure this never happens: the Accra Initiative, a low-level network set up by five governments most directly concerned (Burkina Faso, Benin, Togo, Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire) geared towards intelligence sharing and joint military action and grassroots campaigns to take away the lure of the gangs. This kind of joined-up thinking, in tandem with the creation of real economic prospects for the young folks most likely to be lured by the Siren Call of armed violence may yield results in the near future. I certainly hope so. After a decade of destruction, this region desperately needs success against the ever-expanding destabilising influence of these criminal groups, after the ambiguity of Opération Barkhane, the stillborn efforts of the G5 Force Sahel and Operation Takuba and the utter disaster of Russia’s Wagner killers. Here’s hoping that they get it right this time. And here’s hoping that eventual foreign (dare I say…Western) backers understand three things: that it is chiefly about money, crime and turf and not about religion, that the initiative must be with those affected and their governments, and that throwing military kit and troops at the problem solves nothing. The alternative is grim: the shutdown of a space the size of Western Europe.

Rain!

In the Sahel, rain is typically preceded by a dust storm, like the one that met me one afternoon in August 2020, as I was walking through the fine town of Ségou, just a few hours from Bamako. One moment I saw it crossing the river Djoliba, on which the town lies; the next I was enveloped in it. It was pitch dark and it was mid-afternoon. Luckily, I knew where I was: a stone’s throw or two away from a friendly hotel called L’Auberge but it wasn’t until I arrived at its entrance (following a sandy road by pointing my phone light straight down to my feet) that I saw the light above the door. It took another 30 minutes for the rain to finally begin and then it hit – hard. Stay indoors when this happens.

The sand and dust wall approaches, Ségou

Similar a few years earlier on a long stretch of street from the Ouagadougou suburb of Pissy past Gounghin and the headquarters of the FESPACO film festival and into town. Here, a wall of dust and sand came barrelling towards me as I was riding a bicycle and the effect was not unlike one of those Northwest European seasonal storms when gusts of wind tug at your bike and try to floor you. Except that this one came with tiny bits of sand and dust that stung. This forced me to do something humiliating that in principle I never do on principle: get off my bike. The sandstorm was mercifully short-lived but the rain that followed was relentless in its fury.

In a matter on minutes, roads become rivers where cars struggle. You will be astonished at the colossal amounts of water and wonder where on earth it all comes from; surely not only the sky… This was certainly my experience on another bike ride around Ouagadougou. I had foolishly ignored the warnings of thick clouds overhead and soon enough found myself negotiating the disappearing tar surface of the road all Ouagalais call La Périferique. I was attempting, unsuccessfully, to stay away from the water that kept invading until it had converted the road into a shallow river. Riding a bike in one of Ouaga’s ultra heavy rainshowers with unpredictable water movement is not really the occasion to push your luck, so I ended up sheltering under one of the very few overpasses the city possesses and stayed there, like many other very sensible Ouagalais, until the incessant lightning and thunder had died down a little and it was sort of over…

Serious storm clouds over Ouagadougou and its airport with the prettiest control tower anywhere… (pic: Burkina24)

Intimidating lighting, some of the most spectacular light shows you will see anywhere and huge downpours, as if whatever resides up there has decided to personally pull out all the stops and open every single tap it can possibly find and then stands aside laughing manically as the poor folks below scramble for safety. And scramble they must because these rains can kill. Abidjan, for instance, frequently gets hit: it sits on a lagoon and has built up areas sitting literally on the shoreline; it also receives copious amounts of rain, which then struggles to find a safe way out. Deaths are regularly reported from around town.

How does rain become such a problem? Among the factors (and a lot of them are related) we can count a near perfect storm of urbanisation at breakneck speed and climate change. Most if not all towns and cities in West Africa (I will limit myself to this region) have been growing at a dizzying rate. Bamako, Mali’s capital and my home for a couple of years was deemed Africa’s and even the world’s fastest growing city at the beginning of the second decade of this century. A tiny settlement at the end of the 19^th century, it became the administrative centre of what was then called French Soudan, while it was mostly limited to the north bank of the mighty Djoliba River.

