Chocolate soldiers: West makes Ivory Coast safe for cocoa

The best indication of the depth of the crisis in the Ivory Coast lies in its very name.

Much as it is now known as perhaps the primary global supplier to the cocoa industry, it started life as a place where ivory was found.

This was of course right next to a coast where gold was found and in the general coastal area where slaves could also be obtained. Only commodities. Never people.

Today there is optimism that the county will go back to being the region’s economic powerhouse.

However, the realities of the country’s history indicate that Allassane Ouattara’s entry into State House there will no more prove a cure than Laurent Gbagbo’s presidency ever was.

If it is indeed true that some 54 per cent of the electorate voted for Ouattara, then it means that nearly half the electorate — the 46 per cent who voted for Gbagbo — voted against.

Talking glibly to impoverished citizens about winners and losers in these circumstances can therefore actually become counterproductive, especially when they feel that the outcome puts their livelihoods at stake.

The current crisis seems to carry the old historical resonance: That the economic goods of the region have always held more importance to the world than the people actually living there.

This could help explain why, despite the fact that the people are politically split nearly fifty-fifty, the Western powers are for once determined to see an African election result, however marginal, implemented to the fullest extent of whatever military might can be mustered.

All this in defence of not even an economy, but of a commodity to which some wretched African voters find themselves harnessed.

This outcome however masks a much deeper malaise that could see the country headed towards decades of instability if the more fundamental questions about its origins are not honestly addressed.

The Ivorian cocoa economy became much bigger than the capacity of the original population to work it, and so there began decades of an increasing reliance on labour from informal migrants from the neighbouring countries. This is where the real story of the crisis begins.

The northern support base for the man declared winner of the ill-fated November elections comprises descendants of generations of migrants who came to the country to feed the cocoa industry’s labour needs.

Now totalling nearly half the population, their status in the country has been subject to legal scrutiny and policy U-turns anywhere between being deemed illegal immigrants to being declared new naturalised citizens.

This vacillation revealed a deeper problem of “status anxiety” among the original peoples who first found themselves Ivorians at the start of the colonial project, and now nearly outnumbered by gastarbeiten, and whom Gbagbo, in his desperation, increasingly claimed to represent.