The Masque of Africa_ Glimpses of African Belief - By V. S. Naipaul Page 0,75

Football released great passions here. Houphouët’s stadium was orange-coloured. Orange was the colour of the national side. Six weeks later, when Ivory Coast was playing Malawi, and winning, a wall in the stadium fell down and sixty-nine people died.

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ABIDJAN HAD grown so much I had trouble thinking back to the town I had known in 1982. I had stayed then in the Forum Hotel. No one seemed to know about it now. I remembered an open field across the road where fat baobab trees grew. I remembered the lagoon, like the sea, outside one of the hotel’s public rooms; in the heat of the afternoon the algae-covered water rocked and it was then like an undulating green carpet. I remembered a general feeling of openness. There was nothing like that now; all those memories seemed to have been swallowed up by time itself. Two days before I left, a taxi-driver, showing me the sights, took me to the Golf Hotel. It was set, stylishly, a little way from the busy road and the lagoon was at its back. It would have been the old Forum, re-made in the image of over-peopled Africa, with a new kind of staff and a new kind of clientele.

Houphouët, promoting his town of Yamoussoukro, had built an autoroute to it from Abidjan. A hundred and fifty miles, mainly bush: at the time it had seemed part of the vainglory and general wastefulness of Yamoussoukro. But the autoroute was now in use, beaten up in parts, a short stretch replaced by a red dirt road (tree branches on the asphalt announcing the diversion), and it was now the main thoroughfare for heavy trucks from the north and the countries to the north, bringing supplies to Abidjan.

Between Abidjan and Yamoussoukro the land is ravaged. For a hundred and fifty miles the tropical woodland or forest has been cut down and replaced by patches of petty planting: banana, knotty cassava (introduced to Africa by the Portuguese): the subsistence food of people who are not yet a peasantry. They make scratchings in the bush; these scratchings may develop into a village of grass and mud and mats (for the roof), and that village might turn into something more durable, of concrete and tin.

The pressure on the land is great; the migrants never stop coming down from the poor and arid north. From the days of Houphouët and the French there is a myth of the blessedness of the lush Ivory Coast where no one need starve. Needs are small; there isn’t the time or space to think of grandeur. But, in spite of the myth, it is possible that in that ravaged, once forested land they will one day be hungry. For people to aim at grandeur they must have a picture of grandeur in their minds. Houphouët didn’t provide this. His rhetorical buildings were part of the private magic that served him alone.

The land has suffered much. The Ivory Coast—land of ivory beside Ghana’s land of gold—is now without the elephants that by their death provided the ivory of their tusks. There are two cruel elephant monuments in Abidjan—one of a female elephant with her calf (elephants are food in this part of Africa), and a tall awkward obelisk composed (wickedly) of elephant tusks alone. Many small hands got rid of the mighty elephants, and many little scratchings have surely destroyed the great forest.

In another direction—east of Abidjan, to Bingerville—the idea of landscape has been undone or certainly hidden by line upon line of inelegant small houses. I remembered the road to Bingerville as a road through country, almost wilderness. Now it belongs to the developers; and the wretchedness of Abidjan encroaches.

Bingerville is named for Binger, a French governor of the Ivory Coast. And there is so little of history and architecture here in this former French colony that Binger’s house, said to be a great house, is promoted as one of the sights. It is far from being a great house. There are a score of grander public and private buildings in a small place like Trinidad, on the other side of the Atlantic; and Binger’s house is now, more appropriately, an orphanage: Africa drowning in the fecundity of its people.

In Ghana, just next door, with the same kind of people and climate and vegetation, the British (as they did elsewhere in the empire) created a botanical garden, which still more or less stands, with a few local intrusions. Next to Binger’s house there is said to