Ugh ugh… dusting off this blog is tough work… all these spiderwebs, yuk !
So…, wow, 24 November 2007 and today is 24 March 2008, rrrrright. 4 months…
Sorry for being soundly asleep for all this time, so yeah in the end it seems I did not fall of this earth (in case you were wondering).
Where shall I start? I just came back from a weekend in Yamoussoukro, so I will try to give you a little impression of the little I saw in one and a half day over there. It was something else, let me tell you that!
The trip from Abidjan was about 3 hours by bus, well, UN bus of course. Which means not stopping at the 23490423 checkpoints along the road, which might make your trip just a tad longer… The highway was large and amazingly well paved, much better than many highways I have seen in Italy, Greece, France and Spain. Then there was forest on both sides, becoming less thick the further north we went and, every now and then, a tiny village on the roadside with a little market one could buy fruits and vegetables from. Once almost in Yamoussoukro, the highway becomes more a B-road with just 2 lanes and a couples of bumps here and there. For some stretches, I have seen the magic three colors of this country, which I am sure Côte d’Ivoire shares with many other African countries as well: the bright RED dirt road, with bright GREEN bush on wrapped around the road tightly on both sides and the bright BLUE of the sky filled with the heat of the sun. It is just magic.
And then tadaa, there it is, the supposed capital of Côte d’Ivoire. Supposed, because it is not. All government institutions and people working in them are in Abidjan. But wait, there is more.
Imagine any huge country capital with perfectly paved and well-illuminated 8-lane roads all over, a great number of fancy looking universities and a GINORMOUS cathedral like the one in the Vatican. Ow yeah, and two hotels that seem teleported over here straight from Dubai. And then… emptiness, only the vastness of endless fields of coconut trees.
The roads are deserted. The cathedral is deserted. The universities are deserted (well, I did go during the weekend…!). There is a single street with maquis (Ivorian open air restaurants) only. There are also enormous institutes of this and that, lodges, presidential palaces and other gigantic-constructions-with too-much-marble-and-blasting-airconditioning-for-2,5-mostly-sleeping-or-at-least-sleepy-guardians-and-nobody-else.
The climate is far nicer than in Abidjan, it was far less hot and, in the evening and mornings, even quite chilly. Actually, for the record, on Sunday morning 23 March 2008, for the first time in 5 months since I have been here, I have pronounced the following words: “I’m cold!” Once I shared this revelation with a Belgian friend and colleague we both looked at each other seriously and then burst out laughing bitterly because surely we did not wish more of such horrid and nightmare-provoking northwestern European climate back up here.
Needless to say that we ate rather copious quantities, dare I say it, HEAPS, of food at every occasion which made the bus shiver and shake once we climbed back inside along with our severely strained digestion system.
All in all, never have my eyes met such an outlandish empty extravaganza, a Las Vegas or Qatar where much is in place but where most still needs to be constructed, and where somebody simply forgot to invite people to actually come live there. I think it might be the set constructed for the next edition of the Truman Show and all that needs to be done yet is to give the green light to the movie crew and all the cast to start doing their predefined laps. So yeah, the next Truman Burbank might be Ivorian!
I must say I am very happy to have visited it, to have seen something so extravagant that if you would tell a European or North American that it exists in Africa they would lock you up in a mental institute; to have witnessed a city that, once filled with entrepreneurial people and a big population, could become a new pearl to this amazing country; to have seen that, no matter how often you try to understand, reason and then explain something, and all the more if this something is African, you miserably fail to grasp its many subtleties and intricacies.
I wish with all my heart it will never stop me from trying.
Best,
Fra
