-Caveat Lector-
>From www.foreignpolicy.com/bookspage.htm
Via www.cybereditions.com/aldaily/
Les faux complots d’Houphouët-Boigny
The Fake Plots of
Houphouët-Boigny
by Samba Diarra
248 pages, Paris: Karthala, 1997 (in French)
Reviewed by Howard W. French
Almost from the moment in the early 1950s when they emerged as the
preeminent indigenous political leaders of Côte d’Ivoire and the Gold
Coast (now Ghana), Felix Houphouët-Boigny and Kwame Nkrumah have
often been linked in the minds of historians and of the people of
their region. Their determined rivalry was captured in one of the
most famous episodes of their era: the public wager they made in 1957
over whose approach to leadership — Nkrumah’s socialist-oriented Pan-
African nationalism or Houphouët-Boigny’s eager alignment with the
capitalist West — would create the more prosperous and influential
nation.
Their bet was to have been decided in only 10 years time, but Nkrumah
could not stay the course. In 1966, he was overthrown. Nkrumah died
in exile in Bucharest in 1972. Houphouët-Boigny, for his part,
continued ruling his country until his death in 1993. Even so,
Nkrumah today remains an icon of an enduring grassroots attachment to
ideals of African unity and self-reliance, while outside of
Francophone Africa, mention of Houphouët-Boigny, who built his
region’s most prosperous and stable state, stirs few memories.
Nkrumah famously enjoined Africans to “Seek ye first the political kingdom,” promising
that they wo
uld receive all manner of dividends from sovereign control of the continent’s vast
wealth. But it w
as Houphouët-Boigny who
actually devised the model that generations of African autocrats have copied to
secure power.
It is precisely this latter story that most impresses the reader of Samba Diarra’s
book, The Fake P
lots of Houphouët-Boigny, a political prisoner’s–eye view of the dark side of a leader
who is celeb
rated in national myth—
and was much lauded in the West—as a benign nation builder, model of moderation, and
man of peace.
With a minimum of emotion, Diarra recounts how, from the earliest days of his rule,
Houphouët-Boign
y warded off potential
challenges to his authority through a cunning strategy of intimidation. As the
president saw it, kn
own foes were easy to deal with, whether by arrest, execution, or banishment. The
trickier task was
conjuring a steady str
eam of traitors, whose punishment—and usually, eventual pardon—would keep his new
nation in awe of
him and preemptively terrify anyone from questioning his power.
Setting a pattern followed by Nigeria’s late General Sani Abacha, the Democratic
Republic of Congo’
s Laurent Kabila, and a legion of other African dictators, the president focused his
paranoid energ
ies on many of his clos
est collaborators. One of Houphouët-Boigny’s earliest and most surprising victims was
Jean-Baptiste
Mockey, his loyal number-two figure during the last years of French rule and,
significantly, one o
f the few colleagues wh
ose courageous role in the independence movement might have cast shadows over
Houphouët-Boigny’s pr
oject to make himself his nation’s quasi-mythic father. Mockey, who eventually died in
a suspicious
car accident, was put
away for several years because of the so-called Black Cat Plot, in which he was
accused of planting
the head of a cat whose mouth had been stuffed with the tip of a bull’s horn in the
luggage of Hou
phouët-Boigny’s wife. T
he curse, it was publicly alleged, was intended to render Houphouët-Boigny impotent
and eventually
kill him.
Houphouët-Boigny distinguished himself from many of his African presidential peers by
investing hea
vily in overseas higher education right from the start of his rule. But there was a
high price to b
e paid by that first ge
neration of graduates, who were frequently jailed on wholly invented charges when they
returned hom
e—the better to disabuse them of any ideas they might have had of enjoying power.
Diarra himself wa
s imprisoned for four y
ears in 1963 for his supposed participation in one of a series of plots involving the
first great w
ave of students returning from university training in France to become the new
administrative and p
olitical élite of an in
fant nation.
Many survivors, once rehabilitated, went on to become trusted lieutenants—indeed,
ardent champions—
of Houphouët-Boigny’s rule, capable of giving speeches to the effect that from the
time of his infa
ncy, as one put it, the
nonpareil president had been “first in everything.”
