Heart of the Matter

Getting "tropicalized"

Thursday October 16, 2003

Today I spent a lot of time driving around, spending a lot of money and accomplishing very little. People had warned me that Abidjan was surprisingly expensive and that is proving to be true. I think I blew through $400 today – although almost half of that went to purchase a local cell phone. Having decided that Le Palm Club was not a very good place to stay, I spent the morning driving around looking at various other options. I saw the Tiama, which is the most expensive hotel in Abidjan, but didn’t think it was significantly better than the Novotel, which is where I ended up. (I also looked at the Ibis, which was very dreary and almost as expensive as the Novotel.) This place is clean and modern and safe and I got a decent rate because I’m staying for a month, although it is still twice as expensive as the Palm Club. It does have a pool, however, and some sort of fitness club.

A lot of business here seems to be conducted on the street. People sell everything from little tin shacks in Treichville, one of the city’s seedier areas. That’s where my cell phone came from. At first my driver suggested that we take my US cell phone to a friend of his who specializes in “tropicalizing” things. I like this word. It has something to do with using a computer to reprogram the phone’s SIM card. It’s certainly not on the level. An amazing number of things here are “tropicalized” – adapted for local use in some interesting way.

Any way, I didn’t really want to risk damaging my US phone, so my driver and translator went into the market to bargain for a new one, claiming that if I went with them I was sure to get a bad price because I’m white. Finding a SIM card for the phone ended up being a bit of an adventure. Apparently, Orange, the most of popular cell service here, allows people to buy up tons of SIM cards even if they don’t have phones. These people then turn around and sell them on the street for a 25% mark-up. This creates a nice black market. And it also means that there are no SIM cards available in the stores after about 11 a.m. – they’ve all been bought up already by black marketeers. My driver – whose name is Yoda by the way (how cool is that! -- he works for a business wire service normally) – tried to get me into one Orange retail outlet, but he almost caused a riot by trying to take me to the front of a mob of people who had been waiting for hours to enter the store and were crushed against the door of the store. Needless to say, I didn’t get in. I finally decided to give up and buy a card from a kid on the street. I was suspicious that it was all some sort of scam, but actually it seems to work just fine.

I tried to reach a good deal with my translator, but I couldn’t get him below 50 euros, which is more than I want to spend. I am still not sure he is really any good.

There doesn't seem to be much news in the city today. Some members of Les Juanes Patriotes, or the Young Patriots, which are basically a kind of “brown shirt” brigade for President Gbagbo’s party, have been attacking opposition newspaper offices and trashing their publications. But this seems to be a normal occurrence here these days. Tonight Gbagbo banned all public demonstrations in the whole country for a period of three months. While this is certainly somewhat anti-democratic, it may actually be a good thing under the circumstances. Two of the opposition parties had planned a big demonstration for this weekend and their probably would have been a counter-protest by Les Juanes Patriotes and a very high likelihood of violence.

Well, that’s all for this entry…

Posted by Jeremy Kahn at October 16, 2003 11:59 PM