For many years, Ivory Coast was a byword for instability. From the 1999 coup, to the outbreak of civil war in 2002, to the violence after the 2010 elections, the West African state went through a prolonged crisis.
But recent news from the country has been much more positive: with peace has come impressive growth, making it one of the world’s fastest growing economies.
Abidjan always had style, even when I was living here at the height of the civil war a decade ago.
There’s something about the combination of palm trees and skyscrapers, their neon lights reflected in the city’s lagoon like shimmering promises, that gets even the most prosaic soul soaring.
The cityscape has been compared to Manhattan, or – like many a town in Francophone Africa – the French capital: Petit Paris, they called it.
Over the years Abidjan has been a magnet for chancers, dreamers and those looking for a better life – from Ivory Coast and all over West Africa.
Even on its worst days, when gunshots echoed around the streets near the presidential palace, or the smoke from burning tyres stained the horizon, Abidjan maintained a sort of put-upon glamour, like a film star living in drastically reduced circumstances, determined not to let the indignity show.
Those violent times are over, at least for now, and they have been replaced by an economic boom. The country has been at peace for five years, and since then GDP growth has averaged 9% a year.
You can hear the burgeoning economic confidence in the patter of investment fund managers, laying out the new pan-African opportunities radiating in and out of Ivory Coast’s economic capital.
You can taste it in the high-end restaurants in the Plateau, the central business district, where you can munch a crocodile carpaccio or the tenderest of steaks – at a cost, of course.
You can see it in the refurbished Hotel Ivoire, a building once symbolic of the country’s decay, now restored to its full glory, or in the new bridge across the lagoon, a toll highway of business-like concrete.
I found the changes in Abidjan most striking on one of the old bridges. A decade ago, soldiers would set up roadblocks here as night fell.
Men in uniform would ask drivers for “something to drink” – a bribe of a dollar or so. It was an unofficial toll booth, with the money extracted by fear.
At the time, I tried to work out how much cash disappeared into military pockets, and concluded it would be impossible to get rid of these roadblocks. Who would dare?
Well, I was wrong about that. They have been removed, and traffic now flows uninterrupted across the bridge.
BBC
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