Those individuals deemed less cooperative were harshly condemned in show trials or
tirelessly humil
iated, whether through beatings in front of visiting African heads of state or
warnings to their wi
ves that they should ta
ke other husbands because their current ones were unlikely to be of much use after
release from the
political prison of Assabou. The most famous victim of this type of treatment was
Ernest Boka, the
first president of Côt
e d’Ivoire’s Supreme Court. In 1964, the jurist had refused to condemn political
detainees against
whom there was no evidence and so was arrested himself and, according to Diarra,
savagely beaten in
front of Houphouët-Boi
gny. Untreated, he died a short time later of his wounds.
Stories such as these have made the book a big seller in Côte d’Ivoire and throughout
the region, w
here, even if such events have been discussed with ever greater openness since the
advent of multi-
party elections in 1990
and especially since Houphouët-Boigny’s death, they had never before been chronicled
in such an ex
haustive way.
What emerges, though, in Diarra’s recounting of how so many “political opponents” were
created, pun
ished, and then, quite often, coopted is less interesting for its revelations of the
president’s mi
sdeeds than for the rou
gh schematic it provides for the consolidation of power in postcolonial Africa.
In less capable hands, Houphouët-Boigny’s model often turned to grand tragedy or
tragic farce. Yet,
as evidenced by the steady stream of visits from African peers—including both more
famous leaders
such as the late “Emper
or” Jean-Bedel Bokassa of the Central African Republic or Mobutu Sese Seko, the
deceased dictator o
f the former Zaire, and relatively obscure microdespots such as Presidents Gnassingbe
Eyadema of To
go and Omar Bongo of Ga
bon—the Ivorian leader’s approach to building unchallenged one-man rule was broadly
influential.
As a member of the Baoule, a large but hardly majority ethnic group, Houphouët-Boigny
quickly sough
t to put Côte d’Ivoire’s other ethnic groups on notice that power was not up for
grabs. What better
way to do that than by
inventing coup plots to jail their most ambitious members. And lest the Baoule
themselves feed res
entment, or begin to think of power as an entitlement, Houphouët-Boigny used his last
major wave of
arrests (in 1963 and 1
964) to prosecute another group of supposed plotters that included kinsmen as close as
nephews and
cousins who were sentenced to death or long terms of imprisonment.
By 1966, the Ivorian leader’s project of establishing an uncontested autocracy replete
with a perso
nality cult run by effusive sycophants was complete. From then on, a progressive
relaxation began.
By the early 1970s, Hou
phouët-Boigny felt secure enough to acknowledge publicly what no other African tyrant
has—namely, t
hat the charges pressed against his enemies were almost all cooked up. Not by himself,
of course, b
ut supposedly by overly
ambitious underlings. In a private meeting with one of Houphouët-Boigny’s many
victims, Jean Konan
Banny, a fellow Baoule clansman and former defense minister who served four years at
Assabou, the
author quotes a contrit
e Houphouët-Boigny explaining away the minister’s imprisonment in these terms:
“Between disorder an
d injustice, I chose injustice. Injustice can always be repaired, whereas disorder can
have unpredi
ctable consequences. In
any case, these [jailings] had a positive side to them: They allowed me to
exterminate in egg any
thoughts of a coup plot in Côte d’Ivoire.”
For the remainder of his life, Houphouët-Boigny worked tirelessly at promoting an
image of himself
as an apostle of peace and of his country as a kinder, gentler corner of a mean
continent. His effo
rts included building t
he world’s largest basilica near where the Assabou prison once stood and giving asylum
to political
refugees from all over the continent.
Diarra rejects Houphouët-Boigny’s pretensions to a George
Washington–like stature in his country’s history. Indeed, The Fake
Plots of Houphouët-Boigny is destined to contribute to an Africa-
driven reconsideration of independence-era leaders that in some cases
will highlight how far their respective countries have come and, in
others, stress what a vast, uncharted stretch of road ahead they
still have to travel. Yet, Côte d’Ivoire undoubtedly remains a haven
of relative peace and prosperity in a region of much poverty and
turmoil. And at home at least, the country’s first leader remains
widely revered.
Howard W. French recently completed a four-year assignment as West
African bureau chief for the New York Times. He is currently a
visiting scholar in Japanese and Korean Studies at the University of
Hawaii and will be assigned by the Times to Tokyo in August.
A<>E<>R
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