leadership protesting against economic disadvan-
tages and voicing African grievances began to
bring about change. In the Ivory Coast Felix
Houphouët-Boigny founded an African Demo-
cratic Party in 1946 which won widespread sup-
port, in large part fired by the continuing system of
forced labour and low wages – that is, grievances
directly affecting African life. Meanwhile, French
governments were ready to abandon the more bla-
tant forms of centralised colonial control, to intro-
duce reforms in their colonial administration and
to allow more representation in the French
Assembly. The idea being propagated was internal
autonomy in a French Union freely supported by
the African peoples. In fact, the Union was
intended to maintain and indeed strengthen eco-
nomic and political links between metropolitan
France and French Africa, and indeed with the
whole French empire, now so unfashionable. The
vision was one of partnership in a common cause in
the service of a French Republic restored to great-
ness as a world power. It was never intended as an
equal partnership. It proved an illusion that led
France and its former empire in Indo-China and
North Africa to much grief and bloodshed.
Independence was conceded only after bitter
conflict. In black West Africa, however, unlike
Algeria, armed conflict was avoided, except in the
Cameroon. The transfer of power from the mid-
1950s was peaceful and inevitable. But the setting
up of territorial assemblies with elected African
deputies, increased representation in the French
Assembly in Paris, and the establishment of a fed-
eral Grand Conseil for French West Africa to assist
the governor-generals, now renamed high com-
missioners, were no more than palliatives. Black
Africans remained second-class citizens. After
Ghana had become independent in 1957, with the
struggle in Algeria still at a crucial stage, de Gaulle
marked his return to power in 1958 with an elab-
orate initiative: he devised a new constitutional
settlement. The French Union would now become
the French Community; its members would con-
tinue to receive French economic and technical
aid; the former French colonial territories would
receive internal autonomy and titular independ-
ence but would still be tied to Paris. The French
Community was submitted to a referendum in the
French colonial territories in November 1958. As
economic aid was still indispensable, all but one
West African state, Guinea, voted to approve the
Community and to remain within it. But during
1959 and 1960 the African governing elites all
demanded complete independence, and Paris had
to accept that its efforts to maintain imperial polit-
ical control in ever more ingenious guises had
failed: the remaining black African nations of for-
mer French West and Equatorial Africa were
granted independence in 1960.
The Côte D’Ivoire, the most populous of the
former French territories, was economically better
off in the early 1990s as an independent country,
though it was still impoverished by Western stan-
dards. In the 1930s agricultural development had
been rapid, and cacao, coffee and palm oil became
the chief export crops. As the 1990s began, the
Ivory Coast was a one-party state and had been
ruled since independence in 1960 by French-
educated Felix Houphouët-Boigny, formerly a
minister in Paris and a member of the Assembly
who had abandoned his early adherence to com-
munism. Economically the Ivory Coast advanced
and diversified as the pragmatic Houphouët-
Boigny welcomed Western capital and French aid
and associated the country closely with France.
Eighty-seven years old in 1992, he no longer
enjoyed reverential respect. The fall of the prices
of cocoa and coffee had had an adverse effect on
the economy, and servicing the foreign debt swal-
lowed up a sizeable proportion of export earn-
ings. Economic conditions rapidly deteriorated. A
new generation of students, teachers, profession-
als and trade unionists was no longer prepared to
accept meekly the rule of the ‘fathers of the
nation’, the corruption and one-party states. The
West became dominant on the continent fol-
lowing the collapse of the Soviet Union, and
Houphouët-Boigny had to make the gesture of
allowing for the first time in October 1990 a con-
tested presidential election. His control of the
levers of power until his death in 1994 ensured
victory, but that did not end demands for a tran-
sition to a broader sharing of power and spoils.
Like Nkrumah, Houphouët-Boigny wasted
millions on imposing architecture in his poor
country. The capital boasts the famous basilica
1
THE END OF WHITE RULE IN WEST AFRICA 727
