Word: houphouet
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Billboards picturing Houphouet-Boigny, 86, are everywhere. They show Le Vieux in a charcoal-gray leisure suit surrounded by enthusiastic young Ivory Coasters, the camera angle chosen to make the tiny President look as tall as everyone else. Houphouet is regarded as a master politician. Says a Western diplomat: "When the Ivory Coast won a regional soccer game, everyone was convinced it was because Houphouet managed to buy off the other teams. They feel he is capable of anything...
...symbol of the Ivory Coast's profound cultural disjunction is a huge edifice that rises from flat green fields at Yamoussoukro, Houphouet's native village: the Basilica of Our Lady of Peace, which cost some $175 million, a gesture of lifeless grandiosity. Amid the grazing goats and the lagoons, the basilica looks like an ill-shapen mushroom, massive from a distance and strangely sterile up close. Ismail Serageldin, director of the technical department at the World Bank, observed during a recent Cairo lecture dealing with culture shock that there were "certain symbols of a society dissociated from its own people...
...Houphouet-Boigny is old. Forty-three percent of his country's population is age 15 or younger, and most are uneducated. Last year university students rioted, and an elite military assault team attacked their dormitories. The army sees the students as pampered rich kids. Class differences are rising. The future may belong to the educated young -- or it could be dictated by the embittered, uneducated masses from which the army and the gendarmerie draw their recruits. As elsewhere in Africa, there are two deadly races: economic growth against population, and basic education against ignorance...
...Basilica of Our Lady of Peace in Yamoussoukro, he will be consecrating the biggest church on the African continent. But critics of the structure, which cost more than $200 million, charge that the Pope will also be giving his blessing to the monumental extravagance of Ivorian President Felix Houphouet-Boigny. In response to questions about where the funds came from, the President insists that he used his own fortune to finance the basilica...
Embarrassed Catholic leaders have tried to stress the basilica's importance as a bulwark of Christianity. But others say Houphouet-Boigny has more earthly aims: to use the Pope's visit to clinch a seventh successive five-year term in the upcoming presidential elections...