Word: abidjan
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...French West Africa's nearly 19 million people, nine million are Moslems, one million Christians, the rest pagan animists. The Negroes alone speak 120 different languages. Just outside the teeming modern city of Abidjan, villagers still slaughter small children and toss their disemboweled bodies into the river to make sure of a good year's fishing. Until this year, Mauritania, whose Berber people call themselves "whites" (Bidanes), felt itself too poor to have a capital of its own: it shared Saint-Louis, which was the capital of black Senegal. In Dahomey, which means "The Belly of Dan," after...
...West Africa is wholly dependent on France and the French Union for nearly 80% of its trade-France has a reservoir of good will. French West Africa's most noted political leader is Félix Houphouet-Boigny, sophisticated mayor of the Ivory Coast's capital of Abidjan and a minister of state in De Gaulle's Cabinet. Says he: "We don't want independence. My neighbor Nkrumah in Ghana is independent, and as a result must support an army which is very expensive. Who is really independent, anyway...
...Avion!" With its huge exports of cocoa ($30 million a year) and coffee ($60 million), as well as its dense forests, the Ivory Coast is rich by comparison. By sunrise the people of Abidjan are already on their way to work, the men loping along in giant and graceful strides, bantering in a French laced with local slang, e.g., "Avion!" for "Hurry up!", "Japan" for anything shoddy. The symbol of the Coast's progress is the French-financed Felix Houphouet-Boigny Bridge that stretches across the Ebrié Lagoon and supports a four-lane highway and a two-track...
...would-be adventurers in the Care Capriccio should get a big bang out of "A Far Place." It is by an ex-MacLeish student, who spent two years in Accra, Dakar, and Abidjan working for Texaco, and has also played factory hand, circus roustabout, department store salesman, U.P. Staff correspondent, and Associate Editor of the Paris Review. He also spent a year writing "A Far Place," in Paris, before becoming a Barnard English teacher...
...grows on his plantation. "Every year I force myself to give up something I like." This still leaves him a good deal. In Paris he wears expensive European suits, is driven around town in his black Cadillac by a white French chauffeur, lives in a luxurious apartment. In Abidjan he wears cotton native robes, keeps a black Chrysler, maintains a house there and in his native village of Yamoussoukio, where he has torn down the straw huts and replaced them with 500 new concrete houses...