west africa wins always

Tanzania bis

2012-01-23T08:32:00.001Z

One more Tanzania landscape picture.

Monkey attack

2012-01-13T06:23:00.003Z

A failed attempt to breakfast on the balcony of our hotel in Tanga.

Looking for paradise

2012-01-10T10:01:00.002Z

After driving hundreds of kilometers on empty roads past square brick farmers’ houses and green savannah filled with thorny shrubs as far as the eye could see, the road went up through glorious mountains and down again to an eerily quiet Lake Malawi, where we slept in a rattan hut on the camping ground of a lone German adventurer who proudly declared his barren lakeside home the most beautiful place in the world. The lake is almost devoid of fishermen and remains largely undiscovered by tourists because of its remote location, though the German, like most Europeans building a hotel in Tanzania, has big dreams. One day, he said, he will be able to charge visitors several hundreds of dollars for an overnight stay, just like the lodges in the famous Serengeti national park. For now he’s living in a container converted into a makeshift house with a pregnant wife, cats and dogs, and countless sand flies for company. I understand his desire for solitude and the romantic pull of rural life; but the thought of having to accommodate a tourist herd would kill my dream immediately. After all these years in Ivory Coast I’d forgotten that tourists look like overweight children; one sees them trudging along unpaved roads in shorts and faded t-shirts, roughing it to the next bar, the next museum, the next national park. The white man likes to walk, oh yes; the African walks because he has no bicycle.

Tanzania is an immensely beautiful country but there isn’t much I can say about the people; an old village woman scolded me for taking pictures, children yelled “white person”, and I’ve been offered peanuts, bananas and fried termites by street vendors. C. is the one who does the talking; he speaks the language; he haggles with policemen and wards off the beggars. Yesterday’s journey went northwards on a road connecting Tanzania with Congo, Zambia and Malawi. It was lined with wrecked trucks and squashed trailers, and C., who in a previous life ran his own trucking business, entertained me with a running commentary on driving skills and truck maintenance. He has great stories to tell about the dangers of trucking in Tanzania, but the best story is unsuitable for sharing publicly, and will remain untold.

East Africa

2012-01-02T08:50:00.001Z

Hello Tanzania. Hello cheetah. Hello 2012.

New army, same violent behavior

2011-12-28T18:57:00.004Z

A trader was shot at point blank range at a checkpoint manned by FRCI soldiers in eastern Ivory Coast. Days earlier, FRCI soldiers melted plastic bags over the naked backs of four men who stood accused of theft. The four are being detained until they have to appear in court but they have not received any medical care. In central Ivory Coast, a woman who refused to sweep a local market on the orders of FRCI soldiers was dragged on the ground and severely beaten. Another woman was rushed to intensive care after being assaulted by an FRCI soldier. The police persuaded the family of the victim to settle the matter amicably and accept $30 from the alleged perpetrator to cover medical expenses. The condition of the victim remains critical.

Merry Christmas

2011-12-27T12:24:00.002Z

Hand-delivered at the doorstep: a bottle of Moet & Chandon and a bowl of chocolates. With compliments from the presidency's communication department. Ivory Coast finally has a president who has noticed the existence of non-French foreign correspondents.

Six years without a job

2011-12-17T17:19:00.011Z

“They say: when life is tough, it’s the tough ones who survive. I’m trying. But I can’t help thinking: why did my life turn out like this? I haven’t always been good, good, good. But even if I had to pay my dues, I’ve certainly paid them by now. It’s been six years. Six years without a job. I used to believe things would improve. The fact of the matter is, they are getting worse. I’ve moved in with an uncle. He has given me a room in his house. But I’m not free there. I can’t speak my mind. You know how it is in Africa: you must respect your elders. When his son comes home, he takes the room, and I sleep on the sofa. I’m in my thirties. It used to be me who took care of people. Luckily both my parents are dead. If you saw me – I’m no longer wearing fashionable clothes. I can’t afford them. I look like a villager now.

"Six years without a job. The boredom! I don't even have a TV anymore. Listening to music on my mobile phone is my only distraction. Sometimes I go to church, that helps a little. When it gets dark, all kinds of thoughts enter my head. These thoughts eat me up. Last month I was close to killing myself. I sat on my mattress thinking about my life, and I decided to commit suicide. I'd just had enough. Then my phone rang -- a friend invited me to a birthday party. I probably wouldn't be alive today if he hadn’t rung. This year it was such a struggle to buy school books for my daughters. They are living with their mother, who is also unemployed. What depresses me most is the fact that I can’t map out a future for my daughters. I want them to go to university, but I can’t afford to think about it. It’s impossible to think long-term. I barely have enough money to eat. Plantain bananas are twice as expensive as before. You order a loaf of foutou [a doughy ball of mashed plantains], that’s all you eat that day.

"Last time I went to the city I ran into two girls I used to be friends with. They asked me where I live these days. I didn’t tell them the truth. ‘I live in Cocody,’ I said. They said: ‘Oh really, you don’t look like you do.’ I said: ‘Well, I don’t have time for fashion.’ I took my phone and pretended someone was calling me. ‘Sorry, I have to answer a call,’ I said, and walked away. I didn’t want to face their questions.”

One more note on the West African sex trade

2011-12-14T10:49:00.004Z

Stories about prostitutes are a staple of West African newspapers, and I tend to believe they tell us more about what it means to live in poverty than statistics ever can. As a newly arrived correspondent I used to be fascinated with Abidjan's nightlife - until I went about town to research an article on prostitution and discovered how grim and depraved the local sex trade really is. It was an unforgettable exercise in cynicism that managed to dampen my curiosity completely. Following below is a newspaper story, edited for brevity, that recounts what happened in Liberia while Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf went to collect her Nobel peace prize in Norway.

Sex Workers in Dog Fight Over Customer
A local shop in Paynesville was a dramatic scene when two commercial sex workers were locked in a dog fight over a man believed to be their customer. According to eyewitnesses, one of the girls, identified as Gertrude, 14, negotiated with her male customer for short time for a fee of $1. Gertrude said while she and her customer were on their way to a motel room, she left her customer to buy a condom in the shop. Upon her return, she was surprised to see her customer in conversation with Princess, a well-known commercial sex worker in her late 20s. "I thought she was negotiating to go with him too, but I realized they agreed to leave me alone," she noted.
Princess and the man agreed on $0.75 for short time. But Gertrude could not allow her customer to be taken away by Princess. Both girls got into a serious fight, something that attracted the attention of bystanders. According to Gertrude, this was not the first time Princess stole one of her customers. "She thinks she can take advantage of me because I am a little girl who’s just coming into the business. But whatever she can do, I can do even better," she explained in tears.
Girls between the ages of 13 and 14 are often seen in the area selling sex for $0.50 and beyond. Our reporter who visited the scene said he was engaged by many teenage girls who wanted short time. Some of them explained to this paper that they were on the streets because they are self-supported.

Rumors of lightning bolts and human blood

2011-12-12T19:16:00.005Z

Ivory Coast held parliamentary elections yesterday. We might imagine people were keen to cast their vote after having witnessed ex-president Gbagbo’s dogged sabotaging of the 2010 presidential elections. But Ivorians don’t necessarily want what we think they want. Gbagbo’s party declared a boycott in an attempt to cast doubt over the credibility of the outcome and the popularity of Alassane Ouattara, and many voters stayed at home. Newspapers offered different explanations for the apathetic response to the country’s first parliamentary elections in eleven years: fear of violence, social pressure, disgust with politics in general, and anger at Gbagbo’s transfer to the International Criminal Court. ‘Some people don’t see the point of having deputies,’ a journalist wrote. Indeed, the politicians most likely to win a seat in parliament already have positions of wealth and power. I’m wondering to what extent rumors affected the turnout; someone told me he didn’t dare leave the house because there were “strange stories” going around. Last week a candidate in the west of the county was heard struggling with somebody in his bedroom, which his family members said was most peculiar because he was alone in the room, with the door locked. Panicked by his screams of agony, his relatives broke down the door, whereupon the night sky released a single bolt of lightning and struck the unfortunate candidate dead. Few Ivorians seem to doubt the veracity of this story, although I can't say for sure what it is supposed to mean.

Liberians have a way with rumors as well. When residents of a Monrovia suburb noticed blood dripping from a white van that had been parked in the area for hours, the news spread so fast the vehicle was rapidly surrounded by ‘people from far places to see what they believed was human blood’, according to an online newspaper today. The police arrived around the same time as the owner of the van, who explained he had delivered an order of pig meat before rushing off to a wedding. But as he fumbled for his car keys, the angry crowd began pelting the police with stones and threatening to burn the vehicle. ‘He then got some boys to break the locks and when the door flew open, only a bag of palm nuts was in the back,’ the newspaper reports. ‘A bystander who was missed by a rock, said: “The youths of Liberia have no control, look at how they were going to hurt me for nothing."'

Hair

2011-12-08T11:48:00.006Z

Abidjan ranks the third least safe city in the world, after Baghdad and N’Djamena, according to a shoddy survey by a consulting group that obviously has never set foot in this country. How they come to qualify Abidjan as one of the worst places on earth is anybody’s guess as the firm’s website only tells us the streets are "generally unsafe after dark". Even that is not entirely true; it depends as much on the area as the size of your vehicle. Armed robberies are rampant since the new government began demobilizing so-called volunteer fighters who joined the rebels during their advance on Abidjan in April. I read the newspapers mainly to find out which neighborhoods are being targeted by robbers, and I keep my eyes fixed on the rearview mirror before I drive my car into the garage to check for gunmen lurking in a corner. But yesterday I was struck once again by the unassuming friendliness of random strangers that seems so typical of Abidjan. I went to the local bank machine to get money, and the watchman held out the door to the cash cubicle as if he invited me to his own house. As I punched the numbers to obtain my cash – it often takes several attempts, and you never know if the machine is going to function properly – deafening rolls of thunder announced a tropical downpour. Outside, the watchman hurriedly unfolded an umbrella and walked me to the car.
“Be careful not to get wet now, hair is expensive,” he said.
“Don’t worry, my hair is cheap,” I said. “It grows by itself.”
“Ah. Well, you know, our sisters have very expensive hair, and they always come asking us men for money to buy more hair.”
“I know,” I said. “But whites have cheap hair. That’s why they don’t take very good care of it.”
“Ah bon? Interesting. Have a good day, madam.”

In the 'sleeping people' series

2011-11-23T18:48:00.003Z

Maybe, one day, I will be able to sleep like this, oblivious to noise, dust, and the neighbors.

While Liberians wait for election results ...

2011-11-10T12:31:00.006Z

From today's Daily Observer, one of the main Liberian newspapers with a circulation of about 300 copies.

Mysterious Whale Appears in Maryland
By Rev. Edgar Freeman, Citizen Journalist

A big fish believed to be a whale has appeared in Maryland county, on the Grand Cavalla River. The creature was first spotted by Fanti fisherman as early as 5 a.m. on October 18, 2011. The Fanti are well known for their fishing activities in that part of the country. In fact, fishing stands out as their sole source of income, their livelihood.
Awakened by the alarm sounded by the fishermen, residents of the area suddenly converged near the Atlantic to take a look at the amazing creature. With the belief that the creature was dead, minutes after the discovery, residents of the area were seen rushing to their homes for axes and other sharp tools to cut portions of the fish for consumption.
Everyone was delighted. Some screamed with joy after realizing that the seemingly inexhaustible meat supplied by the whale would end their search for meals for the next several days. The scramble to cut portions of this giant of a fish continued until October 27, when it mysteriously disappeared from the shores.
According to locals of the area, they have enough food for the next couple of weeks. They expressed gratitude to the Almighty for providing them a chance not only to see a whale for the first time in their lives, but also to put meals on the table for their families.

Drink, eat and sleep

2011-11-09T08:20:00.006Z

I stepped through the gate of my overpriced hotel to find five men drinking beer in the shade of a streetside shack. It was 8 a.m. I was the first to have breakfast that morning, and when I leaned over the bar to order coffee, I surprised a waiter taking a swig of Heineken. It was 7 a.m. "All that works here is drink, eat and sleep," the driver remarked later that day. Seems to me they are lucky to have women doing the laundry for them. But seriously, Monrovia's poverty still gets to me.

A riot in Liberia

2011-11-08T08:52:00.004Z

"A big holler holler, but it will not last," said my 27-year-old driver, a skinny kid named PYJ in honor of former rebel leader and current senator Prince Yormie Johnson. He was commenting on the riot on the eve of the second-round election in Liberia, which incumbent Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf is guaranteed to win. The opposition party CDC unexpectedly withdrew from the vote last week amid vague claims of fraud, seemingly unable or unwilling to provide proof for its allegations. There are rumors the opposition has run out of money; most people think they are trying to save face by pulling out, which has the added advantage of undermining Ellen's credibility. "CDC running from defeat," as a newspaper said.

Yesterday the opposition mobilized hundreds of kids to block a main highway in the capital under the pretense of holding a peaceful rally in protest at the electoral process -- polls that have cost the international community tens of millions of dollars. When some kids began hurling stones at the police, the overly well-equipped police force nearly disintegrated into chaos, ignoring commands from their superiors and running this way and that. I saw a guy using his teargas rifle like a Liberian rebel uses a Kalashnikov: he ran towards the crowd carrying his gun at the hip, firing tear gas grenades in quick succession as if they were bullets, and yelling a strange battle cry whose words I could not make out. Now there are rumors that several people died -- word on the street puts the death toll at seven, although so far nobody has been able to produce a body. As a consequence, many opposition supporters, angry about what happened yesterday, are staying away from the vote. It's both a childish and a very cynical game called African politics.

A story about Mr Lo, Mr Diallo, Mme Bah, and Bollore

2011-11-05T17:12:00.007Z

Some of my belongings had been stored for more than two years in Dakar when I finally pulled myself together, got on a plane, and faced the musty cardboard boxes R. had rescued from a damp garage. In 2009 a Senegalese by the name of Mr Lo had wrapped my belongings in old rice bags and shoved them in a container with wooden giraffe statues and other art bound for Senegal. His fee was so low I kept things I would have otherwise sold or thrown out, including a pair of leather designer boots gone crooked with wear. My stuff moved, but I didn’t -- I fell in love with C. and decided to stay.

