Ivory Coast

After seventeen hours of flying and four hours of waiting, I arrive in Ivory Coast from Singapore. I’m in the terminal building, just having gotten off the Air Afrique flight (pronounced “I freak” and lives up to it) and I walk into the customs area. Everyone getting off the plane has in addition to their passport and entry forms a yellow card, which reads “Vaccinacion”. Everyone but me and one or two hapless others, that is. Since my French consists of - oh - nothing – I try as best as I can to figure out what is about to happen to me. It turns out that everyone entering Cote d’Ivoire (pronounced Coat div wahr) has to be vaccinated for Yellow Fever. Delightful.
Well, I’ve never been vaccinated for Yellow Fever, and in any case if I had been I couldn’t prove it. So a “Health Inspector” leads several of us away to an office upstairs. He takes a bunch of French speaking Africans into the office for a few minutes and they emerge and leave. Then I go in. I am not looking forward to this – the one thing I’ve heard about health care especially in Sub- Saharan Africa is if someone offers to stick something in you, say no. Most needles are reused in this land of the AIDS virus, and it’s hard to be sure… his needles are wrapped in plastic, sitting in a bowl on his desk that in the US would be used to offer you candy. However bad Yellow Fever is, I think I’ll take my chances. The “doctor” says some things in French. “Anglaise?” I look at him hopefully.

“No vaccination. 15,000 Francs.”
15,000 Francs?! That’s $300 US!
“No no, Cote d’Ivoire francs. $15 US.”
“Ah. So – do you take Singapore dollars?” I show him the money.
He looks at it, turns it over, looks at me quizzically.
“You American?”
“Yes.”
“What is this?”
“Oh, that’s Singapore money.”
“No good. US, French…”
“I don’t have any.”
“You go back to France then.” I shrug. This seems to work in a lot of graft situations, which I have just figured out this is. The three people who went in before me could not possibly have gotten vaccinated and paid in that time unless the “doctor” was throwing darts. I definitely don’t want the vaccination anyway. I don’t want to go back to France, though. But that would involve paperwork, and the nature of graft in the “developing world” is that usually the grafter doesn’t bother too much. It’s a transaction of fear and greed – if you frighten the tourist he will instinctively reach for the wallet to get out of trouble. If you frighten one and he doesn’t he probably doesn’t have anything.
So he looks at the Singapore monopoly money, and I write down “2$US = 1$Singapore”. Actually, it’s more like 1$US = 1.5 $Sing, but hell, if he doesn’t know, he doesn’t know. I offer him $10 Sing. He points to it and motions, again. OK. So I give him $20 Sing and he waves me away. I point to the syringes. “No vaccination?” I ask. He says something in French that seems to mean get lost before I put your Yankee ass on a plane to Kenya. I walk up to immigration. They say nothing about any vaccination form, and I waltz through customs.

Uniquely Intercontinental?

My next stop is a hotel, as western as possible, so I can start sending email and get a presentation together. The Intercon – they’re the same everywhere, I’m thinking. The one in Cambodia could have been in midtown Manhattan. And here, they’re not so pricey – only $145 a night. I decide to book in with them, and after turning away an airport “friend” who wants to help me change my Singapore dollars on the black market and find me a cab – instead I hop in the Intercon van with an Israeli who’s working for the World Bank. The trip is uneventful and we arrive at Hotel Ivoire and I check in. The clerk looks scornfully at my airport room booking, which means he cannot charge me the $320 front desk walk-in rate. I am whisked up to my room. And I begin to realize that not every Intercon hotel is the same… as the commercial says, around the world one hotel is in touch with the local customs… and this one sure is. This place looks like it was reasonably furnished back in the Kennedy era. There is a little TV sitting on a table and two beds that looks a little like army cots and a toilet that is doing bass for Led Zeppelin. I do a quick survey of the phone and electricity – and I can’t use the wall jack, so
I ask the bellboy to send up a converter. An hour later, I go down to the front desk. They’ve never seen a hack like that. I say “Well, it’s just like that one” pointing to the clerk’s portable phone. Ah. That kind of jack. “OK, we’ll send someone up.” So their guy comes up and he speaks French of course, so we have a conversation in sign language, and he leaves. He returns with another guy. They take a phone cord I have and splice a new end on to it and they leave. It doesn’t work. So using a nail clipper and a file (as wire cutter and screwdriver respectively) I splice the phone line into the phone itself and dial up Compuserve – and of course the number they gave me doesn’t work. I crack a beer from the mini bar using the bottle opener in the bathroom and take a census of the roach population.
So I figure I’ll get some cash changed, get some food and go write my presentation. Of course they have never seen Sing dollars either. And the bank is closed. And it reopens Monday. So I ask them about an advance of American Express. “No no, we can’t do that.” After going back and forth with them, they send me to the manager, who says no, then how much. So I get 50,000 Cote d’Ivoire Francs ($100 US) and go and collapse in my room.

