Heart of the Matter

Heading for Indian Country

There are a couple of little things about this country that are really starting to drive me nuts. One is that no one ever has any change. I'm always suspicious when people tell you they don't have change. I always think they are hoping that you will just decide to overpay. But here this isn't some sort of scam. They really don't have change. And I'm not talking about overpaying by vast amounts. I'm talking about trying to pay a 1,200 CFA taxi fare with a 5,000 CFA note. (This is like paying for a $2.40 cab ride in the US with $10. In the US, the cabbie would definitely have change. In fact, you could probably offer him a $20 and he might grumble a bit, but he would have enough money to give you change.) Here no one ever has enough money to give you change. They always expect you to be able to produce the exact amount you owe or to get within a couple hundred CFA. If you are more than 500 CFA off, you have a problem. I have run into this phenomenon before in the developing world (it was true in Venezuela too) and I find it baffling and infuriating. I mean how hard is it to get a bunch of small bills and coins in the morning and keep them on hand. Maybe it really is hard because people are so poor that don't have any extra money. And I guess that without bank accounts they can't get a lot of small bills and coins to use as change. But still it is just ridiculous. It puts the burden of the transaction on the customer rather than on the seller, which is bad for business. Change helps grease the wheels of commerce. I wonder if development economists have ever looked at this problem.

My other complaint is that the window cranks in the back of most taxis are missing. You get into these unairconditioned cabs and the first thing you want to do is roll down the windows, but oh no, invariably you can't because there is just this nub where the window crank should be. So you have to ask the driver for the detached crank he usually has with him in the front seat and he will pass it back to you so you can roll down the window. Then you can pass this to your fellow passenger so he can roll down his window. Then you hand it back to the driver. In some taxis, they don't even have a broken-off crank so they pass you a socket wrench instead. I asked one taxi driver why none of the cabs have window cranks and he said it was because, given the heat, everyone wants to roll down the windows and as a result the cranks break off really quickly. But you figure this would be a good reason to REPLACE THE CRANKS. But I guess that would cost money and people here don't have it.

Okay, now that I've gotten those two rants out of my system, on with the blog...

Well, this morning I finally broke out the suit I schlepped over here for an interview with Albert Tevoedjre, UN Secretary General Kofi Annan's special representative to Cote d'Ivoire. I figured I ought to dress up for the occasion, but it also happened to be the cleanest article of clothing I could wear. I tried washing some clothes last night in my hotel bathroom. When I was in Iraq, I washed stuff all the time and hung it out on my balcony. In the desert air, it was dry in an hour or two. But here, I don't have a balcony and in my air-conditioned room, everything was still wet when I woke up this morning. I am hoping laundry is easier to do when I move to my new residence in Vallon.

Any way, my interview with Tevoedjre was interesting. His office in the MINUCI (some sort of French acronym that stands for UN Mission to Cote d'Ivoire) headquarters, a fair-sized compound located down a quiet road in Cocody. The place has fairly tight security to begin with and this morning the government defense minister and some army generals were visiting when I arrived, so the place was practically in lock-down. (There were some scary looking dudes in plainclothes with wires dangling from their ears on all the stairways.) I had to wait while the army chiefs were ushered out of the building and into waiting luxury cars before I could have my meeting.

Tevoedjre must have been the first person I've met here who was optimistic about the prospects for peace in Cote d'Ivoire. (It is of course his job to be optimistic, but still it good to hear something positive for once.) He seemed convinced that the rebels would have to return to the government. He said the only way for Alassane Ouattara (the RDR politician who now lives in self-imposed exile in France and is believed to have financed the rebellion) to get what he wants, i.e. the presidency of Cote d'Ivoire, was to continue with the peace process and go for elections in 2005. Tevoedjre was sure economic pressure, applied by the international community and Cote d'Ivoire's neighbors, would force the rebels back to the table. He said he expected a breakthrough within the next week.