Two years on, it was time to ship it back -- if nothing else, at least my books. R., puzzled by my helplessness, recommended I call Bolloré. They can send it by plane, she said, and it will be quick and affordable. I paired my possessions down to a heavy book case and two veranda chairs. Noisy neighborhood boys started a riot over two boxes I dumped on the street corner, and for entertainment we watched them punch each other over a Chinese-made bedside lamp. In the blink of an eye the street was littered with what I used to call my 'archives' until a woman intervened to grab the lamp and yell at the kids for making a mess. The looting spree was over as quickly as it had begun.

Bolloré made it sound easy indeed. An imposing Senegalese woman, curvaceous and tall, met me in front of the warehouse at the airport. I followed her upstairs into a freezing office, where she used the phone to bark orders at somebody of inferior status downstairs. Every time she put down the receiver she gave me a reassuring smile. “There is no problem,” she said. “No problem at all.” In local code, this meant I was going to have to pay a lot of money. She also started using my first name with a familiarity I found suspicious. She said it cost 367 euros and looked skeptical when I asked for a receipt – why didn’t I come back tomorrow, the receipt was just a formality. She remained vague on the details: once my things arrived in Abidjan, there would be no problem at all.

Back in the taxi my instinct told me I had just been conned, but I preferred to bask in the sense of relief that comes with having finished a dreaded chore. A total of 367 was expensive, but if that was all, I could live with it, I thought.

Mr Diallo from Bolloré Abidjan called five days after my return. My packages had arrived and could I please fetch them? Did I know I needed a taxpayer’s account to get them through customs? Did I realize the procedure might take several weeks while storage costs had to paid? “All in all,” he said, “it’s going to cost you about 430 euros. and that's an estimate.” I fell silent with shock, then protested loudly. It became clear that Ivorian customs would want to inspect my knickknacks and second-hand books, and that Bolloré was going to make me pay through the nose to get the stuff out of storage. It just didn't make sense. I didn’t tell Mr Diallo how much, at that particular moment, I hated his country.

Mr Diallo’s boss was more helpful. I impressed upon him, a fellow European, that I was deceived in Dakar and lost in a labyrinth of hair-raising bureaucracy. “You must get a transitaire -- they can do things we as a company simply can’t do, if you understand what I mean,” he said. In other words, I better recruit somebody to bribe my books out of the warehouse. Another month passed before I found Madame Bah, an unyielding negotiator in a traditional dress who had no time for smalltalk. I met her in front of Bolloré and she literally knew everybody. At the customs’ office, she told me we were going to perform a little play. The head of customs was going to say it was difficult if I did not have a taxpayer’s account, and I was going to say I had no money. And so it went. The bribe was 30 euros.

Madame Bah managed to get my things out of storage within a day. She said it was up to me to decide how much I’d pay her. I realized that wasn’t entirely true when I was presented with the final bill, which appeared to be rather high. Fortunately, Mr Diallo's boss had kept his promise to wave the storage fee. I paid Madame Bah handsomely; I just wanted to get it all over with. She thanked me profusely and waved goodbye. ”Now that we have done business together, we are friends,” she exclaimed, waving her mobile phone at my car window. “Call me from time to time.”

Tabaski

2011-11-03T19:40:00.002Z

Trucks arrive daily from the northern neighboring countries to unload hundreds of black-and-white sheep. Taxi drivers are helping their clients lift the struggling animals in the trunk. The air is thick with the smell of dung; excited boys pull obstinate rams by a rope on the horns. It's Tabaski this weekend.

Soldiers of misfortune

2011-10-18T15:26:00.005Z

Even though it briefly appeared in the news a couple of years ago, I paid scarce attention to the issue of Africans who fought for France in the second World War and did not obtain the pension that was their due. I pitied the old men but I never felt an ardent desire to read about yet more people who feel they’ve been wronged by the whites – I was sure I could already spell out their laments. But when I searched the internet for historical information on Ghana and came across glowing reviews of a book about Ivorian ex-soldiers, Soldiers of Misfortune, I ordered it out of mild curiosity, thinking I might learn something about Ivory Coast in the colonial days. It proved to be a real page-turner: I read it straight through. Never did I know that more than 100,000 Ivorians were conscripted as 'volunteers' to fight the Germans and given vague, if at all, promises of voting rights in return. More important to them was the unofficial French policy that anciens militaires were exempt from forced labor. In clean and often witty prose the author, Nancy Lawler, notes that “most had no idea of where they were going” when they embarked for France in 1940.

The men she interviewed were mainly from the northern town of Korhogo. Some tell the story of the battle for France, others recount their experiences in Lebanon, a French protectorate at the time. The unlucky ones spent years in a German prisoner-of-war camp. Some Germans treated African prisoners relatively well, however. They liked them because they didn't try to escape: they had nowhere to go. They also made good domestic servants:

"A German officer took me as his boy. There were two of us. They gave us names. They called me Bibo and my friend Jambo. Names of slaves, but we were slaves. But they did give us food and a good certificate."

Many soldiers spent the euphoric days of liberation drinking in Paris before they were repatriated with a small demobilization allowance. France began to worry that the Africans could be influenced by nationalistic ideas -- some veterans had developed friendships with American soldiers, both black and white, and the French saw America as hostile to colonialism. A man from Korhogo remembers his surprise at seeing black Americans:

"I didn't know black Americans existed. I had an American friend. We went out together. I saw a guy who looked like a Korhogolese. I spoke to him, but when he did not understand me, I knew he was not from Korhogo. We did not know where they came from."

At their return, many veterans actively supported the rising nationalist movement in Ivory Coast. It was Felix Houphouet-Boigny who told them they must now fight not for France but for their own country. But when independence was finally obtained in 1960, the soldiers of the new Ivorian army had little interest in the stories of an older generation about a war that was over, and the veterans and their accomplishments, says the author, were gradually consigned to oblivion.

Findings 2

2011-10-17T10:47:00.003Z

The former security chief of Simone Gbagbo, captain Anselme Séka Séka, has been arrested at the airport after a passenger recognized him on a Bamako-bound plane. The mayor of Grand-Bassam was to attend a funeral ceremony in his birth village but drowned when his canoe capsized on the lagoon. Distraught villagers helped rescue divers of the fire brigade by using traditional drums urging the water spirit to return the body. The parents of an 11-year-old boy with both male and female genitalia are desperately seeking funds for a medical operation. Highway robbers shot and killed three minibus passengers over the weekend. Residents of the Agban neighborhood in Abidjan are wondering why their sleep was perturbed by the sound of heavy artillery. A farmer in central Ivory Coast was found having sex with a sheep after his wife left him for another man. Caught in the act by the owner of the sheep, the farmer has not been seen since. The sheep was slaughtered.

If all the taxi drivers could read...

2011-10-14T18:24:00.004Z

REPUBLIC OF COTE D'IVOIRE
'UNITY--DISCIPLINE--WORK'

DISTRICT OF ABIDJAN STATEMENT NUMBER 116

Traffic in the district of Abidjan has become of particular concern because of the behavior of some road users who do not respect the basic rules of conduct and thereby cause regrettable bodily and material harm.

The district governor urges all road users to observe the rules and strictly respect:

- spaces and sidewalks reserved for pedestrian traffic
- traffic lights and road signs
- one-way streets
- right of way
- the obligation to keep right on a road with multiple lanes
- the obligation to pass on the left
- the prohibition of on-street parking

Vigorous action will soon be taken against users who are breaking the rules.

America Dollars

2011-10-05T11:51:00.002Z

In August we spent a couple of days at a stylish seaside lodge near the unremarkable Ghanaian town of Axim. As we were waiting for the son of a shoe repairman to patch up a sandal -- the shoe repairman himself was sleeping off a hangover -- we watched the president of the Axim Unity Fun Club painstakingly polishing his car across the street. He had tried to turn his little black car into a flashy sports model by decorating it with chrome bars and colorful stickers, a real labor of love. He wore a silver chain and immaculate white basketball shoes, perhaps paid for with America Dollars sent by a relative, perhaps cheap Chinese. The Unity Fun Club seemed to be doing better than the competition, which had hung a rather clumsily written banner over the adjacent street. They were the Holy Boys Fun Club, slogan: 'Holy Boys We Fear the Lord'.

In the waiting room

2011-09-26T22:54:00.004Z

The damage is still visible for those who know where to look. The wall around the gendarmerie school is getting a fresh white coat of paint, the pockmarks on the adjacent forestry office have disappeared, and most of the gas stations that were looted and stripped to the bone have been repaired. But sometimes I search for bullet holes on the facade of tower blocks or residential buildings to remind myself this mad little war really happened, and I construct a mental image of empty streets and men with guns; and when I drive past the spot where I saw a stinking pile of half-naked corpses, now marked with a shred of crumpled plastic, I realize with sadness how cheap human life is, how easily expendable and forgotten. Yet it does not take much to prompt Ivorians into talking about their personal experiences of "the crisis", as it is called today, for everybody has a story to share, and everybody seems to marvel at the extent to which one can live through extreme violence, and survive.

Mafia Island

2011-09-10T13:54:00.002Z

We spent two days on Mafia, an island south of Zanzibar that attracts fewer tourists because it has nothing to look at in particular except picture-perfect beaches on a clear blue sea. The locals run a drinking water supply business to an even smaller island nearby, and the area is a designated marine park, so we went scuba diving under the patient supervision of a Scottish girl and her taciturn Italian boyfriend. Gazing at hundreds of colorful reef fish, which look as if they have been designed for the delight of human beings, time went by unnoticed.

Fear of flying

2011-09-09T19:07:00.002Z

A naked woman was lathering her body on the sidewalk near my house yesterday. Until I saw her sagging pendulous breasts in the rearview mirror, it was difficult to tell her square shoulders and firm buttocks apart from those of a man. Further down the road, after the nail salon and the car wash, I saw the local loony, a deranged woman with a diseased leg swollen to the size of a tree trunk, performing a shambling dance with a tin can to an audience of no one. She lives on the edge of a road which is being extended to connect to a new bridge, and her cardboard shack is unlikely to survive this showcase of economic recovery.

I must have gotten blasée, I thought, if the sight of a naked woman in my street fails to jolt me out of a state of sleepy semi-awareness. And suddenly I remembered that I’d witnessed not one but two drownings last month, and they had barely cast a shadow on the holidays. In Ghana, as we drove into the parking lot of a beach hotel, we saw a group of distraught whites standing around a SUV. A flabby red-faced girl in a towel was making a frantic phone call. Her friends or colleagues stood around in shock, and the Ghanaian parking guard told us in hushed tones that the body of their friend, a Russian, had just been fished out of the sea and bundled off to the local morgue. One of the beach guards could hardly contain his anger at the stupidity of the foreigners; they had ignored his warnings, and see what had come of it now. He was probably worried about losing his job. People in the West expect to see warning signs when danger is near, but despite the violent undertow of the Atlantic, beaches in West Africa have nothing of the sort, and hotel owners are keen on preserving the illusion of exotic wilderness. Two weeks later I went for a walk on a popular city beach in Dar es Salaam when I came across a crowd of people staring at the lifeless body of a swimmer in black underpants. It was the same case of debilitating group dynamic I’d seen after a gruesome road accident; nobody knew what to do, nobody wanted to act first. Then someone slapped the swimmer's face, which fell sideways in the sand, mouth open. How this young man had drowned remains a mystery for the Indian Ocean is relatively safe. I don’t speak a word of Swahili; my shy questions were met with subdued mumbling. Finally three men dragged the body on a dune, and I returned to the seaside bar feeling resignation and only a mild sadness.

Seeing death and constantly hearing about people dying may have left its marks, or maybe I have just grown overly aware of my mortality; I am experiencing an increasing fear of airplane turbulence that is both embarrassing and annoying. I panted and wriggled in my seat all the way back to Abidjan, and wondered, when I had finally gotten myself under control, why this illogical affliction is creeping up on me.

Sweet endings

2011-08-25T16:52:00.004Z

The coffin showroom is a staple of every town in western Ghana, and the caskets are typically displayed in a glass house bearing a cheerful inscription like "Sweet Endings". The western tribes in Ghana are similar to the eastern tribes of Ivory Coast, but coffin showrooms are more of a rarity, and it was a surprise to find this one, especially as the owner demonstrated an unusual creativity by sculpting a bible coffin. He also makes cocoa coffins for those rich cocoa farmers who would like to be buried in a wooden two-meter specimen of the pod. Funerals are a fascinating topic I have never written about, and I still intend to interview the chairwoman of the Ivory Coast union of 'pleureuses', or professional female mourners, one day.

Early morning

2011-07-21T09:08:00.002Z

Early morning in an unidentified village in northern Ivory Coast. Several women sat around a bowl of boiled peanuts, peeling shells. In keeping with village customs, one of the women brought out a plastic mug of well water and kneeled in submissive hospitality as she handed it to me. I took the smallest imaginable sip and gestured at the lime-sized nuts on the ground: what were they? She showed me a small cooking pot with fresh shea butter. There was the sound of clucking hens and the excited patter of the ladies. It was a perfect picture of peace of simplicity, as least to the wide-eyed white visitor. My Ivorian driver, who thinks of himself as a seasoned traveler, was more condescending: "Of course you can take their picture. They are idiots."

Looking for Gbagbo

2011-07-18T18:40:00.002Z

Chinese marketing meets the spirit of Latin-American idealism in Korhogo, a dusty provincial town with shoddy architecture, a bustling marketplace, and the pervading hum of motorbikes.

I want to become a decent photographer, but ...

2011-07-13T12:48:00.004Z

I am a writer of newspaper articles, a slave of form and format, and sometimes I am envious of the way photographers can work in countries they know next to nothing about as long as they capture the wounded, the dead, and the RPG’s. I know there is much more to photography than that – courage, persistence and technical dexterity, to name but a few skills -- but the fact remains that a refugee camp can make a photo story while a refugee alone hardly ever makes a newspaper story. Writers must include facts, experts, critics, and to me, every completed assignment is a reminder of how much information I had to leave out. I enjoy taking pictures, but am often disappointed with the results; I want to tell a story about human beings, but I struggle to explain the basics of daily life in words, let alone in images. Glenna Gordon’s incisive blog about photojournalism regularly discusses the perception and visualization of conflict in Africa, and she has posted work from professional photographers on Ivory Coast. Some pictures are inspiring, some are awe-inspiring, and some prompted me to think: “Hey, I can do that!”.