Bamako’s first bridge was built only 65 years ago, thus linking the old town to the southern riverbank from where the city could spread. And spread it did. In 1990 Bamako had just shy of one million inhabitants; today it is close to four million. Such growth rates are beyond the administrative, logistical, infrastructural and service capacities of any city government. And it shows: roads are in very bad state and disintegrate almost visibly when it rains; electricity and water supply are patchy at best; traffic is anarchic and service levels low to non-existent. By contrast and as a predictable result, levels of self-reliance among the Bamakois are very high.

A rain-soaked street in Kalaban Coura, Bamako and yes that was once my bike…

Cities fill up because the countryside offers very little in the way of economic prospects. This is deliberate. Governments fear the city-based electorate and one way to keep the urban masses happy and prevent riots is by keeping food prices low. This is achieved by either not paying the farmers who still work the land enough for their produce or simply replacing locally produced food with cheap imports, which has the added advantage of keeping super rich and often corrupt traders happy; after all, they bankroll political parties and their candidates. What we have here is a vicious circle. Armed insurgencies and/or criminal enterprises that have been making their appearances since the early 1990s are nothing less or more than the bill being presented for these misguided and short-sighted policies. In the absence of viable rural economies (and indeed the absence of opportunities in cities), easily recruitable young men join these gangs and they will not go away any time soon.

This looks very much like the street in Angré, Cocody, Abidjan where I briefly rented an apartment eight years ago (pic captured from YouTube)

As if this isn’t bad enough you now must add further effects of climate change (rains are increasingly erratic and downpours have become noticeably more extreme), bad road design (usually without the sloping surface that should be mandatory here) and the city dwellers’ excruciatingly bad habits. Unfortunately, the concept of a common public space is not very alive here. You have your own home and direct surroundings, which you keep scrupulously spotless. And then you have the rest, which nobody gives a flying flip about. Hence stuff thrown from buses and cars, culverts converted into dumping grounds, drains full of masses of accursed plastic bags and every open space covered in rubbish. This leads to one thing: blockage and the near-certainty that when there is extreme rainfall people drown.

There’s almost certainly more but you get the idea. And so it is the same scene, repeated during every single rainy season every year, in Ouagadougou, in Bamako, Abidjan, Conakry, Banjul, the smaller urban centres throughout the West Africa region and, indeed, Dakar, where I am writing this and where I may have had a bit of a lucky escape.

Rond Point Philippe, Ouest Foire, Yoff, Dakar

I set out this last Friday afternoon, during what I thought to be a break in the rain of sufficient length to allow me to get a very late breakfast and sort out one or two other things. It soon became apparent that I had miscalculated. Badly. As I walked along an already rain-soaked sandy road towards a place called Rond Point Philippe (a busy roundabout named after a popular pharmacy) the skies opened once again amidst an orchestral suite of lightning and thunder. I walked briskly down the remaining streets (one right, one left, one…oh no, the street’s become a lake…retrace steps, one right, another right, one left and onto the roundabout, which has a brand new bridge in the middle where I thought I was going to stay until the rain would let up.

No such luck.

I found my way blocked by a solid mass of water. I stayed put under a tiny overhang, just small enough to keep me less wet than I would have been otherwise, as I contemplated my next move. I quickly concluded, as one car waded past and caused a stern wave that almost spilled over the ramp where I was standing and into the shop behind me, that any next move would involve getting my feet wet. Beyond the bridge I spotted a Brioche d’Or, known for good coffee, and unpredictable levels of food quality and service. But how to get there?

I braved the rain and plunged into what had been a street, waded across and found that beyond the small collection of street stalls (now closed) where I had thought to find a strip of land high enough to get me across the street and to the bridge there was more water. Oh well. Caution to the, er, rain then.

From my table at the Brioche d’Or. Yes, I made it there.

Traffic was the least of my worries: it had come to a complete stop. I walked across to that bridge and waited, hoping for the now solid sheet of water coming down relentlessly to subside just a bit. Which it did.

The Brioche d’Or felt like a place under siege. Nowhere was really dry but that was fine because nobody was, including yours truly who did not have a dry stitch on his body by now… Being under siege from the elements brought fleeting solidarity among those who had managed to get under its protective roof. And Brioche had a life saver: coffee! And a half decent burger and very nice service. So we sat on this veranda-like place, waiting for it all to calm down…deep in conversation about how this was all the fault of the government because the roads were badly constructed and how we should know how to deal with these things by now because this happens every year and so on……..

