Félix Houphouët-Boigny is thought to have been born on 18 Oct. 1905 in the town of Yamoussoukro. The son of a wealthy Baule tribe chief, he became a rural doctor as well as a wealthy planter. At five years old, Houphouet-Boigny inherited his father’s chief status and his cocoa plantation. He studied at primary and secondary school in his village and graduated as a medical assistant in Dakar, Senegal.
From 1925 to 1940, Houphouet-Boigny worked in medicine throughout the Ivory Coast. By 1944, his family’s plantation was prosperous, and he rose to political prominence by organizing the Syndicat Agricole Africain (SAA), a union that defended farmworkers and planters’ interests. In 1945, he was elected as the Ivory Coast’s deputy to the French Constituent Assembly.
Successively traditional leader, doctor, planter, trade union leader, deputy in France, minister in many French governments, president of the Ivorian National Assembly, mayor of Abidjan, Ivorian prime minister and first president of Côte d’Ivoire from 1960 to 1993, Félix Houphouët-Boigny plays a leading role in the process of decolonization of Africa, and dominates until the end of his life, the political scene in his native country.
Houphouët-Boigny became prime minister of the Côte d’Ivoire government in 1959 and was elected the first president of the independent country in 1960. He was reelected to the presidency unopposed in 1965, 1970, 1975, 1980, and 1985. A skillful and pragmatic politician, he won over opponents to his one-party rule through cooperation, consensus, and compromise.
From the start Houphouët-Boigny pursued liberal free-enterprise policies and developed Côte d’Ivoire’s cash-crop agriculture at a time when many other African nations were pursuing costly and abortive attempts at state-run industrialization. Under his leadership the country became a major exporter of cocoa, coffee, pineapples, and palm oil. Houphouët-Boigny welcomed foreign investment and cooperated closely with France in economic matters, even going so far as to employ thousands of French technical and managerial personnel to ensure his country’s development. By the early 1980s Côte d’Ivoire had one of the highest per capita incomes of any sub-Saharan African nation without petroleum exports. In 1990 Houphouët-Boigny was reelected in Côte d’Ivoire’s first contested presidential elections.
However, this cooperation with France does not stop at the economic level alone. Relying on the networks of French influence in Africa of Jacques Foccart, close to General de Gaulle, he pursues a policy which translates into unconditional and mutual support from the two countries. This position allows France to keep, between the influences of the United States and the Soviet Union, control of its “backyard” during the Cold War. In exchange, Félix Houphouët-Boigny, the man of France in Africa, carved out a special place for himself on the African scene, especially in French-speaking Africa and in the Gulf of Guinea, where his influence was great. His fortune was estimated to be between $ 7 billion and $ 11 billion.
In the West, Houphouët-Boigny was commonly known as the “Sage of Africa” or the “Grand Old Man of Africa”. Houphouët-Boigny moved the country’s capital from Abidjan to his hometown of Yamoussoukro and built the world’s largest church there, the Basilica of Our Lady of Peace, at a cost of US$300 million. At the time of his death, he was the longest-serving leader in Africa’s history and the third longest-serving leader in the world after Fidel Castro of Cuba and Kim Il Sung of North Korea. In 1989, UNESCO created the Félix Houphouët-Boigny Peace Prize for the “safeguarding, maintaining and seeking of peace”.
On December 7, 1993, Félix Houphouet-Boigny died in Yamoussoukro, his city of birth and the capital of the Ivory Coast. After his death, conditions in Ivory Coast quickly deteriorated. Between 1994 and 2002, there were a number of coups, a devaluation of the CFA franc and an economic recession; a civil war began in 2002.
Some of Houphouet-Boigny Quotes:
“In front of this tree which you see there, the tree of the tortured, the tree of the sacrifices of my elders, I had made the commitment, almost thirty years ago, when I left school , In recognition of all that the Akwés have done for me, to offer other sacrifices, the sacrifice of self-love, the sacrifice of money, the sacrifice of myself. “
– Tribute to his native village, Yamoussoukro, May 3, 1956,
“It is not the framework of independence that matters, but the content: economic content, social content, human content. If we could, from our resources alone, by our To the African man the happiness we wish him, we would have chosen nominal independence in spite of everything that tied us to France, but because we are convinced that we can not ensure the real progress of Africa We have preferred, in view of the law of the century, the interdependence of peoples, we preferred to integrate ourselves into a large economic and political group, which is the Franco-African Community.”
– Press Conference in Paris, June 9, 1959
“In Côte d’Ivoire, where the consciousness of responsibility from generation to generation is so vivid, pride means that each one of us leaves more to the future generation than he has received.”
“Sterile condemnations, even repeated to satiety, only meet indifference among those who have the madness to dominate the world.”
– To the Ivorian National Assembly, January 15, 1962.
“On the day when those who provoke wars must be in the front line, at the head of the men they engage in the turmoil, we will certainly see fewer wars on our planet. Personally, assured to be safe in concrete shelters or far from the line of fire, while their peoples, torn from their peaceful occupations, will be forced to kill each other.”
“It is a mistake to believe that there is no alternative but war to eliminate apartheid, when one can and must, from a perspective of peace in Africa In any case, dialogue will prevail one day, before or after the war, and it is infinitely preferable to resort to it as soon as possible in order to avoid war, which I will never repeat enough Nowadays.”
– At the National Council, July 1, 1971.