So I went through my own unused photographs and tried to stop criticizing myself for my poor technical knowledge and look objectively at the information they may or may not convey. And I realized they raise too many questions -- in my mind, at least.

Power has changed hands in Yopougon and the newly arrived fighters, giddy with the arrogance of victory, are openly debating whether they should kill the three boys on the ground. The two boys on the right deny they are pro-Gbagbo militias. The guy on the left is dehydrated and catatonic. When I look at this picture, I think about the fate of these kids -- surely, they are dead, but who were they?

A typical image of looting. The tragic detail of the broken Barbie doll. But maybe it was already broken before the house was looted, and sitting discarded in a corner when the mobs arrived?

The mass grave in an immigrant area of Yopougon attracted a lot of attention. The residents were angry and bitter and spoke vehemently of revenge. Then there is the boy with the hat. He is wearing cheap women's jewelry and a hat that is too big for him. Did he find it among the rubbish in the looted house of a dead neighbor?

Findings

2011-07-12T13:58:00.002Z

A carpenter in Bouaké has fallen from a rooftop and broken his neck. The friend who helped him secure the rooftop repair job -- in return for 15 percent of profits -- professes to be so sorry he wants to commit suicide. The corpse of a young man lies covered by black plastic at a roadside in Yopougon. A housemaid in Marcory who is preparing for catechism has woken up to find a miniature Koran in her room. The spiritual guide of a nearby mosque believes she will die or go insane if she does not convert to Islam. The girl says she prefers to stay a Christian and is reported to have cured her boss of his addiction to cigarettes. Health workers in public hospitals admit to being scared of the new security forces following an altercation in which military men injured several nurses for refusing to operate immediately on two comrades with bullet wounds. The government has concluded there is enough sugar in stock for the month of Ramadan. The minister of Youth Promotion denies having spent 90,000 euros on an official trip to South Korea to attend an international youth conference with a delegation of at least four people. The minister says he is “very worried about the future of the media in Ivory Coast”.

World Bank factoids on Africa

2011-07-08T15:15:00.004Z

* It takes 16.6 days average time to clear customs on direct exports in Cote d'Ivoire and 3.8 days in Gabon.

* Firms identifying corruption as a major constraint was highest in Côte d'Ivoire at 75.0 percent, whilst the lowest is Ghana at 9.9 percent.

* In 2010, starting a business in Guinea required 213 days for each procedure. It takes 3 days in Rwanda.

* The percentage of firms expected to give gifts to secure a government contract is highest in Congo Republic at 75.2 percent.

* Zimbabwe has the highest adult literacy rate at 91.2 percent. Mali and Burkina Faso have the lowest at 28.7 percent.

Compliments for Simone

2011-07-07T10:03:00.002Z

When a newspaper reporter gets out of the taxi that has dropped him in front of the house where Simone Gbagbo is being detained, the driver tells him: “I’m surprised that you come all the way from Abidjan for somebody we don’t care about.” Simone is kept prisoner in the northwestern town of Odienné, about a day’s drive from Abidjan, and contrary to what the taxi driver claims, the population hates her so much that the UN painstakingly hides her identity when she is taken out for a drive to avoid her getting lynched. “The resentment towards her is still very much alive,” the local UN representative tells the journalist.

Her jailers, however, are surprisingly positive. While she refused to meet the eyes of her guards during her first two weeks of detention, her attitude has radically changed. When she takes a break from her Bible reading sessions, Simone enjoys a game a Scrabble with her doctor. She has adapted so well she even eats the local dish kabato “not because she is forced to but because she likes it”, the reporter explains. Her jailers attribute this most remarkable transformation to the removal of objects that had been woven into her hair by a famous Beninese witch doctor. “Surely the voodoo fetishes in her hair predisposed her to doing evil things rather than good things,” says one of the military guards. “She was liberated when the fibers were removed from her head – fibers that in fact were human nerves. When she arrived, she saw us as the incarnation of the devil. Now she speaks with everybody. I can honestly say that fraternity is gradually taking precedence over adversity and hostility. She talks with us, she often teases us and she even gives us advice on how to handle our youthful age and our lives.”

Takoradi train station

2011-06-28T12:49:00.002Z

The man in the wheelchair used to work as a tailor in the Ivorian capital Yamoussoukro and spoke rudimentary French with a choppy Ivorian dialect. How he ended up in a wheelchair, I do not know for he seemed reluctant or incapable to explain it. The imposing Takoradi train station is no longer in use and its dark breezy hall and silent platforms serve as a sad reminder of the town's glory days. But the sleeping wagons are occupied by squatters, and the invalid beggars gather here at the end of the day to pray and sleep. Among them were two fat women with deformed legs who had traveled to Takoradi from the interior of the country. There are fewer cars in town than in the capital and hence more space at intersections for a person in a wheelchair.

Road trip to Ghana

2011-06-25T14:44:00.002Z

The twin cities of Takoradi and Sekondi in western Ghana used to be bustling port towns that thrived under British colonial rule. The British built post offices and sturdy seaside mansions, constructed a railway, and shipped timber and bauxite from the ports. After decades of neglect by the Ghanaian government, the discovery of a massive deep-water oil well has flushed Takoradi and its inhabitants with a newfound sense of importance. But the fishermen in the beautifully decaying town of Sekondi feel the oil is of no concern to them. "If we don't work, we don't eat," said the owner of a wooden vessel. "The oil jobs are only for educated people."

Rents in Takoradi have tripled since the foreign oil engineers began to arrive and Ghanaians with a job in the oil industry have learned to leave their company shirts at the office before they buy groceries in town. "We get charged double for everything if people spot the company logo," said a young woman. "Everybody thinks I am rich now." She loves her job for the training and benefits that it provides, but she still marvels at the strange habits of her overweight white bosses. She had noticed most whites like to smoke cigarettes, and gathered it is because they want to stay warm. "But it is always warm in Ghana, so I don't need it."

I took a picture of the happy fish statue years ago but over time I forgot where I had taken it, so it was a nice suprise to see it again as I got lost along the way to the fishing wharf. I asked a passer-by if he knew anything about this odd piece of artistry. "Our colonial masters put it there," he said. I doubt it.

Glum

2011-06-23T09:57:00.002Z

This glum woman gestured I must take a picture of her and it was only afterwards that I noticed her moustache. African women with body hair on the chest or chin are not all that unusual and they can still appear immaculately dressed; in some parts of the continent, apparently, tufts of hair on the chin are a sign of wisdom.

The end of the statues

2011-05-16T21:19:00.004Z

The statues Gbagbo erected across the city to celebrate the glorious superiority of Ivory Coast were, as it turns out, diabolical instruments to consolidate his grip on power. Human sacrifices are said to have been buried under the statues to cast a powerful magic spell on Gbagbo’s presidency, which of course his wife considered a god-given position no human being could take away. It is only when Ouattara’s troops smashed two of the biggest ‘monuments’ that they were able to break Gbagbo’s spiritually enhanced resistance and enter the hide-out under the presidential residence to arrest him. This is what one of Ouattara's soldiers told me, and he was not joking. Destroying the rest of the statues was one of the first acts of government Ouattara carried out before his inauguration. A bulldozer was removing the remainders of the Saint Jean roundabout today.

A tour of Yopougon

2011-05-14T12:31:00.004Z

Last week a tour of Yopougon left me sad and fearful -- after Gbagbo's capture on April 11, scores of people were killed in ethnic revenge attacks by militias. The devastation was heartbreaking. I stood at the edge of a mass grave, saw bloated corpses, drove past burned out slums and watched the new FRCI army haul half-naked alleged militias to jail. I also learned the term pro-Gbagbo militias used for burning people alive: applying article 125. Hundred CFA-francs for petrol, plus 25 CFA-francs for a box of matches. Northerners that were targeted by the militias say they are ready to apply article 125 on their executioners when they catch them. Yesterday I nervously went back to Yopougon, but I was glad to see life is slowly resuming. There are few young men about though. One mostly sees women, children and old people.

A new day -- but will it be bright?

2011-04-13T12:04:00.003Z

This is the first corpse I have seen during the crisis, and hopefully the last. It's also the first day I cautiously drove around the neighborhood after having been locked inside for nearly two weeks. Power has changed hands. Gbagbo is out, humiliated, defeated. Ouattara has finally managed to grab the presidential seat he has been eyeing since 1993. In the simplified language of the media, the power struggle was described as a bad guy vs. good guy narrative. I think there was definitely a bad guy, or rather, a stubborn and increasingly delusional leader, but the ‘goodness’ of his rival has yet to be proven. And the first signs are not encouraging. Ouattara started off in the worst imaginable conditions, his speeches lack compassion, and his FRCI army bears all the hallmarks of a rebel group. The FRCI is gradually gaining control over the city and seems to hunting for thieves and looters among its ranks. Neighborhood grocer Salif walked to the bakery this morning and was a witness to the execution of four “thugs” in military uniform who were about to drive off in a car without license plates. They were cornered by scores of more official-looking FRCI military who came racing past the corner and opened fire at the car. Salif was shaking his head in disbelief as he told me the story – he was still in shock. Three men were killed instantly and their bodies dumped in the FRCI truck. The fourth was still moving and left to die on the sidewalk. But killing thieves is a good thing, Salif believes. “Otherwise they kill us if they have a chance.” Later on, a spokesman for Ouattara confirmed that the Republican Forces are “trying to get our rogue elements under control”.

Something I wrote for a newspaper

2011-04-07T17:16:00.002Z

Last month I cursed the thick concrete walls of my bungalow as I tried to hang a picture on the living room wall. Hammers and nails were useless. Even the drill failed. Yesterday, as I ran to find shelter from bullets whizzing overhead, I was glad to know the concrete walls were offering relative safety. Abidjan has been under siege for almost a week now, and the fighting near my neighborhood has at times been so fierce I had to hide in the bathroom to wait it out. There haven’t been any gun battles in my street, but I live close enough to Gbagbo’s residence to get woken up by the sound of heavy artillery almost every day. A stray machine gun bullet pierced the neighbor’s metal garage door and lodged itself into his car. Another stray bullet tore through the living room wall of a family living two houses down the street.

Like most residents, I have been locked inside since last Thursday amid sporadic bursts of gun fire, the unnerving shocks of grenade explosions or the sound of helicopters circling over the city. When the shooting dies down, an eerie silence settles over the day, punctuated only by chirping birds. The Ouattara government has imposed a daytime curfew from noon. My friends have stopped calling because they have run out of phone credit, and as I have run out of phone credit myself, I have to use my boyfriend’s phone to find out what is going on elsewhere in the city. I am all too aware that I am relatively well off: I still have three kilos of rice, two bags of pasta, and six cans of tuna in the kitchen cupboard, and the watchman miraculously managed to find a crate of beer.

Things began looking dire after a power outage that lasted for almost three days, including one day without running water. Abidjan is a hot and humid place, and food left outside the fridge starts to decay almost immediately. We were still laughing when we rinsed the dirty dishes in the swimming pool, and my boyfriend managed to hook up his car battery to a small inverter to power our laptops and charge our phones. But we had forgotten to buy a torch light and the car battery finished quickly, leaving us with the worrying prospect of a complete communications blackout.

This morning, finally, the power came back. Having electricity again feels like an incredible luxury after two nights of treading carefully around a pitch-dark house. I’ve also found out why two lone gunmen were emptying their AK-47’s in my street last night, a deafening noise so scary I hunkered down beside the bed. A neighbor told me that Ouattara’s troops are in control of our area now, and they were ‘simply’ trying to ward off looters. These are small comforts in an absurd and unnecessary war that will mark Ivory Coast for years to come.

A stray bullet

2011-03-18T17:55:00.003Z

Dragged myself to the tennis club for the first time in weeks, mainly because I wanted to have a chat with two employees who have found temporary shelter at the club. S. fled Abobo, leaving everything behind, and W. fled Williamsville after a night and a day of machine gun fire. And guess what flew over the courts last night? This stray bullet, one of three, left a scratchy, pointed hole in the red concrete.

An explanation for heavy artillery

2011-03-16T20:51:00.002Z

S. observes everything from his wheelchair, and even when taxi’s and minibuses have stopped driving, he peddles quietly across the city on deserted roads. “I saw a body on the street yesterday,” he said. “It gave me a really bad feeling. I didn’t dare to look at it.” Weeks ago, S. drove down from his hometown Yamoussoukro to repossess an old battered taxi from a cousin in Abobo, the neighborhood that is now controlled by the so-called invisible commando. “You can see them alright,” he said cheerfully. “They are wearing very strange clothes. I had to pass at least 20 roadblocks to get to my apartment.” S. thought it safer to leave Abobo and move to a residential area in Cocody, where he knew a watchman who’d offer him a place to sleep. I told him to return to the relative safety of Yamoussoukro, but he can’t quite abandon the battered taxi just yet. S. ran a successful second-hand clothing store until the elections killed his business, and the taxi is keeping his hopes alive he’ll bounce back financially.

I’ve finally understood why the security forces are using rocket launchers and hand grenades: the invisible commando is said to be impervious to ordinary bullets, and heavy losses among the military serve as proof. If Kalashnikovs can't do the job, rocket-propelled grenades will. Or so the military believes.

Daylight robbery

2011-03-05T18:48:00.003Z

The muffled pop-pop-pop of faraway gunfire this morning, and within minutes a friend calls to tell me the residence of finance minister Charles Diby Koffi is being looted. He is watching members of the student union FESCI carrying chairs, airconditioners, ventilators, bed sheets, and pillows out of the house. The FESCI is a criminal organization that rents out student dormitories to police and prostitutes, and extorts protection money from nearby businesses and shopkeepers. Few Ivorians can tell the difference between the FESCI and the Young Patriots apart from the fact that the Young Patriots pretend to have a purely political agenda. An hour later, my friend calls again. “I saw a pick-up truck of the crime brigade (CECOS) carrying refrigerators, and several guys from the navy as well,” he said. “Oh, and the chairman of this fake association for toxic waste victims – he arrived with two jeeps.”