The rain continued. The traffic stalled. Somewhere a siren (I presumed the fire brigade) wailed incessantly, clearly attached to a vehicle that was unable to move like the rest. Why this was the case I was about to find out. Because the rain eventually did let up and I could safely leave. I paid the waitress and walked from the low point where the Rond Point was located (no wonder it was now a lake) in the direction of my old street. Worse was to come.

First thing I found was that traffic on the bridge was blocked, because it was virtually impossible to go past this…

“There is no way through,” I was told by some folks coming from where I thought I was going. To my left, across the flooded exit road leading to the Rond Point I saw a procession of people gingerly negotiating a bit of pavement between the road and the parking lot of the Yoff Municipal Authority, also flooded. Water swirled around their feet. Oh well. Turn around, go there, keep your luggage dry (including a laptop I had weirdly deemed necessary to bring along and which had managed to keep miraculously dry inside its plastic shell) and hope for the best. Walking back, I noticed a bit of a riot.

Yes, a bunch of neighbourhood kids had turned their bit of flooded highway into a swimming pool and were having a grand old time splashing about in a watery dance they repeated every ten metres or so, pretending to bail out the water right in front of the vehicles that just stood there, engines switched off.

Time to be on my way. I joined the procession I just described and had a scare twice, when there was a clear surge in the water streaming across from the other side of the highway where the boys were swimming. Where did that come from? Cars that had decided to move after all? A stream spontaneously joining another stream somewhere? There’s no way you can tell where exactly all this water is coming from and where it is going except to the lowest point which is roughly where you are walking right now… Bits and chunks of ground had given way under the weight of the cascades and if this happens when you stand on one such spot you’re toast.

That’s where I walked too, gingerly…. I first negotiated the other side of the exit road you see here, to the right That’s where I took the pic of the splashing kids.

We all made it, and walked to wherever. Me to the seventh floor of a hotel on the big thoroughfare that was and remained blocked solid in both directions for the rest of the afternoon and into the evening.

There’s no solution in sight, especially not when the causes are so complex. What can and probably should be done is make a real effort to change peoples’ behaviour, invest in more and better infrastructure and prevent people from dying because there are fewer deaths more terrible (I think) than drowning, like the one driver who got stuck in an underpass near Mermoz and did not live to tell the tale. And at the very end the best idea is probably to turn rural areas into economically viable zones so that people do not feel the need to migrate to these already overcrowded cities or even less to pick up an AK47 and start attacking them because the villages offers no prospects whatsoever.

Abidjan miniatures 8 and end

Abidjan is probably the easiest place on earth to find a taxi. They beep at you incessantly the second you place yourself on the pavement, even when you just want to cross the street. They are, in fact, louder and more insistent than their colleagues in Dakar but somehow manage to be less annoying, mostly because in this city literally EVERYONE is making noise… So: taxi. Within seconds.

The driver fills his seat to overflowing and he has positioned his corpulent self like someone on an extended relaxing holiday. But he is most assuredly at work and does not miss a beat when manoeuvering his orange Toyota through the throng in this, the busiest part of the city. And in the meantime: he talks, virtually non-stop. “See this traffic jam?” Er, yes, I do. We are in it. A long procession of private vehicles, blue wôro-wôro, buses, taxis (including mine), vans, gbaka stands still and does not move. This may be a looong ride…

“You see? These people are not even leaving Yopougon. They’re on their way to the next maquis. Everything is here! You want beer, there’s beer. You want food, there is food. You see that bar over there?” He points to his right, across a pavement, lined with food stalls and busy like a bus station. “Yes, that one. Now! When that maquis on the other side closes…” he points to his left: amidst blocks of apartments I spot part of an open space packed with tables and chairs and I pick up the sound of a band that is clearly attempting to top L’Internat in the decibel production department. You only have ONE guess as to the music it plays…

“Yes – that’s the place I mean,” my guide and driver continues. “Now. When that maquis closes everybody crosses the road to come here. You see the girls getting ready?” He was not only referring to the ones selling food. “This is the new Rue Princesse, you see? After they had knocked down the old one they all came over here.” Rue Princesse, for the uninitiated, is the busiest street in the area, where boys with money meet drinks meet food meet girls looking for a good time and some money (and maybe even the other way around)… hence the name. You may, by now, have reached the conclusion that the urge to turn life into one giant party is irrepressible here and you would be right.