Tevoedjre's optimism was balanced out by the brief chat I had this afternoon with the bureau chief of an international news service. He thinks the country is totally screwed. He is certain violence will return with the next election, if not before, and he believes that ultimately Cote d'Ivoire could go the way of Liberia or Rwanda. He doesn't see any way out of the current political deadlock and he thinks France's only hope of extricating itself from its expensive commitment here is to turn the peacekeeping operation over to the UN. The bureau chief hates Cote d'Ivoire in general. He thinks the people are rude and arrogant. He finds Abidjan expensive, dirty and dangerous. (He says he worries every night that someone will attack him in his home - in part because there is so much hostility toward the foreign press here.) He says he likes Liberia better than Cote d'Ivoire, which is saying something. He also said he is planning on moving the bureau to a neighboring country soon. (The bureau chief said he had heard that I had visited La Sorbonne. I am not sure how he knew this. For all I know he reads this blog. He said that going over there was very "unwise." He said I was lucky to be alive.)

I had a long chat with Fanny at some point today about the problems in Cote d'Ivoire. Fanny is from the north and is a Muslim and he clearly has some sympathies for the rebellion. He says he liked the fact that when Ouattara was prime minister he really tried to tackle corruption in the country. But Fanny told me he thinks ultimately nothing with change for the poor people of Cote d'Ivoire. He said the reason was that all African politicians are corrupt and only want power for themselves and their friends and relatives. He says that no matter how much money and development assistance the West gives to Africa, Africa will remain backward and impoverished because there were no good political leaders in Africa. All of them were corrupt and only looked out for their family or maybe their tribe, never the country as a whole.

Fanny is from a poor family. His father dug diamonds for a living and died when Fanny was 14. (Fanny says he sometimes digs diamonds too to earn spare cash. He keeps promising to show me some uncut stones he has dug up. Why do I have feeling he's planning on trying to sell some to me? Don't worry, I'm not buying.) Fanny was the first person in his family to go to university and yet he says he almost wishes he hadn't gone. After all, despite his geography studies, he hasn't been able to find a good job (except working for me as a translator.) Having gone to university has only increased his frustration with his lot in life. He thinks poor people in Cote d'Ivoire have no opportunities for advancement. They will always be poor. The choice positions and business opportunities go to those who are already rich and have government connections, he told me. He said he wanted to go to America, where there were real opportunities. And then he came round to what I figured he was building up to: he wanted to know if, after we finished working together, I could help him come to the US to work or study. Wasn't it true, he asked, that I could get him a visa easily? No, I said, it's not true. I have no idea how one gets a work permit or a student visa, but I have a feeling it's really difficult. Surely, Fanny said, if you really wanted to you could sign the papers for me. No, surely I could not, I said. All I could possibly do is try to find out a little about the application process and give him that information. Fanny seemed a bit disappointed, but I have a feeling I haven't heard the last of this request.

Almost everyone here wants to come to the US. People really do think it is the Promised Land. Timothy says he would love to study in America, but he knows he'll never be able to get the money together. So he is thinking about going to South Africa instead. I talked to Timothy about what Fanny had said. Timothy said he didn't like Fanny's attitude. If he thinks the poor will always be poor, then he will be, Timothy said. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy. Timothy said there were plenty of rich people in Cote d'Ivoire who had begun life with nothing. I was glad to hear Timothy say this. But later he mentioned that he had been trying to get a job with the UN or a foreign embassy here and that for the most part they hadn't even bothered to send him a rejection letter; he just never heard back from them. He said he knew that many of jobs went to people who knew someone already working there, so maybe Fanny was right after all. (I couldn't tell if this was simply a much subtler version of what Fanny had done earlier in the day: did Timothy want me to write him a letter of recommendation for a job with the UN or an NGO or the American Embassy?)