The “students” have so far looted eight houses and set two villas ablaze, all of them belonging to senior opposition figures who have been holed up in the Golf hotel since December. Security has been beefed up around the houses of other opposition figures, but if the army participates in the looting, there isn’t much they can do. A spokeswoman for Ouattara called it “the logic of chaos” of the Gbagbo regime – if we can’t rule, then nobody can.

Getting slightly frustrated

2011-03-04T22:10:00.004Z

The Ivory Coast crisis – and possible descent into civil war – has sparked heated debates on blogs, in newspapers, and among pundits abroad. Gbagbo’s supporters are especially vocal in slamming the foreign media for their supposed one-sidedness, and I have been insulted more than once for ignoring the “fact” that French President Nicolas Sarkozy is the cause of Ivory Coast’s woes. Blaming others for all your problems has never done anyone any good, and it’s particularly insidious in the case of Ivory Coast, where foreigners are taking the blame for a decade of political infighting and willful economic mismanagement. How blind can you be? And why am I being branded a Ouattara supporter for reporting on the brutality of the security forces, the murders, the accidental killings, the sloppy torture? Earlier in the week I had the chance to visit a small hospital, and found overwhelming evidence of the security forces using disproportional force against civilians. A staff member documents every injury with his digital camera; I saw picture after picture of people hit by hand grenades, rocket-propelled grenades, or tear gas grenades, and it was hugely unsettling. A day before, a 10-year-old boy had been brought in on the back of a moped. He had been hit by a bullet as a soldier of the Republican Guard fired in the air to scare onlookers away – and his guts were literally pouring out off the side of his chest. Violence breeds violence, and as both camps are sharpening their knives, the African Union looks on, indecisive, unable to agree on a firm resolution, unable to stop the abuse.

It's never been worse

2011-02-28T12:55:00.005Z

Nobody dares speak about ethnic clashes yet, but I would not be surprised if events like this become commonplace:

(Agence de Presse Ivoirienne) -- The head of the Burkinabe community in Loviguié (Agboville) has been burned alive by the town population, according to Thomas Choho, the local campaign director of Laurent Gbagbo.
A young man from the village, Patrice Béhira, was found in the commercial capital Abidjan with his throat slashed in circumstances that have not yet been clarified, according to Mr Choho. In response to this criminal act, the population of Loviguié set alight the local Burkinabé chief in protest at the “bad policies” of President Blaise Compaoré of Burkina Faso.
Mr Choho says that Burkinabe mercenaries are fighting alongside the New Forces rebel movement against military loyal to Gbagbo. He also says he has been receiving threats from opposition supporters.
It should be brought into memory that in January, the decapitated body of a Burkinabé woman was found on farm land near Loviguié.

While the Gbagbo camp is entrenched in the aggressive rhetoric of victimhood, blaming "the UN and France" for the woes that befall Ivory Coast, thousands of people are stuck in a neighborhood where armed groups are fighting each other with machine guns and heavy artillery. When the gunfire dies down, and they venture outside to try charge their phones or find food, they see decomposing bodies on the street. Neither the Red Cross nor the press is allowed into the area. Gbagbo's "security forces" (what a ridiculous name!) have barricaded the entire neighborhood with the help of youth militias. A civil war has begun, even if it's still small-scale, and the world is watching Ghadaffi.

Killings are not clashes

2010-12-24T12:57:00.002Z

The score so far: the security forces, sometimes accompanied by "heavily armed individuals claiming to be Liberian" are responsible for 173 extrajudicial killings, 90 cases of torture, and 471 illegal arrests since last week. Chief of the U.N. mission's human rights department Simon Munzu said yesterday he received on average 300 calls a day from people asking for assistance. “The official figures are in relation to the cases we have verified, but just on the bases of cases reported, there may be many more deaths,” Munzu said.

Contrary to what some media say, the killings in Ivory Coast are not the result of "clashes", "riots" or "post-election violence". They have nothing to do with the colorful pictures of angry boys at burning barricades which purported to depict the "atmosphere on the streets of Abidjan". The killings are being carried out by the country's security forces, at night, in impoverished neighborhoods where few outsiders are willing to go. In upper middle class areas like Cocody, where I live, most people are buying ice cream for their children at the supermarket.

No end in sight

2010-12-19T15:15:00.006Z

The threat of sanctions and worldwide condemnation of his strong-arm tactics have only strengthened Laurent Gbagbo’s resolve to stay in power. The sound of machinegun fire rang out through the neighborhood on Thursday as I was about to leave the house to cover the demonstration with which the opposition coalition wanted to force a breakthrough, maybe even a popular revolt. The result was tragically predictable: the police and the Republican Guard opened fire on protestors, made scores of arbitrary arrests, and threw up roadblocks across the city to stop people from moving about. The opposition had secretly counted on support from a silent majority within the armed forces, but so far their calculations proved wrong. Food and toilet paper is running out in the Hotel du Golf, where Ouattara, Bedié and Soro have been holed up since the beginning of the month. Yesterday Gbagbo ordered the United Nations to leave the country after accusing UN troops of supplying the rebels with weapons and the UN radio of “inciting hatred and civil disobedience”. I think Gbagbo would rather burn the city with everybody in it to the ground than step down.

A friend called to ask for help after police in his neighborhood had dragged about a dozen youth from their homes on Friday evening. They spent the night in a basement at police headquarters and who knows what happens to them if no one intervenes. Emergency services have counted 54 dead -- so far. On Wednesday evening, the watchman asked permission to take his pregnant wife to hospital because she was suffering severe chest pains. Her doctor said the delivery had to be induced right away. The next day, police injured so many protestors that hospitals could not cope, and the watchman was told to come back on Monday. Last night his wife delivered the baby in their rickety, unventilated house, and the baby died. They buried the body the same night. These are the silent victims of the dangerous illusions of one ruthless man.

Depressing propaganda

2010-12-05T21:01:00.002Z

I despise Ivorian state television (RTI) and the evening news did nothing to change my opinion. The propaganda is maddening. The anchorman said at least three times Gbagbo was inaugurated yesterday before we had to sit through the speech of Son Excellence Monsieur de la Republique. A young professor in a fancy brown suit came on to express his surprise at the unlawful interference of the United Nations, unlawful at least in the eyes of the presidential camp, and then we were treated to another mouthpiece of Gbagbo, self-proclaimed patriot Charles Ble Goude. He appealed for calm, which means Gbagbo is not yet prepared to mobilize his hooligans. I once had a friend at RTI who said everyone but her was utterly incompetent. She was a good journalist indeed, but had no qualms about propagating the Gbagbo regime once she became the mistress of his aide-de-camp. The question is, do the journalists at RTI believe in their lies, or do they say it because it's their job? One thing is clear: as long as RTI controls the airwaves, Gbagbo controls the population.

The day in pictures

2010-12-04T19:14:00.002Z

Youth burned tires and set up barricades in protest at Gbagbo's claim he has won the elections. "He has stolen the vote," they said.

Gbagbo was sworn in during a hastily organized ceremony. He said he wants to work with "all the countries in the world" as long as they respect Ivory Coast's sovereignty. Gbagbo received 46 percent of the vote, a score he reportedly did not expect. Gbagbo's ceremony was snubbed by western ambassadors.

Opposition leader Alassane Ouattara, who got 54 percent, also held a meeting and proclaimed himself winner. Ouattara is being supported by the UN, the US, the EU, and the African Union. Today Ivory Coast has two presidents. The population does not know about Ouattara's ceremony as he is completely barred from state television.

A fight at the electoral commission

2010-12-01T10:35:00.003Z

Not many events can match the absurdity of what happened at Ivory Coast's electoral commission last night. It was a sad and yet hilarious demonstration of the bullying tactics of Gbagbo's cronies, and a first sign of blind panic within the presidential camp. As a crowd of local and foreign journalists prepared to film the announcement of partial results, aides to the particularly crude Interior Minister Desire Tagro grabbed the results sheets from the hands of a dumbfounded commission spokesman and marched off in anger, saying the "proper procedure" had not been followed. Later on, as Tagro's secretary decided to hold his own press conference at the steps of the building to announce the results were invalid, the vice-president of the commission stepped in, drove the short stocky man into a corner, and used both hands to push the crowd of journalists down the steps. "You don't have the right to speak," he shouted at Tagro's man. "Shut up!" It was a long and eventful evening, and today will undoubtedly have more drama in store.

Rumors, rumors

2010-11-30T09:24:00.002Z

I’ve had to write so much about Ivory Coast I could not bring myself to repeat everything on this blog. It’s easy to get caught up in the Ivorian syndrome of nationalistic navel-gazing if you regularly watch state television or listen to the political heavyweights. One would think the whole world is holding its breath in anticipation of elections that will decide the fate of Africa. “If you only had the opportunity to travel,” I told a friend yesterday, “you’d see that Ivory Coast is not nearly as grand as your president makes it out to be.” It was a self-righteous and arrogant thing to say, maybe, for he has no money to feed his family, let alone travel abroad. But his narrow-mindedness – “Gbagbo wants peace, Ouattara wants war”—irritated me. The opposition has posted billboards asking people if they want more power cuts, more potholes, and hospitals where patients go to die. I asked him the same questions, but he still preferred to vote for a president who hails from his own region, likes to crack jokes, and speaks a simple language he can understand.

Making the rounds of the city on the slightly lethargic second-round day of voting, on Sunday, it became clear that many people are worried about fraud. Representatives of Gbagbo’s party had been seen carrying lists of voters names into the polling stations. A representative of the opposition said he had been offered money to sell unused voting bulletins to Gbagbo’s party by the end of the day. A voting station in Abobo barred local observers from watching the vote count, and the police inside the compound seemed anxious for me to leave (“Are you done yet?”).

A single gunshot rang through the darkness last night, reminding us to stay inside during the five-day nighttime curfew. The results are supposed to be announced today, but we are in Ivory Coast, and promises are rarely a commitment, but rather an indication of intent. Rumors are saying the opposition has won. Wait and see, as the Ivorians say.

Money and sex

2010-11-08T10:18:00.004Z

“The more you know, the less you file,” a fellow journalist quipped once, and a recent conversation with well-informed friends reminded me again of that indisputable truth. They described the appeal of Gbagbo’s nationalist message to impoverished urban youth; they went back in history to explain why Ouattara will always be seen as a stranger, an outsider; they knew of personal enmities, unexpected bonds of friendship, and who has slept with whom. Money and sex are the driving forces of Ivorian politics, one of them said jokingly. “Ivorians do not want a good technocrat to lead the country – they want somebody who has a sense of humor and knows how to bend the rules.” Ouattara, to them, made a crucial mistake in saying he wants to clean things up and get everybody back to work. “Ivorians are spoiled -- they don’t want to work. They want money.” Not that I can use any of it in a story. To my editors in the Netherlands, elections are a simple matter of candidates, voters, and ballot boxes, and eyes glaze over with lack of interest when I elaborate on the details of West African politics.

Watching state television

2010-11-03T16:00:00.005Z

Ivory Coast is in limbo. People are staying at home to wait for the results from Sunday’s vote. Last night the results from ten provinces were finally read out on state television, in between monotonous music videos and endless repeats of the evening news. By the time the electoral commission called it a day, at 3 in the morning, Laurent Gbagbo was slightly ahead of his main rival Alassane Ouattara. It remains a mystery why we had to sit through the night to hear the first results, but that’s the impenetrable logic of Ivorian officialdom.

Another thing I find difficult to understand is why people would vote for Gbagbo. Ivorians tend to choose someone of their own tribe, but the first results indicate that thousands of Ivorians have set tribal and religious loyalties aside to keep Gbagbo in power. His self-congratulatory speeches make my hair stand on end, and I would think that his indifference to corruption, police extortion and army brutality is enough to disqualify him as a leader. But that’s the point of view of the white man, said my friend F., arguing Gbagbo is not as unpopular as westerners think. “The question people ask themselves is: who can give us peace and stability? Put yourself in the shoes of a villager who has lost everything in the war. All he wants is peace. Remember how Liberians voted for Charles Taylor in the 1997 elections? Same thing: they wanted peace. Gbagbo did not start the civil war, even though he used the situation to his own benefit. He agreed to organize elections, he allowed his rivals to campaign nationwide, and he has adopted a conciliatory tone. This has struck a chord with many people. They think Ivory Coast will never have peace if Alassane Ouattara wins. He once famously said he would set the country on fire, and the Ivorians have never forgotten that.”

Free drinks, everybody

2010-10-29T20:10:00.005Z

Alain: "They are chanting the former ruling party song while using the name of Gbagbo. That's odd. They got it all wrong."
Koffi: "Nah. They just having fun. Yesterday they were walking around in Gbagbo T-shirts, today they are walking around in T-shirts of Bedie, and tomorrow they'll be cheering for someone else entirely."
Alain: "True. The election campaigns mean free T-shirts, free food and free drinks for everybody."
Koffi: "That's why you can't judge a candidate's popularity by the size of the crowd attending a rally. People come because they get stuff for free."
Alain: "Yeah, they take a T-shirt here and a T-shirt there, but once they are in the voting booth -- ha. They vote for the person they had in mind all along."

Five days to go before elections

2010-10-27T10:17:00.009Z

The European Union has sent 120 observers to monitor what are supposed to be Ivory Coast’s first free presidential elections since independence. They arrived yesterday, and I saw them chatting excitedly over cocktails in one of the city’s better hotels. In electoral observer mission standards, 120 is a lot, but in practical terms, it means only one observer per 84 voting stations.

In the evening, I called W. She had just gotten off the phone with a friend who runs a non-governmental organization. The friend, who is not Ivorian but hails from a different African country, had been contacted by a presidential advisor offering to provide voter cards to members of her organization. All are foreign nationals and therefore not eligible to vote.
“How many people are in your organization?” he asked.
“About a hundred,” she said.
“Well, we can give voter cards to everybody,” he said. “Even if you are a thousand.”