Come to Cote d’Ivoire and see our Capitals

The next day I decide to see something of Ivory Coast before I get embroiled in business for the next few days. Usually you couldn’t get me up at 7am on a Sunday, but then it feels to me like it’s 1pm because I’m still on Singapore time. I decide to take in the sights. It’s Sunday. The laundry is closed, the business center is closed, and of course the tourist agency is also to be sure closed. So I cut a deal with the concierge to find me an English speaking taxi driver. He agrees to take me to the old capital of Grand Bassam with his friend who speaks no English. My guide gives me a fact sheet of Cote d’Ivoire that sounds like CNN – I’m hearing about power projects and family planning, animism and highway projects, the history of the colonial capital, the church dedicated by John Paul II in 1984. He takes me enroute to see the river in Abidjan.
This is Cote d’Ivoire in a nutshell: a woman making soap from animal fat and palm oil, a process her people have done for a thousand or more years; maybe 50,000 – this is Africa. She is on the bank of a tiny river, where immigrants from the surrounding countries that are not as well off as Ivory Coast are beating laundry against rocks, waist deep in a muddy river. Over them run high tension power lines, behind them is a 6 lane super highway developed by the World Bank, and they are downstream from an industrial park developed by Dupont (which may be making Tide for people in New York.) Among the laundry are T-shirts for the New York Knicks and kente cloths, which tell the history of an entire clan since the time of Marco Polo. When my laundry comes back from the hotel now I look at it and wonder.
This life experience costs me 500 IC Francs through the driver – it would cost me more but I don’t have a camera. People are still afraid you will steal their souls with the camera, but they’ll let you take their picture if it will buy them a meal.
We also pass by a market – it’s one half plantains and roosters brought in from the countryside, and one half expired Duracell batteries that couldn’t be sold in Atlanta anymore. The market exists in wooden shacks built on the grass of a cloverleaf to the city’s main expressway. You know – that patch of grass that usually has a big sign on it that says route 80 stay left. This one has that sign but it’s partially obscured by a shack where a guy is selling goats.
So having done a quick tour of Abidjan we head out of town to Grand Bassam, the old capital of Cote d’Ivoire, abandoned after an epidemic of Yellow Fever a century ago (hmmm. Maybe I should have taken that vaccination.) French colonial decay. An old wine house in the center of town still has the columns and roof but little else. I tell the driver to stop at a decayed villa, first abandoned probably a century ago. But the outside is painted with a riot of colors and the French sign says something about art, and I wander in. This place would do well in Soho. Although the concrete walls have been decaying for a few World Wars, the paintings hanging on them are actually very good. And the murals painted on the concrete show a passion that ain’t entirely for the tourists because no one will be taking them home. My guide (Konan – and in the words of Dave Barry I’m not making this up) hands me a decapitated coconut which I drain and toss with Konan’s on the lawn. We head back for Abidjan.
Ah, but there is a slight twist of fate. As we turn on to the main road the local gendarme close off the outbound lane of the road to traffic. The president of Cote d’Ivoire is enroute from the capital to dedicate a Cathedral at this crossroads. We’re stuck. We plant ourselves under a tree and wait out the welcoming ceremony, complete with big Cote d’Ivoire flags.
Ironically the flag is the reverse of the Irish flag, making me initially wonder why everyone here hates Ireland. It actually is orange (symbolizing the savanna) on one side, green (symbolizing the forest) on the other, with white between them symbolizing peace. I start to tell my driver about the Irish flag and it’s symbolism of 400 years of sectarian hatred, and then decide to skip it
I cross the street to our parked car and get my cigarettes and a Frenchmen tries to bum one off of me – but I’ve just run out. We end up talking – I’m expecting a lecture about American neo colonialism and it turns out he spent most of his childhood about ½ a mile from where I live, and if he was 15 years younger he would have gone to school with many of my friends from Queens. We talk for a while about Bryant High School. Reality check – I’m in sub Saharan Africa. Does not compute. This is like talking to the head of Caltex Vietnam about a pool hall in Bayside Queens while having a beer in old Saigon.
He asks me half jokingly, “So, are you CIA?”
I say “More likely IRA. But neither.”
He buys some tangerines for my drivers and me and passes the rest around the crowd under the tree. He’s a multimillionaire who distributes for the oil companies here and owns the largest plantain plantation (say that three times fast) in West Africa.
Soon the president of Cote d’Ivoire (along with his wife and the wife of the president of Ghana) pass by squeezed into the sunroof of a BMW. The crowd chases after the car, accompanied by a brass band playing a mixture of tribal music and jazz. Elders hobble by dressed in kente. And we’re back on the road to Abidjan after the traffic clears.

The Heart of Darkness Bar? No that’s in Cambodia…

At the end of a brutally long Texaco day, I sit in a bar at the Unique Intercontinental. My companion Walterah has just departed. He is Cote d’Ivoire middle class. He has a silk shirt on, wears a gold watch, he’s dressed far better than I am on my best day and drives a Lexus. He orders me a local beer (“Flag”) but gets a Tuborg Gold for himself. I’ve been informed by the upper management of Texaco a few hours before that Walterah will be working with me for the near future but he may not have a future at Texaco, so I need to work with other people as well. He is native Cote d’Ivoire, about to be downsized by imports from Quebec and Cameroon, though he does not know it yet and I can’t tell him. He’s engaged and going to get married soon. He stays as long as custom requires, and leaves me with my beer.
Occasionally when you are in Nicaragua or the Philippines or Cote d’Ivoire, you find yourself in a reverie about this new place that you are in, which before now was a blotch of color on a map but is now made real. A place where impoverished immigrants from Mali were beating clothes against a rock in a muddy polluted river every day of your life, the day you played your first game of monopoly and the day you broke your arm, though you didn’t know it. The sunset through the palms outside the hotel could be the Bahamas. These guys playing the blues could be some long lost quarter of New Orleans. But then a child with a leg twisted by some disease you’ve only heard about through Save the Children’s 3am appeal hits you up for spare change and you remember that this is Africa, 300 miles from Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Liberia is 100 miles away, exploring a new lower limit for the human condition through a war waged by 12 year olds. When you go back to your room you still have your email.