Before the French
The forests and savannahs of what is now Côte d'Ivoire were never a single state. In the north the Kong Empire, a Dyula trading and Muslim-scholarship power, rose in the early eighteenth century around the town of Kong before Samory Touré sacked it in 1897. In the centre the Baoulé arrived in the eighteenth century in a migration led, in the oral tradition, by Queen Abla Pokou, who is said to have sacrificed her son to cross a river — the name Baoulé is glossed as "the child is dead".
The coast itself was slow to be colonised because it had no great harbours and a fearsome surf. Europeans named its stretches for what they extracted — the Grain Coast, the Ivory Coast, the Gold Coast, the Slave Coast — and the French did not impose real control inland until a long, brutal campaign of "pacification" that ran past 1915.
The Houphouët machine
Félix Houphouët-Boigny, a Baoulé chief and planter, founded a growers' union in 1944, served as a minister in Paris, and steered the colony to independence on 7 August 1960 without a war. He then ruled for 33 years as a one-party patron, keeping France close, keeping cocoa and coffee prices high enough to buy peace, and pouring a fortune into his home village of Yamoussoukro — including the Basilica of Our Lady of Peace, the largest church in the world, consecrated by the Pope in 1990.
The model worked while commodity prices held. When they collapsed in the 1980s the debts came due, structural adjustment bit, and the succession Houphouët had never arranged became a fight. He died in December 1993 leaving a country richer than its neighbours and far more brittle than it looked.
Ivoirité and the wars
The politics of the 1990s invented a word — ivoirité, "Ivorian-ness" — to disqualify the northern, largely Muslim rival Alassane Ouattara on the claim that he was not truly Ivorian. It was ethnic gatekeeping dressed as citizenship law, and it lit the fuse.
A 2002 rebellion split the country between a rebel-held north and a government south. A fragile peace held until the 2010 election, when Laurent Gbagbo refused to concede defeat to Ouattara; the stand-off killed roughly 3,000 people before French and UN forces helped remove Gbagbo in April 2011. Gbagbo was tried at the International Criminal Court and acquitted in 2019. Ouattara, having won again in 2015, took a contested third term in 2020. The economy recovered fast; the reconciliation did not.
Cocoa, Abidjan and after
Côte d'Ivoire is the world's largest cocoa producer, growing over 40 per cent of the beans the world turns into chocolate — and capturing only a sliver of the value, the cocoa-to-chocolate gap that shadows Ghana next door. In 2019 the two neighbours tried to set a price floor together through a "living income differential", with mixed success.
Abidjan, built across lagoons, is one of West Africa's great cities, its towers and Treichville nightlife matched by the reggae of Alpha Blondy and the coupé-décalé that spilled from Ivorian clubs across the continent. Football gave it Didier Drogba, whose televised 2005 plea helped pause the civil war. The official capital moved to Yamoussoukro in 1983, but Abidjan is still where power and money actually live.