Laurent Gbagbo, so much is clear, is planning to rig the vote in his favor. It reminded me of what a taxi driver from Cameroon had told me when I was in Gabon earlier in the year. He gleefully recounted how he had been sent off to the polling station to vote for Ali Bongo of Gabon. Presidential strongmen had provided all the foreigners in his neighborhood with prefabricated voting bulletins, for who can tell the difference between an African from Cameroon and an African from Gabon? This is how Ali Bongo won the 2009 elections. And maybe this is how Laurent Gbagbo will win his elections.

And the farmer plods on

2010-10-23T17:29:00.002Z

One week before the much-awaited presidential elections -- elections which cynics like me did not think would happen this year -- the country is plastered with campaign posters. Ivory Coast has never seen free and fair presidential elections, and there is an almost palpable sense of anticipation and excitement. I wanted to take a picture of a cunningly deceptive billboard depicting President Laurent Gbagbo in front of the Laurent Gbagbo Bridge, which looks exactly like the Golden Gate Bridge and does not yet exist. The bridge is part of a controversial multi-million dollar port extension project to be carried out by one of his architect friends. To his opponents, the poster clearly demonstrates that the president is a liar and a crook. I am posting a picture of a cocoa farmer instead, a happy old man who said he had no time for the political fanfare for he is not allowed to vote anyway. If he could, he would vote for the northerner Alassane Ouattara, because "we have not seen him yet. Gbagbo, we have seen him. He has been here for ten years and has not done anything for us. Ten years is not ten days, eh? If he could not do it in ten years, he is never going to do it. Il n'a qu'a quitter."

Random thoughts while in the grips of a jetlag

2010-10-15T16:24:00.002Z

West Africa dropped out of existence along the deserted roads of Nevada, the rolling pine-tree hills of northern California, and the windy streets of Winnipeg. I found one similarity, though, with African land issues and Canadian land issues, reflected in the apparent hostility between white Canadians and the so-called aboriginals, or native peoples; the natives are seen as lazy and undisciplined because they earn an easy income through land ownership, while the Anglophone immigrants pride themselves on their frugality and diligence in farming. Being away for a month was a stark reminder of the irrelevance of African politics to the western world, and even if I had wanted to make a case for what I’m doing over here, I would have been hard-pressed to convince an audience of the significance of Ivorian elections. Still, we were hailed as instant celebrities in a family diner in northern California, where an 8-year-old girl called Kimberley shyly enquired about giraffes. I am determined to resume my book project, though, especially after reading deservedly glacial reviews of a recently published book by self-styled “Alpha male” Tim Butcher, a colleague I have never had the opportunity to meet. They reminded me once again that Africa is a place where the western imagination runs wild, a continent that will only pique the curiosity of indifferent outsiders through stories of murder, rape or blood diamonds. In a review for the Independent, writer Aminatta Forma points out: “No sooner does a Western journalist set foot in Africa, than they are tripping over cannibals, witch doctors and naked voodoo warriors.” A review in the Spectator made me laugh as well: “Like many journalists, Butcher enjoys a sense of his own self-importance. (‘I can clearly remember receiving my first death threat,’ he tells us, grandly.) Most of the world’s recent ‘major conflicts’ have been reported by Butcher (so he tells us). During his 20-year stint on the Telegraph he used to commute to the newspaper’s London office by motorbike (as opposed to up the Thames by canoe), and clearly he thrilled to his duties. Reporting from hot spots abroad is not such a challenge, though, if you have few responsibilities at home: just put it on the plastic and leave the answer machine on." Yes, the best way to get listened to is to tell hair-raising stories of deadly mosquitoes and cannibalistic presidents. I should have learned that by now. But I just can’t do it.

A brief word from Disneyland

2010-09-26T05:58:00.004Z

"Las Vegas is soooo much fun," said the mother of the groom at the wedding party. "It's Disneyland for adults." It was fun, but not the way I had imagined; the sight of thousands of brittle pensioners mechanically and joylessly pushing buttons on slot machines was enough to put me off from gambling. I donated a symbolic dollar to a slot machine, skipped the famous buffets, and cringed at the sight of a fake Parisian street, American-style. On the sidewalks, Mexicans were handing out advertisements for hookers, and near the malls, red-faced beggars and luckless gamblers aggressively asked for change.

After that, the drive continued to Salt Lake City, a Disneyland of sorts for Mormons. The smooth asphalt roads and the abundance of convenience stores are a blessing. "Whereyafrom?" everybody asks, all the time.

Hail the men in uniform

2010-09-13T11:23:00.003Z

Ivory Coast was supposed to have presidential elections in 2005 and the deliberate delays in organizing the polls have resulted in widespread cynicism. But now, for the first time in five years, there are signs that the president is serious about the elections. Not because he travels the countryside promising roads, hospitals, electricity and health care insurance, and not because he has finally approved the voter list. No, he recently promoted more than a dozen army and police officers to the rank of general, including a bully of a police chief charged with fighting crime in Abidjan. And the message he is sending out to the men in uniform is crystal clear: they are there to keep him in power. "We ask the police," he said, using the majestic 'we' instead of 'I', "to subdue all those who are against the republic. You have enemies -- I say enemies, not opponents -- and the enemies are all those who want to disrupt the elections. You are not a judge. You are a combatant. Your role is to obey, not to think. If there is damage, it is up to the judges to evaluate. If there are mistakes, we will solve them. But you must realize that you are here to suppress all those who oppose peace."

Dictators and generals are a West African disease. I am taking a break from it all until the first week of October.

Cocoa corruption 101

2010-09-08T07:43:00.005Z

Once upon a time, a man was invited to a lavish New Year’s party organized by one of the cocoa barons of Ivory Coast. The baron had built three villa’s with cocoa money, and each villa was styled in a different theme (‘classic’, ‘modern’, etc). The affable baron was also known for proudly displaying a grand piano he didn’t know how to play. After innumerable glasses of champagne, the man staggered home, but not before the host had handed him an envelope to thank him for his presence. The envelope contained the equivalent of €300. They had never met before “so the amount I received was probably low”, the man said. At least 50 other guests attended the party, which meant the host had spent at least €15,000 on thank-you notes alone.

Ivory Coast is the world’s biggest producer of cocoa beans and the national cocoa industry is the biggest facilitator of corruption. Today, 24 former executives of state-controlled cocoa agencies stand trial on charges of fraud and embezzlement. The host of the lavish New Year’s party was Henri Amouzou, chairman of the board of the cocoa development fund FDPCC. He also served as administrator of a company selling overpriced jute bags to the fund. The corruption probe started in 2007 and resulted in a confidential report that was published, in part, by a local newspaper until the state prosecutor detained the editor of the newspaper on charges of theft.

The details that can still be found online make for interesting reading material. “Between March and April 2007, Henri Amouzou received €212,000 from the board of management to go round and raise awareness about the regeneration of cocoa. The problem is the tour never occurred. Between 2004 and 2008, so-called legal costs incurred by the fund amounted to a staggering €2 million. In January 2008, the management board mandated the executive secretariat to reimburse expenses advanced by Amouzou – thus, the payment came after the legal costs had already been incurred and, curiously, it does not state the amount he ‘lent’ to the fund."

Investigators also discovered that the FDPCC lawyer had transferred €305,000 to Amouzou’s personal account in Monaco. "Worse, they established that the FDPCC had 19 ghost accounts controlled by Amouzou. One such account, entitled ‘cocoa fund’, was opened in June 2003 with a deposit of €4.5 million, debited 94 times for amounts larger than €30,000, and closed in 2006.”

Newspaper advertisement

2010-09-03T11:32:00.005Z

KONÉ LANCINÉ SOUNOUKOU, TRADITIONAL HEALER AND CLAIRVOYANT
"I help women and men"

What is your specialty?
"Sexual weakness, premature ejaculation, gonorrhea, hernia, bedwetting, epilepsy, insanity, development of the male genitals, shrinkage of the female genitals, powder to attract men or women, the ring to protect against witchcraft, poison and accident control, the ring for good luck at work and in business, etc."
Shrinking genitals is one of the services you render?
"Yes, I can narrow the female genitals properly and fairly quickly. For those who have never given birth but who have had sex, I can almost restore their virginity."
They say that you are able to grow male genitals, buttocks and breasts.
"Yes, I develop genitals, breasts and buttocks to the size that suits my clients. It is up to the customer to choose. These body parts may begin to grow immediately after treatment in my office until the appropriate size for the customer has been reached."
He also treats:
Itching, diabetes, heart aches, head aches, rheumatism, elephant foot, etc.

Contact details:
cell 05 88 44 65 / 07 44 63 98
Healer Moussa Kone at the secretariat:
cell 02 66 63 76
Healer Ibrahim at the secretariat:
cell 05 28 39 86
Abobo, near the roundabout, 15 metres to the right of the orange-white-green flag on the appartment building.
NB : home visits possible

Looney tunes

2010-08-27T19:06:00.003Z

A mysterious voice has been calling out over the neighborhood for more than two months. Now that it is cool and windy outside, and I can leave my office window open, a drawn-out but persistent whoa-whoa-ho comes floating in from morning till dusk. A friend of mine has to endure the cries of a lunatic who lives in her apartment building; it’s a young man with apparent schizophrenia who was locked away in the country’s only psychiatric hospital until his family declared him cured by prayer. Sometimes he keeps her awake until dawn, alternately singing rap songs at the top of his lungs and shouting into the night that he is going to “kill everybody”. The strange cries in my neighborhood are not as unsettling, but they are irritating nonetheless. I asked Kader, the day watchman, about it, and he said it’s street children who live in a makeshift hut on a nearby hill. I asked Amidou, the night watchman, and he agreed it’s the street children, and thinks they are praying. “Everybody is talking about it,” Amidou said. “One of the neighbors wants to get the police to tell them to stop.” That was a month ago. The prayers, or whatever they are, continue to today.

The village in the valley

2010-08-19T19:47:00.005Z

Walking the dog at dusk, I used to look longingly at the dusty red footpath leading towards a village in the valley below our fancy hilltop neighborhood. I'd hear the distant sound of cheerful chaos, and see soft plumes of smoke rising from the banana trees. Up here, we have nervous guard dogs and the occasional clatter of metal gates. Down there, the world came alive.

Last week, I finally had an excuse to go to Blingue, formerly known as Petit Ouaga. The village dates from the mid-1970s and provides the cooks, the watchmen, the gardeners and the drivers for our neighborhood. The houses have no toilets, and many of them lack tap water; the village chief estimates the average income to be around 80 euros a month, ten times less than the average rent of a villa up here. Most residents are immigrants or the sons and daughters of immigrants.

This man offered me a cup of vinegary millet juice after my talk with the village elders; he sat chatting with friends under a cocoa tree in the village square. It would be too easy to romanticize life in this shipshod African village, but this is Abidjan, too: rich and poor live practically side by side.

The chimp island

2010-08-16T12:11:00.004Z

Weekends. I miss being able to go to the movies, to sit unnoticed in a cafe, to see a photography exhibit or to find objects of beauty -- clean modern buildings, designed interiors, soft elegant clothes, a perfect cappuccino in a pretty cup. But here we have space, trees and warm weather, and I've learned to take pleasure in small things like taking a wobbly canoe to get within touching distance of a family of chimpanzees who live on a small green island near the town of Grand Lahou. For our entertainment, the boy with the canoe threw bananas into their outstretched hands. He did not seem to know why the monkeys were living on the island, and obviously did not feel obliged to know -- curiosity is not a virtue. His task simply consisted of peddling the canoe and throwing bananas, and that he did well enough for us, happy with our Saturday afternoon outing, to pay him two euros.

The mysterious monument business

2010-08-09T18:39:00.004Z

Besides potholes and outsized billboards advertising a plethora of mobile phone companies, the city authorities have bestowed a dozen or so cheapish statues on Abidjan over the course of the past five years. The statues are not called statues but monuments, undoubtedly because they celebrate a rather lofty notion of post-independence Ivory Coast. A triumphal arch of white elephants near the airport symbolizes the country's hospitality; in the neighborhood Cococy, a group of people holding up the geographical contours of the country reminds us of national pride and patriotic fervor. Some local mayors have even gone as far as to bluntly create roundabouts by dumping statues smack in the middle of an intersection -- a particular eyesore marking the end of colonization has been causing endless traffic jams in Yopougon since construction began on the faux-marble mausoleum. The African woman pictured above -- I surmise it's got something to do with peace and abundance -- is the most elegant statue by far, even though functioning traffic lights would have served the local population better. According to public records, the costs of five monuments range between €100,000 to €250,000 each, expenses for maintenance of damaged pedestals or knocked over fencing not included.

Stop the press: miss Campbell fears for her safety

2010-08-05T09:46:00.004Z

I was trying to ignore the "the beauty and the brute" stories but the headlines are inescapable: Naomi Campbell has told the war tribunal for Sierra Leone she received diamonds from then Liberian President Charles Taylor. Having to come to The Hague to discuss a gift she allegedly rejected is a "big inconvenience" for her. As if we are supposed to care. "When prosecutors get desperate, bring on the supermodels," writes G. Pascal Zachary, the only voice of reason in this maddeningly ludicrous media event:

"Campbell’s legal street-smarts seems essential to the case against Taylor. After spending tens of millions of dollars on capturing, incarcerating and compiling an air-tight case against the deposed Liberian dictator, the forces of good in African affairs now seem to be placing their bets partly, if not wholly, on the sworn testimony of a British beauty best known for her baroque temper tantrums. The only development more unlikely than Naomi Campbell influencing the course of human-rights law is Naomi Campbell visiting Malawi in the company of Madonna for the purposes of adoping a baby!"

Well said.

