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…

The Façade – Part 3

Abidjan, Plateau, from behind the green tinted windows of the entirely refurbished Africa Development Bank headquarters. The white structure in the middle belongs to the St. Paul’s Cathedral, built in the first half of the 1980s.

 

Between 2002 and 2011 the North of Côte d’Ivoire was the playground of a group that grandiosely called itself Forces nouvelles (Fn). Their political leader at the time was Guillaume Soro, a young and extremely wily political operator who in perfect tandem with his old brother friend and now enemy Charles Blé Goudé turned the country’s student union (known as FESCI) into a violent militia and went on to expand this model across the rest of the country.

When Fn ran the North it had a single business model: loot. Nobody made his own money doing something productive. The region was carved out into zones, over which presided military commanders. They became known as com’zones. When I visited the area in early 2010, with photographer Martin Waalboer, we got our first glimpse of the Fn when they, cap in hand, walked through the train we were travelling on, asking for money. The second impression was that of Bouaké, Côte d’Ivoire’s second city, largely lifeless, half boarded-up and in possession of a non-functioning economy. It did yield a ridiculously cheap rented car, though.

The third impression was that of arrogant indifference among the ground troops about the presence of two foreign journalists in their main fief, only matched by the indignant paranoia of their media chief who we finally got on the phone with the assistance of some local United Nations staff and who only wanted to know how long we had been there. Wise enough, we had decided not to do any work until the Fn chief of the media had barked a few orders down his mobile phone, whereupon our Fn media accreditation appeared pronto from a room at their Bouaké headquarters. Matters were, of course, not helped by the fact that we showed up shortly after another bout of violent rioting, which had rattled the leadership.

The fourth impression was that of fleecing. Anybody unlucky enough to have to live, work or travel in the areas the Fn controlled had their pockets picked. Sure enough, the chaps manning the roadblock on leaving Bouaké were in a good mood (and in stitches when, after passing the roadblock, we returned a few minutes later to tell them we had forgotten to buy petrol) – but pay them we did. As did everybody else. And the fifth impression was the desolate stagnation in which the entire region found itself, nowhere clearer than in another major town, Katiola, where the holes in the road were bigger than a regiment of SUVs and the public buildings appeared to be in varying states of decay. A strange state of affairs for a movement that claimed to have taken over this part of the country because it felt the “Northerners” had been systematically marginalised. If anything, the infrastructure that had been put in place in the first few decades of the country’s independence was decaying fast under their writ.

Between Blé Goudé and Soro, the latter has turned out (so far) the smartest operator. He is currently the president of the country’s Parliament while Blé Goudé, a key ally of former president Laurent Gbagbo, sits in a jail in Scheveningen awaiting the continuation of his trial at the International Criminal Court, for  alleged human rights abuses. Soro, meanwhile, could be heading for the highest post in the land, as early as 2020.

He is also the king of the next place we pass on our trip: Ferkessédougou. This town is doing rather nicely for itself thanks to the generous patronage from their illustrious son who has, according to reports, already had a conference centre set up with his name on it. No doubt he has helped himself to some nice real estate in the process. But at least in “Ferké” as the place is commonly known, there is some evidence of the reversal of the calamitous damage the Fn and its com’zones have caused in the region.

 

But what’s worse – they’re still around. Part 4 shortly.