Côte d’Ivoire

Côte d’Ivoire turns a long, straight face to the Gulf of Guinea. In the east the shore is a chain of lagoons behind sandbars; westward, rocky headlands break the beaches around Sassandra and San-Pédro. Rainforest once covered the whole south, and in what remains of it at Taï chimpanzees crack nuts with stone hammers. Inland the trees thin into savannah crossed by the Comoé, and the land rises only in the west, around Man, towards Mount Nimba.

European sailors named the coast for the elephant tusks traded there. Inland lay older powers: Kong, a Dyula merchant town, and the Baoulé, whose founding story tells of Queen Abla Pokou leading her people west from Asante in the eighteenth century. France made the territory a colony in 1893, governing first from Grand-Bassam until yellow fever drove officials out. Félix Houphouët-Boigny, a doctor and cocoa planter, led the country to independence in August 1960, then governed it for more than three decades.

Bété, Senufo, Dan and dozens of other peoples share the country, mostly Christian in the south and Muslim in the north. Dan masks and Senufo carvings sit in museums worldwide, and coupé-décalé, the dance music born among Ivorian DJs in Paris, swept West and Central Africa. In open-air eateries called maquis, grilled fish comes with attiéké, a couscous of fermented cassava. Smallholders in the forest belt harvest cocoa, the mainstay of exports, alongside cashews, rubber, palm oil and coffee.