The sacred cow that must never be killed

2010-08-02T11:14:00.003Z

The request to “write something” about the millennium development goals arrived in my mailbox as I finally sat down to read Lords of Poverty, a bestseller about greed, stupidity and hypocrisy in the business of aid. Even though this scathing critique of development aid and the freewheeling expatriates making a generous living off of it was first published in 1991, it has lost none of its urgency. In September, the UN is convening a multi-million dollar summit in New York to ‘accelerate progress towards the goals’ and raise ever-larger funds by flying in ‘eminent personalities’ such as Paul Kagame of Rwanda and Bob Geldof. The report published alongside the announcement of the summit, however, makes clear that the event is likely to be just another “ritual celebration of polite inaction”. In 2009, donors disbursed a whopping 120 billion dollars in official development aid. Despite that figure, and despite the UN’s high-minded millennium goals, the number of undernourished people has increased, not decreased; more than 50% of Africans live on less than 1.25 dollar a day; the actual number of people living in slums is growing and will continue to rise; and an estimated 2.6 billion people lack access to sanitation, a number that is projected to grow to 2.7 billion by 2015.

If aid works, Lords of Poverty author Graham Hancock argues, then presumably the poor should be in much better shape than they were before they first began to receive it in the 1960s. “But the ugly reality is that most poor people in most poor countries most of the time never receive or even make contact with aid in any tangible shape or form: whether it is present or absent, increased or decreased are thus issues that are simply irrelevant to the ways in which they conduct their daily lives.” It’s very hard to disagree.

Finding miss Daisy

2010-07-30T15:29:00.003Z

This thing nearly ran under my wheels as I drove home. When I stopped, it hid under the car and sat miaowing. Now we will have to see whether it can make friends with the very excitable and very large Bull Mastiff.

The oldest trade in the world

2010-07-28T16:55:00.003Z

A. was the prettiest of three young prostitutes I interviewed for a newspaper feature, and also the most down to earth. She started working the streets of Yopougon at the age of 17 after a dispute with her stepmother, and gave birth to a baby girl about a year later; now 20 years old, she shares an apartment with her boyfriend in a different part of town and spends most of her income on clothes. She charges the equivalent of €2 for a fuck – no kissing, no fondling, just rapid intercourse in an alley or an additional charge of €0.60 for a nearby hotel room, to be paid for by the client. A. smokes, drinks and is illiterate, but her childlike frankness and deadpan answers betrayed an unexpected intelligence. The two others prostitutes, both pretty, curvaceous girls in their early twenties, were far more uncomfortable discussing their trade. One told me she disliked it so much she often wondered in despair whether she had been cursed.

Sex has become as banal as smoking a cigarette, a friend said when he guided me to what is known here as a 'fuck hotel'. The poor neighborhoods churn out a limitless supply of pretty young females, and the inconspicuous hôtels de passe may well be the most profitable branch of the national sex industry – rooms are available by the hour, even if the actual deed takes just ten minutes. There are no street signs to indicate these hotels, which are often unmarked. Because of a now faded fascination with Japanese ‘love hotels’, I had always wanted to visit a fuck hotel in Abidjan, but a fancy one with porn, free condoms and a secluded parking space to prevent customers from bumping into each other. In Yopougon, my enthusiasm was immediately squashed as I stepped into the depressing squalor of a sixth-rate room with a yellowish mattress on a square concrete bed, dark brown walls, a rusty ventilator and a dirty toilet without a seat. Making love? Here? I now understood why the manager said, with a laugh, that some of his customers are done in five minutes.

Nigerian headaches

2010-07-01T16:55:00.003Z

The decision by Nigeria's president to withdraw the national football team from international competitions following their much-criticized performance in the World Cup has sparked a heated debate among football fans. The president, Goodluck Jonathan, also dissolved the Nigeria Football Federation and deployed police to bar employees from entering its offices. The problem with Nigerian football is "structural", the chairman of the committee that recommended the suspension said: “People have had a heart attack because of Nigerian football. We want to reorganise and get it back to what it used to be when it was the pride of the nation."

Will this kill Nigerian football, as some fans fear, or is it the best solution Jonathan has taken since assuming office, as others say? A surprisingly large number of Nigerians seem to agree with the rather drastic move. "It provides the perfect opportunity to instill discipline into the Nigerian psyche," said one happy blogger. His reaction reminded me of a Nigerian joke C. sent to my mailbox recently. Countless websites are devoted entirely to Nigerian jokes, and I have already written about Nigerian humor. But this one I particularly liked, so here goes:

Gabriel came to the Lord and said, "I have to talk to you. I have some Nigerians up here in heaven who are causing problems. They are swinging on the Pearly Gates, my horn is missing, and they've got Maggi sauce all over their robes. Some folk are walking around with one wing. Others aren't even wearing their halos, saying it doesn't fit with their hairstyles."

The Lord said, "I made them special, as I did you, my angel. Heaven is home to all my children. If you really want to know about problems, let's call the devil."

The Devil answered the phone. "Hello? What the...!! Hold on one minute." He then returned to the phone and said, "Hello Lord, what can I do for you?"

"Tell me what kind of problems you are having down there," the Lord said.

"Wait one minute," the devil said, and put the Lord on hold.

After five minutes he returned to the phone, and said: "Okay, I'm back. What was the question?"

The Lord said: "What kind of problems are you having down there?"

The devil said "Man, I don't belieee.....hold on, Lord". This time the devil was gone for 15 minutes.

The devil returned and said, "I'm sorry Lord, I can't talk right now. These Nigerians put the fire out, and now they are trying to install air conditioning!"

Chicken

2010-06-30T13:15:00.004Z

The butcher at the supermarket is always so kind to include every last bit when I order a chicken, chopped and intestines removed please. But even after seven years in West Africa, there are still some things I, unlike the grateful watchman, rather not eat.

What to make of The Monument

2010-06-25T15:24:00.003Z

The monument meant to celebrate Africa is taller than the Statue of Liberty and cost about 20 million dollars. I visited it yesterday, losing count of the steps on my way up. I was disappointed to find the museum closed and an insipid beige plaque on the wall unable to instill the Soviet-style structure with meaning: President Wade of Senegal exhorts the youth "to think of all those who have lost their liberty or their lives for the rebirth of Africa". Like French presidents and the costly, awe-inspiring museums they build as their mandate reaches an end, Abdoulaye Wade clearly wants to leave a legacy. The difference, however, is that Wade will not relinquish power easily. As I walked down, I saw the North Korean labourers who put up the statue squatting in a narrow strip of shade, looking tired and sweaty in their blue overalls. The Senegalese boys said the statue was "very beautiful".

Stony-faced Senegalese customer service

2010-06-23T21:31:00.003Z

“Good morning, Madame. I hope you slept well. You need to pay a deposit for the room please.”
“Good morning. Sure, no problem.”
“There is a slight problem, actually. You made a reservation for a single room, but we have put you in the mini suite. All our single rooms are booked. So you have to pay 70 euros instead of 40 euros.”
“That’s a huge difference. Why didn’t the receptionist tell me last night?”
“I’m afraid she forgot.”
“Can we make an arrangement? I am not really prepared to pay this much for the room. She should have told me before I checked in.”
“I am sorry Madame, but didn’t you notice that the room is bigger than usual?”
“Yes, I did, but nobody told me anything, so I didn’t think twice.”
“You could have told us this morning that the room was big.”
“No, it was your responsibility to warn me. Can’t we agree on a lower price?”
“Sorry, Madame.”
“Would you mind asking your boss?”
“He will not agree to lowering the price.”
“Hm. Okay. I will check out tomorrow, then.”

Hey you! Fuck you! Don't pepe here!

2010-06-17T09:44:00.002Z

In my mind I have designed a series of stamps that is emblematic of Ivory Coast. These are the images I want to use: a dark-faced policeman with puffy cheeks and a green plastic whistle between his teeth, ready to harass traffic; a parked orange taxi with a pissing taxi driver next to it; a farmer’s wife with an axe balanced on her head; a young man with fake Gucci sunglasses who happily holds up a bottle of Flag beer; and a young woman in a tight T-shirt sitting at an informal phone booth, or cabine.

I thought of my imaginary stamps yesterday when I saw a young man pissing on the street. Pissing men are a revolting fixture of the Abidjan cityscape, but this one was different: he pissed as he walked, his penis exposed, legs slightly bent in what may have been an attempt to avoid his sloppy sprinkle.

A new well-intentioned project

2010-06-15T12:06:00.002Z

Whether I believe in development aid, charity and other well-intentioned projects or not, they somehow seem to come my way these days. Weeks after the little brother saga, I received a reaction on a newspaper story I published last year about a graduate in economics who has been unemployed for five years. Armand scrapes by on handouts from friends and illegally shares a room on the university campus that is so narrow that one mattress has to be placed upright on the balcony during the day. He is one of tens of thousands of Ivorian university graduates who lack cunning and connections to obtain a job, and like them he spends his days in a cybercafé looking for ideas, inspiration and opportunities.

When I met him, he had just broken up with his girlfriend because he realized he could not take care of her the way she hoped he would. His girlfriend was the eldest child in her family, and had come under increasing pressure from her parents since she had a boyfriend. In Ivory Coast, men are supposed to pay for a girl’s expenses, ranging from the frivolous -- perfume and hair extensions – to the more serious, such as gifts for the parents back home. “I can’t even provide for myself, let alone a girlfriend,” Armand said with a shrug of resignation. A compassionate reader in the Netherlands hopes that Armand can manage a small microcredit scheme he plans to set up with private funds. I’ve put them in touch and am crossing my fingers the project will be viable enough for Armand to get out of his dead-end situation. Writing this is also an opportunity for me to post this striking picture of Armand. It was taken by Ky Chung, an avid reader of my blog and a friend whom I will sorely miss when he leaves Abidjan for good at the end of the month.

Rainy season

2010-06-10T16:37:00.003Z

She stopped at the corner grocery shop to seek shelter from the heavy rain, and fell asleep on the wooden bench outside. She stirred briefly when a passerby bought a cigarette and lit up; she coughed, smacked her lips, and slept on. The elderly sales woman hawking cheap umbrellas undoubtedly did a brisker business today: the watchman bought a wine red umbrella for the equivalent of two euros.

Drowning in a sea of dark-blue suits

2010-05-27T08:25:00.003Z

Here is my favorite picture from China, not taken by me, but by Alexander Lloyd, a photographer based in Guangzhou.

Earlier this month I took on an assignment to help cover the annual meeting of the African Development Bank in Abidjan. I have spoken to some interesting people but feel way out of my depth when interest rates, central bank policies and macro-economic bubble theories creep into the conversation. Hotel Ivoire, a moldy and endearingly old-fashioned monument from the country's golden days, has been turned into a bland conference center where hundreds of men in dark blue suits mill around with an inflated sense of self-importance. The AfDB had its headquarters in Abidjan until a surge of anti-French sentiments drove most expatriates out of the country, but the government now desperately wants the bank to return. By bullying the bank into holding its meeting here, the government is trying to prove that Ivory Coast is as gloriously stable as it was in the eighties.

Homosexuality condemned, again

2010-05-21T13:08:00.003Z

Cheap copies of movies about sex, war, and random atrocities sell like hotcakes in West Africa, but the day I sang the praise of Brokeback Mountain as a way of making conversation, the response was cold as ice. “As soon as I understood that it was a movie about disgusting gay motherfuckers, I threw the DVD out of the window as far as it would fly,” a friend snorted. “No way in hell I’m going to watch that. Damn gays make me puke.” I refrained from saying that he sounded like the closet gay marine in American Beauty.

There is a street in Abidjan where transvestites sell their bodies at night, and it’s locally known as ‘snake street’ in reference to the psst-psst call of the prostitutes. Selling sex, even by men, is trivialized; police extortion is tolerated; and theft by politicians shrugged off. But nobody ever stands up for homosexuals, who are unanimously despised with a backward, hate-filled bitterness. Following a similar verdict in Senegal last year, it comes as no surprise that a judge in Malawi has sentenced a gay couple to 14 years in prison on charges of unnatural behavior. "I will give you a scaring sentence so that the public be protected from people like you,” the BBC reported the judge as saying. I once pitched a story to my newspaper about homosexuality in Africa. “Nah," my editor said. "Too trivial."

Last pictures from China

2010-05-17T16:44:00.002Z

Several weeks ago, an engineer in Ivory Coast told me how the Chinese do business in Africa. One of their strategies of persuasion is using flimsily clad female account managers to negotiate contracts in an apparent bid to play into the stereotype of the sex-obsessed African male. These young women invariably wear hotpants or miniskirts, and they never fail to cause a stir in his office for hotpants are worn only by hookers in this country. In China, hotpants are everywhere, and they make the women look doll-like and irritatingly girlish, not sexy. Someone -- I do not remember who -- said Chinese women prefer to show off their legs because they are generally flat-chested, so I couldn't help noticing the perky oversized breasts on the mannequins, and I was left wondering whether the Chinese male is obsessed with breasts after a taxi driver suddenly put his hand on mine, and laughed in my face like a freak.

Nooo

2010-05-10T18:03:00.005Z

The shopkeepers think that Europeans are too polite to negotiate, and they turn their head with an exaggerated drawn-out 'no' to feign shock when I tell them how much I am prepared to pay. As soon as an African walks in, the shopkeeper grabs his calculator and back and forth it goes, the Chinese rapidly tapping in one price and the African, slow and indifferent, his or hers. I can see why many West Africans feel at home here but I was still slightly annoyed to run into a haughty Senegalese who thought it necessary to tell me that China is "so much better than Europe".

Marble and massage chairs

2010-05-09T07:09:00.004Z

A long day of waiting around at the parking lot of a monstrously big five-storey wholesale department store that sells every piece of furniture ever printed in a European catalogue, and more. It was called the Louvre and boasted marble pillars and massage chairs, a noisy fountain in the main hall, and a stiff restaurant upstairs; except for the cheapish grandeur and the sad lack of imagination, there wasn't much Chinese about it. Guangzhou is a most amazing megacity fueled by global capitalism, but its salesgirls and waiters and hairdressers and truck drivers look and behave like they all come from the same mold, as if they have been produced in the same factory. "Despite their economic power, I don't think the Chinese will be number one in the world," said one expat who has lived here for five years. "They don't want to be the best; they want to be average. They don't want to stand out because it will disrupt the harmony of society. They are not insulted when you call them mediocre. For them, average is good."