When Timothy came over to meet me at the hotel this afternoon, he had prepared an elaborate hand-written diagram for me. It was some sort of complicated flow chart, labeled in English that was supposed to show the relationship between a master and a slave. Timothy proceeded to tell me that he thinks France is like the master and Cote d'Ivoire like the slave. After a bit of discussion, he told me he thinks France is behind the rebellion. He thinks they encouraged Ouattara and the rebels in order to protect their economic interests here, which Gbagbo had threatened by calling for the cancellation of several large contracts with French companies (French companies run the water, electric and telecom monopolies here.) I have heard this conspiracy theory before and I have to say it is sort of intriguing. For one thing, it is hard to underestimate the cynicism of French foreign policy. And these kinds of things aren't without precedent in the world: the US encouraged a coup in Chile in part because it wanted to protect ITT's business interests; it supported pro-government paramilitary groups in Guatemala in part to protect the interests of United Fruit. It is also hard to believe that French intelligence didn't have some inklling that an attempted coup was afoot. But somehow I don't quite buy the whole theory. It's far too neat. If the French had really wanted the rebels to win, I think they could have made it happen. Plus, there's no way France wanted to be in the predicament it is currently in here - hated by Ivorians of every political persuasion and yet stuck here as the only real guarantor of peace.

Later in the evening, JP brought an Ivorian social science professor over to the hotel to talk. He too suspected France of being behind the rebellion. In fact, he was really against the French. He talked for a long time about the history of Cote d'Ivoire, the evils of colonialism and the roots of the current conflict. He was very passionate. He is working to try to train people to appreciate the diversity of Cote d'Ivoire and to have tolerance and respect for one another. He said he was optimistic that there would be peace because the average Ivorian is fed-up with the war. I told him I hoped he was right.

My adventures with Ivorian food continued today. At lunch, Fanny brought me to a place that made foutou banane, which mostly cassava and a little bit of banana pounded until they whole thing turns into a glutinous paste. It is served as a big oval lump on a plate. Then you order a bowl of sauce. I had chicken in a thick, somewhat spicey, reddish-brown peanut sauce. You take a spoonful of the foutou and dip it in the sauce and then eat it. It was pretty good, although the foutou is really heavy so you fill up very quickly. This evening, Timothy, Emma and I went to a lively maquis and had poullet brase (grilled chicken with onions and spices) and attieke. Timothy showed me how to eat attieke properly - and the proper method is even more messy (and possibly unsanitary) than I imagined. You take the attieke and need it in your hand into a ball and then dip the ball into whatever dish it is you are eating. Then you sort of lean forward and shovel the whole thing into your mouth. (Earlier, I had been making the mistake of tilting my head back and trying to drop the attieke into my mouth.)

Tomorrow I am planning on heading up north, first to Yamossoukro, the country's nominal political capital, then into Indian Country - across the zone of confidence and into rebel-held territory. I want to visit Buake and then maybe head west to Man. While this sounds dramatic, it isn't supposed to be dangerous. I have been that things are actually very calm up there right now and that the rebels are very welcoming to journalists, so hopefully I find this be to true. In order to head up to the north, you need a pass from the FANCI, the Ivorian army. I applied for mine yesterday and it was supposed to be ready today. But when I arrived at the military barracks to pick it up it wasn't available yet. The soldiers said that if we came back at 6:00 it would ready, or if it wasn't, it would be ready tomorrow morning for sure. After we heard this, Yoda suggested offering the soldiers a 5,000 CFA bribe to process the papers faster. I didn't like this idea. But I also didn't want to be too delayed. Fanny and Yoda assured me that we wouldn't get in trouble. It's the way things are done here, they said. So I gave Yoda the bill and he ran off to give it to the soldiers. He came back and told me the pass would definitely be ready at 7:00 pm. But at 7:40 Yoda called to say he had gone back to the office and it had been closed. So we will have to go back tomorrow morning any way. I am not really sure what it was I paid for then. (Timothy later told me I shouldn't have paid a bribe. He said I would have gotten the papers in time any way and noted that paying bribes only fosters more corruption.)

Tomorrow I switch hotels before I head off. Wish me luck. I don't know what Internet access is like up north, so this may be my last post for about a week. I'll be sure to fill give a full report when I return... (At least one of my readers has pointed out several typos and spelling errors in the blog, which I will have to try to correct at some point. I apologize for these.)

Posted by Jeremy Kahn at October 25, 2003 02:23 AM