After an interminable ride through Yopougon we emerge onto one of the three bridges that give access to the six-lane motorway that is part of the giant motorway system linking all constituent parts of this giant city. There’s always a bit of anarchy going on here, to put it mildly. My driver, forever slouched in his seat, belly protruding as we hurtle along, explains that there’s a lot of accidents happening on this stretch of road (in fact I saw an overturned gbaka minibus on the way in) because people don’t keep their distance.

Neither does he, as he alternates between one line of fast moving vehicles and another…

Angré. Oh dear…are you really going back there…?

“So Angré it is where you’re going, right? But there’s nothing there! No life!” The traffic starts thinning out as we get to our exit lane into Cocody, leading to the Boulevard that takes us to Angré. There’s still a bunch of cars about but nothing in the way that Yopougon was crowded. My driver is almost triumphant as he weaves his way in and out of smooth flowing traffic on the two-lane boulevard. “See? Told you! Nothing here! The bosses are sleeping!” It is just after 10pm and we are, indeed, entering a more affluent part of the city. “Now, in Yopougon, hm, you will see people out and about at midnight. One, two, three in the morning. Yes! And do you know why there are so many banks in Yopougon? Simple: when people are having a good time and the money runs out, there’s always one who will say: ah, let me just pop over to the bank and get some more money for our next beers…? You see? But here….”

But then some doubt creeps into his discourse. “Look, I am working really long hours to get some money and then I pass those maquis – every day of the week, and the same guys sit there at eleven pm, twelve midnight, three am…and they are supposed to work the next day? Of course not. And then the next day…I see them again! Where do they get all that money from? I don’t quite understand…” It is likely that the equally ubiquitous Western Union agencies have something to do with that seemingly endless flow of money…

And then he drops me off in far too quiet, empty and miserable Angré. And he almost feels sorry for me. “Look at you, I’m leaving you in this stone dead neck of the woods and look at me and where I am going: back to life, back to joy, back to good food and plenty drinks and gorgeous princesses…” Do I get the picture?

Yes. Certainly. I do. See you soon in this city, enjoyable and exasperating, full of life, noise, crime and grime but in possession of copious amounts of Never Say Die. I will be back.

An Excellent New Year to You All.

Abidjan miniatures 7

An evening in Yopougon

“C’est mangrrrove. You know what that means? You know what a mangrove is, right? Where trees are growing in the water, right? But here in Côte d’Ivoire mangrrrove means: nice, lovely…”

Thanks for the language lesson, Roger, who says he is one of the neighbourhood youths that designs the dazzling street dances that have for the longest time been a part of the tradition at the place where I meet him: L’Internat, also known as the Zouglou Temple, where the ambiance is, indeed, mangrrrove.

Alright. What is zouglou and where is L’Internat?

Zouglou was born in the huge Abidjan suburb of Yopougon and L’Internat, located well inside Yopougon in the Niangon Sud part of this massive maze has been its principal podium ever since it opened in 2009. “Zouglou is music that allows you to have a good time but it’s also a way for people to express themselves.” That’s Cécilia Yao talking, a visitor I interviewed for a Voice of America report on this place and its music (starts at 25 minutes 30 seconds into this lovely program). She explains in a few words the absolute genius of zouglou: this is music that makes you dance and think at the same time. The rhythms are based on beats that come from around the country, as Yodé & Siro, two veteran zouglou artists and two true gentlemen explained to me the day after my evening in L’Internat. The instantly recognisable multi-layered singing, too: there’s a bit of the Centre in it, the West, even the North…and a detectable link to Congolese rhumba. Their point was this: even though zouglou was born in Yopougon, it is very much part of national Ivorian identity.