Chinese consider it a sign of weakness to show happiness or anger, and food and work are their main sources of pleasure. Life suddenly and briefly grinds to a halt at noon; shopkeepers sit hunched over bowls of rice and will look up only when they have finished. The photographer who tagged along today is a Colombian married to a Chinese scientist. He met her in the US but noticed she became 'very Chinese' after moving back. "After one year of marriage, I asked my wife what she thought was the best and the worst from that year," he said. "I won't tell you what she thought was best, but I'll tell you what she thought was worst: the fact that I do not allow her to work on Sundays."

Gulliver in Guangzhou

2010-05-05T21:28:00.004Z

Had I paid more attention, I would have known that blogsites and Facebook are not accessible in China. Do people care about politics? Do they have time to think about abstract things like democracy? In this gigantic overcrowded city the shops stay open seven days a week, 14 hours a day. The salesgirls get one day off every month. Guangzhou is nothing like I had imagined; it's much bigger and much cosier I thought; the cosiness probably being due to the fact that the tiny Chinese do not require a lot of personal space.

Clothes and accessories are the lifeblood of Guangzhou. Two categories of African traders regularly travel here: the big bosses who go straight to the factories and order containers full of consumer goods without as much as setting foot in the city center, and the small business owners who fill up their suitcases or ship a sizeable amount of watches and handbags back home by plane. The latter category consists mostly of women, and they like to hang around a couple of days to explore the city and buy some more. Guangzhou organizes trade fairs at least three times a year, attracting buyers from all over the world. I saw Indians, Italians, Brazilians and lots of Arabs, and I met F. who flew in from the Comores to buy furniture and industrial fridges. F. is an impeccably dressed high-heeled lady with Dolce & Gabbana glasses -- real or fake, it's impossible to tell -- who used to shop in Dubai but now prefers China for its stupefying variety of choice. Today she negotiated with the representative of a yeast factory and briefly considered importing condensed milk until she realized the label was going to be printed in Chinese, and who wants to buy milk from China?

After lunch, I went to the clothes market, alone. Thousands of wholesalers display their goods under harsh neon lights in shops as big as a shoebox; thousands of diminutive salesgirls are packing, unpacking, gossiping, playing with their mobile phones. Some people look at me in amazement and suppress a laugh; I am a giant to the Chinese. I walked into what looked like a market hall for watches, bought three shiny silver Mont Blanc pens, felt dizzy from the lights and the elevator music and the crowds, stepped outside, and realized this market hall was just one in an entire neighborhood crammed with markets for glittery fake watches.

2010-05-02T10:43:00.003Z

The new Ivorian driver's license is more secure than my pink Dutch license as it requires a blood test, an eye test, a fingerprint and a residence permit. All this has to be done in a shabby office bustling with middlemen, nurses and indifferent civil servants, most of them young. From the equipment required to make this credit card-size piece of plastic, it's clear that somebody is making a lot of money, and that somebody is most likely the government minister who has awarded the contract to the French company producing it. The new license costs about 60 euros, and it helps to pay at least double that amount to obtain it within a week and make sure one's file doesn't get "lost". I'm lucky that C. paid a middleman on my behalf, a jovial man with grey stubbles who suggested I use fake glasses when I realized I had forgotten my own pair after failing the eye test.

I wanted to write about this earlier but I had blogger's block; I was caught up in getting a visa for China, trying to sell story ideas from a country that no one is really interested in anymore, and not getting frustrated over power cuts. So today I'm off to Guanghzou, inshallah, where I will meet African businessmen and -women exporting Chinese consumer goods to the continent.

Sailing under a grey sky

2010-04-12T10:51:00.002Z

The sky has been dirty white for almost a year, with low heavy clouds and a metallic grey sun. It's hot and humid and hopelessly dull, and it would be the worst climate imaginable if I wasn't already used to it. This picture is a fairly accurate portrayal of the weather we saw the weekend before last during a wonderful sailing trip on the lagoon. Ivory Coast's lagoon stretches about one hundred kilometers from east to west, and apart from the occasional dug-out canoe there is barely a boat around. We spent three full days on the lagoon and saw only one fellow traveler, a rotund wooden cargo ship carrying charcoal. Among the people we met were the children at Cow's Island, a tiny island planted with coconut trees and inhabited by cows, pigs and a solitary Beninese family of six.

Bonjour Papa

2010-04-07T19:03:00.004Z

“Bonjour papa, there are several things weighing on my heart that I need to tell you about.”

Thus begins a long and intimate letter that I accidentally discovered on a computer in the neighborhood cybercafé. I was not meant to read it but curiosity got the better of me as I sat waiting for a document from the printer and absent-mindedly scrolled through the list of visa applications and porn pictures left by previous customers. The title -- Bonjour papa-- fascinated me. I found the story of a 21-year-old Ivorian girl called Flora who has grown up with her mother in France and returns to Ivory Coast to spend three months with her father, his new wife, and their three children. An African story, perhaps, because of the accusations of witchcraft; but mostly, a sad story of loneliness, rejection, and disappointment.

Flora starts with explaining something her father already knows: she no longer gets along with her mother. She hopes to get reacquainted with her father, but when she lands at Abidjan airport, he is not there to pick her up, and she has to spend the night at the house of an uncle instead. The next morning, she sets off to meet her father. “On my arrival, your wife tells me you left to visit a friend. You should know that your children acted very cold. William looked at me with disdain; Junior left the room; and Olivia stayed more than 30 minutes in the shower before she finally came out to greet me with visible disgust. I told your wife I did not mind staying at my uncle for the time being. I thought you did not want to see me that morning.”

A little while later, she tries again, this time with her uncle in tow. She and her father “greet each other”, as she dryly describes it. “You then said you wanted to speak to my uncle and to my great surprise you told him I had to wait another week before I could move in because my room was not yet ready. You went to take a nap and you left me alone in the living room.” But Flora does not give up. She returns the following week, only to find the maid telling her that her father is asleep. At her fourth attempt, her father is absent again.

All this time, she complains, he never called her to ask her how she was doing. “Faced with your silence," she writes, "I felt rejected.”

Why does her father refuse to take her in? Flora suspects her stepmother of setting him up against his children. Flora’s brother died years ago, and this is what she has heard: “You kicked him out because your wife did not want him in the house. He said you neglected him, and I’ve been told that you never set foot in the hospital after he fell sick. His friends warned me to stay away from your wife. They say she visits witch doctors and is capable of poisoning people.”

The letter, it now becomes clear, is a farewell to her dad. She must have written it in the cybercafé before she took the plane back to France, and even though it is not a sentimental goodbye, her sadness is palpable. “Everything is clear to me now: you have decided to abandon me in favor of your wife. I prefer you do not try to get in touch with me because I think we have reached a point of no return. Maybe one day the situation will be more peaceful and we can meet again. It is true that I go to nightclubs sometimes but I have never lost sight of my goals. I do not drink, I do not smoke, I have no criminal record. I am 21 years old and I do not have my high school diploma yet, but everybody has problems. You know very well that I was seriously ill for several years and the circumstances to advance in life were not favorable. But I am determined to fight to get out, with or without your help. At least I saw the grave of my brother, and I'm happy. I wish you a lot of happiness with your family and a very long life.”

2010-04-02T20:22:00.003Z

An army of impatient cars slowly pushed its way through the city's main roads as everybody went home early before the Easter weekend. Normally one can get a red taxi within two minutes, but today they all sped past me to deliver their customers at churches, mosques, banks, and shopping malls. As I sat discussing life-in-Africa with a friend over lunch in a Korean restaurant, we agreed we have more time on our hands than people in the western world; we can hire housemaids to do the cleaning and the cooking. "We basically have too much time to think," he said, laughing. But on my way back I realized I spend entire mornings searching for a cash machine that works or a gas station that has not run out of fuel. Even something apparently simple like getting the mail involves a 20-minute drive to the post office. It's nothing to complain about; even if sometimes I long for the smooth and impersonal efficiency of European cities, I'm happy to not have to scrub my own floors.

April fool

2010-04-01T12:49:00.002Z

CALABAR, April 1 (Reuters) - A man who claimed to have been sent by Jesus to punish sinners rammed his car into a parked plane at an airport in southeastern Nigeria, an aviation spokesman said. No one was hurt in the incident and the spokesman said Nigeria had no problem with security.

The little brother saga, continued

2010-03-31T18:07:00.006Z

Yesterday evening, the ‘little brother’ whose right arm was maimed in a road accident came by to show how the wound had healed after surgery. He did not address me directly and kept his eyes fixed on the wooden table top as a sign of deference, but he looked much fitter and stronger. His companion Ismael, another ‘brother’ of watchman Kader, did the talking. Ismael seems to be the only man in that particular Burkinabé community who speaks good French, and his soft voice and dignified manner inspire an almost immediate feeling of trust.

For several weeks I had been making vague plans to look up little brother in his hut, but I also dreaded the inevitable protocol involved in visiting the shoddy village; I still feel an instinctive reluctance to assume the role of good Samaritan. So finally they came to me, and the news was good. The macabre gap in the arm has disappeared under a smooth layer of healthy pink flesh, and little brother demonstrated he can move his fingers, albeit painfully slowly. Now, a second operation will be needed to cover the raw flesh with a strip of skin. “My heart sank when the kid told me,” Ismael said, referring to the 37-year old as l’enfant. “We have depleted our means.”

A few readers of this blog have kindly made a donation. A clumsy attempt to explain that the hospital bills will be paid not just by me but by strangers who happened to have seen the picture of the arm sounded like I wanted to absolve myself of responsibility, so I kept it short, handed them money, and sent them on their way. The truth is, I don’t think they know what the internet is.

Last night

2010-03-24T09:04:00.003Z

"By rights she should not have slept that night. But she did; and a deep and plumbless sleep it proved to be. She tumbled into it without preparation from the brink of wakefulness, in full dress. And her waking up was just as precipitate. One instant she was virtually unconscious and the next she was totally awake, her eyes and head absolutely clear. She was tranquil almost. Why? From what source? Last night now seemed far away, like something remembered from a long and turbulent dream. Last night? It wasn't last night. It was the same night, this night. And it wasn't light yet."

(Chinua Achebe, Anthills of the Savannah)

Wade does it better

2010-03-20T17:51:00.004Z

President Wade of Senegal, 83, is a verbose old man who likes to portray himself as the region's model democrat, even though he has antagonized quite a few of his fellow statesmen with his moralizing pronouncements. Critics say he is a specimen of that typical African breed of former opposition leaders who won't budge from the presidential seat once they are voted into power. Reuters had a sublty written story on Wade yesterday that made me laugh out loud:

DAKAR (Reuters) - Senegal's octogenarian president Abdoulaye Wade said he was confident voters would grant him a third term in a 2012 election and his age was no obstacle to enjoying five more years in power. Brushing aside opposition criticism that he has failed during 10 years in office to stem poverty and corruption in the West African state, Wade said he had done more to build its economy than four decades of Socialist rule before him.

"The Senegalese are satisfied with what I have done...They know some things aren't quite finished, but they think it would be hard for anyone to do better than me," Wade told Reuters in an interview in a modest office in his presidential palace. [...] Wade looked spry and insisted he was in good health. He ignored suggestions that it was time for him to step aside for a younger generation, and said he could think of nobody better to run the former French colony than himself.

"I do not know of any African country doing better than I am," he said.

Christians and Muslims

2010-03-19T10:39:00.004Z

I was in the Nigerian city Jos last year to write about the aftermath of the November 2008 clashes between Christians and Muslims that left about 700 people dead. Most of the people I met were worried that violence would erupt again as the city has become segregated along religious lines -- Christians were moving out of Muslim neighborhoods and vice versa. What struck me most is how common people bear the brunt of the hard-line stance of community leaders vying for political power. The Catholic bishop seemed as uncompromising as the elders of the Muslim council. Almost a year on, another 300 people or so have died, and I can't help wondering who among those I interviewed are still alive today.

Lately I have spent what feels like an inordinate amount of time at doctor's offices. The general practitioner, the gynecologist, the ophthalmologist -- their waiting rooms are always full, and I am to consider myself lucky if I have to wait less than one hour. My contact lenses have caused a recurrent eye infection so I do my daily errands near-sighted, seeing nothing but a blur of movement and dark faces. I have never met a taxi driver who wears glasses and I can't guess how many times I have been putting my life into the hands of a myopic road hog -- it's probably better not to know. An elderly Lebanese ophthalomologist is going to precribe glasses today. I first met him on Wednesday and he made it a point to emphasize that he was a Christian Lebanese, not a Muslim. He was born in Ivory Coast and feigned shock at my question if he plans to retire in Lebanon. "Oh, but I could never live there," he said. "The Lebanese there are liars and cheaters. They are scum, I am telling you. Even here you will find that 95 percent of the Lebanese are Hezbollah supporters. Don't ever trust them, madame."

Power cuts

2010-03-15T18:26:00.002Z

This morning at 8h30 it happened again: a brief click to announce the airconditioner went off, silence, and the power was gone. The Ivorian administration is said to owe at least 130 million euros to the French-held electricity and water companies, and so the country has become like other West African countries with power cuts and an acute dearth of tap water. Today is the third day in one week that there is no electricity in the house from early morning until dark, and it is not only incredibly frustrating but a blow to my work, creativity and income. More on this later.

The more things change...

2010-03-11T10:06:00.009Z

For all their self-righteous militancy and dedication to the African cause, magazines like Jeune Afrique (French) and New African(English) are sometimes nothing but thinly veiled public relations glossies. There are two heads of state in the region who were born into privilege, and each is the son of a recently deceased dictator. Last year, Ali Bongo won presidential elections he himself helped organize following the death of his father, who had ruled Gabon for 41 years. And in 2005, Faure Gnassingbé inherited the presidency from his father, who had called the shots in Togo for no less than 38 years. The elections that brought Faure to power were rigged, but when the population took to the streets in protest, the army retaliated by killing 400 people. Last week, Faure was re-elected with 61 percent of the vote.

One would think that the defenders of African pride had something critical to say about the chubby despots. Instead, they published full-color specials portraying both men as champions of change. It remains unclear what is different besides the fact that they are not their father, but I have no doubt money was paid somewhere down the line to publish the obsequious drivel that is supposed to pass for journalism. Jeune Afrique argues that Ali Bongo is ‘modern’ because he likes fancy suits, fast cars and expensive mobile phones. “The new master of Gabon has restructured the system built by his father to fit his own style. The country is governed like a company under the obligation to deliver and produce results.” Gabon exports 13 million tons of crude oil annually. Half of the tiny population of 1.5 million lives below the poverty line. Jeune Afrique conveniently omits these embarrassing figures.

Even more revolting is the eight-page interview with Faure Gnassingbé in New African. It starts like this: “It is not often that one meets a young Francophone president who speaks impeccable English, a young man who has an open mind and wants the country to be run on democratic lines, a young man with abundant joie de vivre.” There is no mention of vote-rigging, army brutality, or corruption. The last question is whether Faure plans to “go on and on after another presidential term”, just like his father. The answer: “I don’t know really.” The interviewer happily shakes hands and swoons it was "one heck of an hour" with the great Faure.

Luckily there are also honest writers in the region. Venance Konan is one of them. In a local newspaper he speaks his mind about government in Ivory Coast. I wish I could post the entire interview, but it's too long. On the ruling party: “They came into power, they saw a lot of money, and they served themselves without understanding that it requires maintenance, labor and investment to keep a country going.” On president Gbagbo: “No Ivorian in his right mind will vote for Gbagbo. He is not going to organize elections and in any case, it’s not through elections that he will leave office.” On the opposition parties: “Their problem is that they have no strategy. They dance to the beat of Gbagbo’s drums. How else can one explain that Gbagbo remains in power five years after his official mandate expired while we have two opposition parties which together represent the majority of the population? If they had a strategy, Gbagbo would no longer be president. Unfortunately, the opposition parties in Gabon and Togo are just as useless.”

2010-03-07T20:19:00.002Z

An afternoon at one of Libreville's beachside hotels. Drinking beer, eating fish, watching the sun set. And trying hard not to smoke.

Back to Gabon

2010-03-02T21:35:00.003Z

I first went to Gabon in the late nineties, and I had thought that some buildings or places might look familiar. They don’t. The capital Libreville is cleaner, prettier and more provincial than I remember. I am enjoying the ocean breeze and spying on the lonely French ladies at the hotel swimming pool – are their husbands working for Total, I wonder, the oil company that made the Bongo family a fortune? Prices here are higher than in almost any other French-speaking African country; the wealth of the upper class has inflated the costs of living. The Gabonese are said to be lazy and arrogant, yet something extraordinary happened to me today: a stranger who I’d stopped in the street to ask for directions offered me change so that I could take a shared taxi.

Ali Bongo, who took over the presidency of Gabon months after his father died, has left some of the huge billboards designed for his election campaign on apartment buildings across the city. There are small signs of change, a tentative break with the rule of his famously spendthrift father: the number of ministries has been reduced from 50-something to 30, the working week no longer allows for 3-hour lunches, and a minimum wage will be introduced next month. Yes, Ali is president, and an extremely rich one at that, but one may ask if Gabon is really a country. For all the pomp of the presidential palace, the Chinese-built national assembly, the Omar Bongo stadium, the Omar Bongo boulevard and the Omar Bongo university, the population barely stands at 1,5 million.

Dead for nothing

2010-02-25T23:55:00.004Z

Ivory Coast’s state television is such a crushing bore that I can't bear to watch the evening news. News is brought in the form of long-winding formal declarations by government officials and clumsily filmed footage of what the president did or said that day. So even if he offered two cars and ten bags of rice to village so-and-so, we’ll hear about it, as long as the report glorifies the wonderful deeds of the humble leader. No wonder, then, that the coalition of opposition parties finally announced it had had enough of propaganda.

Last month’s protest to wrench the Radio Television Ivoirienne (RTI) from the clutches of the presidential lackeys was the first in a series of demonstrations that sparked political tensions across the country. The opposition called for new protests when President Laurent Gbagbo sacked the government and the head of the electoral commission, and over the course of last week at least 12 opposition supporters were killed by security forces. A new government is about to be appointed, but it won’t make a difference, for the ministers are at the mercy of the president, who does not care for democracy and rules by decree. The point of Gbagbo’s move was to delay the presidential elections once again, and in this he has succeeded. So 12 people are dead, but nothing has changed, except that some state newspapers have resumed the diatribes against western media that made working here so difficult in the early days of the conflict. The first victim is the French news channel France24, which has been taken off the air. ‘French journalists want to provoke genocide in Ivory Coast,’ I read in one of the government papers yesterday. History repeats itself, all over again.

Still waiting

2010-02-22T20:34:00.003Z

Four days after he arrived at the hospital, the watchman's little brother is still waiting for an operation. I went to see a doctor over the weekend to ask why it took so long. Maybe a bribe had to paid, I thought, although I did not ask. He looked tired, rubbing his stubbly skull with his hands. "Right now, we have only one operating room for the entire hospital," he said. "He is high on the list, but emergencies keep coming in, and we have to treat them first." From the corner of my eye, I saw a boy lying in the emergency room, a pool of wine red blood on the dark brown vinyl mattress under his bandaged thigh.

Another day of life in Ivory Coast

2010-02-19T20:39:00.006Z

I’ve become immune to child beggars and easy complaints about poverty and joblessness from acquaintances who are hoping I will dish out money for yet another problem. But sometimes a tragedy enters into one’s life, a tragedy that one cannot turn one’s back to, and what I saw yesterday was one such sad story of ignorance, helplessness, and sheer bad luck.

Earlier this week, the Burkinabe watchman asked permission to go see his “little brother” who had been hit by a car on his way to work. His right arm was broken, the flesh cut to the bone. I tried to find out more, and the story, as it transpired in hastily mumbled French, was that an ambulance had raced him to a hospital where doctors demanded 2000 euros for an operation, at which point it was decided he better go home. For three days the neighborhood had been raising money to send him off to his native Burkina Faso, praying for the recovery of a young man whose arm was in such a bad state he was unable to stand up. I asked the watchman if it was a good idea to put a man with a broken arm through a three-day bus journey in the sweltering sun. He wasn’t sure. But that was, he said, the only solution they could think of.

The next day I bundled the watchman into my car and drove to the neighborhood of the “little brother”, who turned out to be a cousin. Some African languages do not have a word for ‘cousin’ for every male relative is a brother, the only distinction being big (elder) or little (younger). He lived in a makeshift immigrant village in a small valley at the end of a cul-de-sac, a muddy wasteland lined with banana trees and rotting garbage. At least ten women, part of the inevitable procession of well-wishers, piled out of his wooden shack when I arrived. The inner walls of the unlit hut were decorated with the pages of a French ladies’ magazine – insouciant articles about make-up and fashion serving as wallpaper for the poor. The naive optimism of the place made me cringe. Here I was, the compassionate white woman coming to the rescue. I was glad I wasn’t alone; the landlord’s assistant, an Ivorian who happened to know a surgeon at one of the state hospitals, had come along.

The little brother was too weak to sit up. His right hand was swollen like an inflated rubber glove, and a sickly smell emanated from the bandage around his elbow. It was obvious he had to get treatment. “These people come from the countryside in Burkina Faso, they can’t read, they can’t write,” the Ivorian said. “They do not know their way around the big city. In the end, all they can think of is sending this guy away to his relatives so it’s no longer their responsibility.” We called an ambulance. As I could not explain on the phone where the hut was exactly, I waited at an intersection nearby. Three hours and several phone calls later, the ambulance finally arrived.

The men of the village gingerly carried their brother up the hill, followed by a ragtag army of curious children. He was hooked to a drip over nonchalant deliberations whether the arm could be saved while the ambulance doctor shook his head in silent disapproval at the immigrants’ ignorance. “Thank you madam, God bless you madam,” the villagers muttered. I managed a grim smile and looked away. I felt awkward and self-conscious. I didn’t want their gratefulness.

In the hospital, a disinterested female doctor untied the bandage. I’d had to buy her a bag with rubber gloves first, and the watchman had gone to the pharmacy to buy the medication another female doctor had slowly and lazily prescribed. No one could tell why the operation had initially been estimated at 2000 euros, an impossibly high sum by local standards. What did emerge was that the little brother had mistakenly been delivered to the cardiology department earlier that week. He was not in the records of the surgery wing. A receptionist checked the book. “His name is not in here. We got a Mr. X, but that can’t be him, because that guy died shortly after he was brought in.”

And there, after waiting one more hour, in an unlit and unventilated emergency room, a gaping wound emerged, a fist-size gap showing a shiny white bone, yellowish muscles, and strands of dark red blood. I felt nauseous; the little brother closed his eyes in pain, writhed, but never screamed. This morning, I lent the watchman 300 euros for an operation to remove the infected flesh. I ordered him to continue collecting donations from the neighborhood; we would discuss the loan later. Then I tried to decide whether I should post a picture of the wound. It took me a long time to make up my mind. I decided to post the picture because this is what I saw and I would like to know who wouldn't react the way I did. Also, would it be silly to try to raise money myself? It's a dilemma. My blog is not meant for charity. But here I am, the wealthy white woman.

2010-02-13T18:19:00.003Z

The last interview I did in Abuja was with Joshua, a friend of my driver. It was meant for a radio reportage but Joshua turned out to be an eloquent speaker who gave answers that were too long and too level-headed for a straight three-minute clip. He was apologetic about the squalor of his living conditions, a low narrow shack built on the sandy terrain of what is supposed to become a five-story hotel. The owner of the plot has apparently run out of money and about forty squatters have moved into the moldy skeleton until the bulldozers arrive to evict them, a day that will come without a doubt. But Joshua, like other poor Nigerians I met on this trip, does not feel in the least dejected. One day, he said, using the American jargon of hope and optimism, his turn will come. “We Nigerians are lovers of life,” he said. “We are a very patient and tolerant and contented people. We are working towards a better life. We just look at our potential and try in time to optimize that potential.”

2010-02-11T18:58:00.005Z

The capital Abuja was constructed to be a showcase of Nigerian modernity. Its churches and mosques are grand and imposing; its many square and prison-like hotels pretend to offer western luxury; its roads are wide and smooth like freeways. Motorcycle taxis are not allowed, and street hawkers are banned to the outskirts of town. I met consultants and lawyers and government people, but I couldn't help wondering where the bank tellers and the hotel room cleaners live, and so my driver took me to the overpopulated chaos of a suburb called Nyanya. This is where the poor can rent a bare room for 200 euros a year, toilet not included.

2010-02-09T22:04:00.003Z

Four hours in Abuja, the capital of the great rudderless Nation of Nigeria. It never ceases to amaze me how every random person seems to have a stock of educational one-liners at the ready for whoever wants to listen. Nigerians love to talk. Especially about themselves.

"Accident in Abuja is every day. Because of good roads." (taxi driver commenting on road accident)

"The African mindset is rudimentary. It’s not sophisticated. The Europeans arrived with boats and guns while we were wearing leaves and carrying spears. The African does not want to manufacture cars or invent mobile phones. He doesn’t care. The African is easily content. All he wants is a house, food, a wife, and lots of concubines. He won't look any further. He just wants to enjoy himself." (engineer in airplane commenting on bad governance)

"Nigerians think their country is the best because it’s the biggest. One out of five Africans is a Nigerian. That’s why we think we are better than anyone else. It’s about size, not substance. In Nigeria you can meet a homeless guy in rags and he will tell you he can become president if you give him a chance to talk to the people. He won't even feel the need to change into a suit. The thing with Nigerians is: we have no self-doubt." (businessman commenting on the trouble with Nigeria)

2010-02-01T17:28:00.002Z

'Pakistan's cities are like many in the Third World: overwhelmed with humanity, underserved by government, and ruled by a wealthy elite who cultivate an atmosphere of lawless entitlement.' (From The Intelligence Factory, an article on how the US makes its enemies disappear, in Harpers' Magazine)

2010-01-30T12:59:00.003Z

Another holiday tale. I grudgingly admit there is much more beauty in East Africa than in West Africa, except for the people, who wear drab old-fashioned western clothes in sickly colors. East Africa at least has managed to preserve its natural wealth, unlike Ivory Coast, where the few paltry national parks it still had before the 2002-2003 war have been unscrupulously cleaned out by loggers and poachers. The national symbol may be the elephant, but there are no elephants left in the country, only some socialist-style elephant ‘monuments’ erected to put money in the pockets of the elite.

In Tanzania, C. took me to the Lake Manyara national park, a strip of forest land between a lake and a green wall of Rift Valley mountains. Thomas, a young guy with brown teeth, was our guide. He was knowledgeable and chatty. One of his colleagues had tried to commit suicide the day before by jumping off a bushy cliff with a glorious view of the park. He didn’t break his skull, but he broke his arm, and after laying helpless for several hours called up a colleague for help. His attempted suicide was prompted by “a problem with one of his girlfriends”, Thomas sniggered, for whoever is stupid enough to want to kill himself over a woman hardly deserves to be rescued. At night we stayed at a very civilized lodge, where Thomas informed us that a 7-year-old French boy had been eaten for dinner by a leopard last week. It turned out to be five years ago, but the story was good of course, and added to the thrill of adventure.

The guide had jumped over the fence, according to Thomas (middle)

The next day we went to Tarangire national park. “Tonight you’ll want to puke when you see one more elephant,” Thomas said. “They are everywhere.” It was true; as soon as we entered, we stood face to face with an enormous male. He walked past the car silently, and I swallowed my nervousness and sat in awe. Everything went fine until we came across a lonely female by the end of the day. C. turned off the engine, leant out of the car window and indulged in taking pictures. I was ready to drive on, afraid to infuriate an animal twice the size and weight of the car. Elephants have bad eyesight but a fine sense of smell, and after a minute or so the female suspiciously curled her trunk towards the car, smelling us, my fear, or more likely, C.’s cigarette. She raised her trunk again and flapped her ears. I was terrified, but my companions wanted to taunt her just a little bit longer. And so she charged as soon as C. started the car, trumpeting, approaching in a slow but steady gallop. Thomas and C. nearly doubled over with laughter at my screams. Haha. Scared of an elephant! What a coward!