Most of you will know the biggest zouglou hit ever, Magic System’s Premier Gaou, which made it all the way to MTV in the 1990s. An apparently autobiographical account of a poor boy who is rejected by a girl, who then tries to rope him in again when he has become famous thanks to a hit song he’s written. Magic System are still huge and one of their offshoots is a music company, unsurprisingly called Gaou Productions. Other bands have also made sure that their names are not easily forgotten: Les Salopards, Les Garagistes, Les Patrons…

A whiteboard-like wall, next to the bar, gives you some of the biggest names who stood on the stage of this mythical place…

The thinking part of zouglou comes from the words, as another visitor to L’Internat, Olivier, explains. Like Cécilia (and yours truly) he comes a veeeery long way, from the Cocody neighbourhood of Angré, to see the bands and have a ton of drinks and fun with his friends. Mind you, this is only once a week on the Sunday and it tends to end pretty early because for many of the music lovers here, tomorrow is a working day. “Zouglou…it’s the  beautiful music and the words,” Olivier explains. “There’s good advice on how to behave, how to live…” In actual fact, many of the songs tell not-so-uplifting but truly hilarious stories about what has happened in the street, the neighbourhood, the antics of a veritable rogues’ gallery of small-time crooks and two-timing husbands and/or wives, brought to you (we cannot stress this enough) with a huge dollop of uniquely Ivorian humour. Abidjan is called the Capital of Laughter for a reason.

Seven years ago, during another visit here, there was one song that kept coming back: Je Roule Kdo (that’s ‘cadeau’ for you, and in this neck of the woods ‘cadeau’ means ‘for nothing’, or ‘free of charge’…). It told the story of two Frenchmen who were swindled out of a very large amount of money by a wily Yopougon taxi driver…so large was the sum that he could buy a car from the proceeds – hence the title. A party of very robustly built neighbourhood women was dancing to this tune, whilst pretending to be at the wheel. They had an absolute screamer of a good time, while I was having visions of their husbands, tied to the kitchen table back home…

Evening has fallen and as usual, the music cascading from the PA system has reached such ear-splitting levels that the sounds starts bouncing back from the buildings around the place. To give my ears some relief, I move to the adjacent parking lot, which is where I meet Roger and Olivier, and where I interview artistic director Patron Sylvanus, who explains how zouglou is also a great leveller, as it makes you forget, if only temporary, who is boss and who isn’t. Even when there are plenty of songs to remind the listener of exactly that…

Yodé (left) & Siro, after the interview

Like the latest Yodé & Siro tune, Président On Dit Quoi (the last three words here are, in Ivorian parlance, the universally used phrase to ask you how you are), where they take a few digs at the current government of president Alassane Ouattara. “It’s nice that there’s light everywhere now. Tarred roads everywhere. There’s even lights IN the tarred roads (a reference to the tiny lights that alert drivers they are about to stray into a lane for oncoming traffic…). Our country is becoming really beautiful. But president, why is it that we always hear that the money is working…but then we only see certain people eating well and oh, by the way, why is it you don’t care what happens to us when we fall ill? Ah yes, I forgot: you lot always go abroad for medical treatment…”

Yes, in spite of the banter and the jokes the lyrics can be pretty hard-hitting. Yodé & Siro did not really want to discuss their recent legal troubles with me, the result of their comments on the partisan actions of the nation’s State Prosecutor, which landed them a suspended prison sentence and a substantial fine but they were clearly undeterred: “Look, we have been lampooning presidents ever since we began. Just because there is a new government now does not mean we are going to change. It’s our job to tell leaders what they do right and what they do wrong…”

One famous episode recounts how, when Laurent Gbagbo became president, Yodé & Siro did a song that warned him: if you appoint thieves in your entourage, you will be called a thief. One day, they were called to the presidential palace, where they went with some trepidation. Gbagbo had lined up his entire cabinet of ministers, so the story goes, and then ordered the two artists to sing their song on the spot. When they had finished, the president told his ministers: “You see? It’s YOU they are singing about. YOU are the thieves…” This is unlikely to have changed the actual situation materially – corrupt bureaucrats have been a blight on this country for decades – but it does show you the extent to which zouglou is part of the Ivorian DNA. Président On Dit Quoi was on permanent rotation in the maquis, on the radio, in the markets, everywhere…

Photo credit: L’Internat Facebook page

But now, for me, the time has come to leave L’Internat. This is very sad but my left ear is ringing from the World War Three levels of the sound system. Ever since I caused a rather unfortunate sound accident in a self-op studio some nine years ago in Hilversum there’s a maximum to what that ear can tolerate. And yes, even more maddeningly, my back has started protesting yet again… (I don’t moan about it all the time but rest assured that it moans at me on an almost permanent basis…). So it is time for a taxi and the last instalment of these Abidjan stories…