African Diaries XVII
Abidjan: well-paved roads that lead to… nowhere!
I set out to explore Abidjan on foot, early next morning. As per G.’s suggestion, I wanted to start out by Rue des Jardins Deux Plateaux area, and to get there, I’d have to walk for about half an hour through the streets the taxi took me home yesterday evening; so, I could try to retrace and find that very tiny street that seemed to be lined up by local, open air eateries.
It also meant that I would walk past Casino, the go-to supermarket brand in these parts of West Africa, where I could pick up a local SIM card. Picking up a local SIM card was one of the first things I kept on doing whenever I arrived at a new country, no matter how short or long I stayed there and in the case of Côte d’Ivoire, it was going to prove crucial!
Finding a functioning ATM to draw my first ever West African currency CFA’s, getting a breakfast sandwich and coffee and the SIM card proved much longer than imagined; the narrow street with the local eateries didn’t look as inviting as it did the first time, and by the time I got to Deux Plateux, I was weary with all the pretend French speaking and walking under a brazen sun with high humidity.
Another Casino supermarket came to rescue with its rich offerings of packages of fresh fruits, much more generous in size, and naturally much tastier for a fraction of the price of what you get at a Tesco back in the UK (this is despite Abidjan not being a cheap city). By the time I was out, my warm sweat had long vanished courtesy of the relentless, very cold air-conditioned climate blasted at the supermarket with its extremely bright white fluorescent light that outshone the tropical weather out.
The southerly section of Rue des Jardins which is closer to Boulevard François Mitterrand, a major east-west axis cutting across the city, is rich with home appliance, car repair, flower boutique store and other retailers. Around Rue des Jardins’s intersections with streets J74 and J88 are the majority of the cafés and restaurants, for which G. must have recommended me this place.
I take a small break, sitting on the pavement, a little further north, planning to make a change in direction as a man who appears to be asking for money approaches me — feeling embarrassed and somewhat frustrated by this point that I’m finding impossible to communicate with people due to my lack of French, I offer him some of my fruit cocktail, having now overstuffed myself, and start walking south and west.
Immediately west of Rue des Jardins are tree-lined avenues with fancy-looking detached houses, the likes of which I had seen only in one other place, Kigali. Trying not to resort to my phone and “search-engine powered mapping” application, trusting my sense of direction, as ever, I keep walking south and west, trying to get out of the neighbourhood, but at every other attempt, the street either ends at a sudden dead end or makes a full circle, bringing me back to where I started.
My frustration inevitably keeps growing, only tamed occasionally by patches of shade I find under palm trees of this neighbourhood with best pavements I have seen since, again, Kigali.
The frustration in the city’s unexpected cul-de-sac’s would reach its peak on my final morning en route to the airport, when, trying to be clever to find a shortcut out of the housing compound that my Airbnb was part of, to get to a nearest taxi as hassle-free and as quickly as possible, anticipating there has to be a pedestrian connection at the edge of one of the main streets that the map application may not show due to lack of accuracy, I ended up walking around the entire block for 15 minutes.
It’s as if the city’s layout was deliberately designed like a monkey puzzle tree!
Don’t get me wrong; I’ve actually really enjoyed walking around in Abidjan, despite the fact that, relative to its population, its being probably the most spread-out city – meaning it’s difficult to get from A to B on foot but it is certainly a great fitness and cardio exercise. The layout of the city has a lot to do with the time and model of urban development it has assumed. I’ve felt that this could be somewhat significant for cities like Accra are now on the path Abidjan went along a few decades ago.
Côte d’Ivoire is and has relatively been wealthier than its West African counterparts, owing to a number of reasons including close ties with the former coloniser French since independence in the 1960, supported by growth fuelled by agricultural export that benefitted from a competitive tax regime (owing to the fact that its rulers were already wealthy and could focus on the country’s overall economic growth instead of cash-cowing the producers).
Such close ties to France also meant that the country head-started with strong banking and financial institutions, received technical support from qualified French citizens relocating to Côte d’Ivoire. Particularly in the decade from the mid-60s to the mid-70s, diversification in agricultural products helped the country become a leading exporter in goods such as cocoa, coffee and timber.
With economic growth came population rush and infrastructure development into Abidjan that had now become the country’s economic and administrative centre. The city’s skyline, dotted with tall skyscrapers, which was the first I had encountered, to date, was a legacy of this development pattern from the 1970s and 1980s.
And, sadly, so were the major highways and boulevards that dissected through the city and cut its central neighbourhoods from those further out (to the north and east of the lagoon) where the main university, some of the administrative buildings and a lot of the foreigners’ residential areas were located.
Furthermore, the lost decade from the early 2000s to early 2010s to the Ivorian civil war gave the city a sense of time frozen from a bygone era.
Nowhere was this visually more starkly manifested than the magnificent “La Pyramide” built in 1968–1973 in Plateau, the French colonial part of the city: built as a true mixed-use building, trying to emulate the street market model in a covered setting with residential units atopping the retail units on a cascading design; its design failed its economic prospects with significant loss of floor space as the building rose towards the sky.
Walking to the La Pyramide from the St. Paul’s Cathedral on my 3rd day meant that I traversed the Plateau and the Commerce areas that make up the French-colonial centre of Abidjan and this was a welcome change from the previous day. On the second day, after having been frustrated by the cul-de-sacs, I had attempted to walk all the way into the centre but when encountering what looked like a spontaneous gang fight that drew crowds of students and young professionals away from the only stretch of non-motorised (and unpaved) piece of land that led to an overpass across the massive Autoroute de N highway, I had also backed off.
Now, having enjoyed walking through what felt like the leafy neighbourhoods of Istanbul my primary school was located in, where around the corner from a government agency building was a half-block sized fine example of a modernist residential building with balconies, followed by an avenue split by a pocket park, I decided to follow my 2-D spatial instincts and the urge to check out what looked like a transitional urban area just northwest of Plateau where the perfectly aligned and spaced out gridded network of streets gave way to an even more densely packed network of tiny alleyways.
Of course, to me, part of the appeal was that, this area lied right to the east of the rail tracks – and having sadly discovered that train services just about run (sporadically), I was wondering whether there was any type of informal development around the rail tracks, which is something I had come to expect from similar sights in Kampala, Uganda, or as others may know from a range of informal settlements across India.
The area, the southernmost point of Adjamé, one of Abidjan’s 10 communes, and largely a slum development lying immediately to the north of Plateau, it must have developed at the pace it has thanks to its location and access to the rail network, one of few that has long operated in West Africa, connecting the populations with goods delivered into port of Abidjan and distributed throughout the city and the country.
The administrative buildings with their large footprints and tall, modernist structures along Boulevard Abrogua seem to serve the purpose of separating the Plateau’s well-distributed mid-rise, suburban feeling semi-dense developments from what lies further north: to the east, streets named with numbers (Rue 23 to 30) that collectively form a mixed residential-commercial area with a range of repair shops, and to the west, an even denser, partly covered set of alleyways, creating the sensation of an organised, mini (in West African scalar standards) open-air market. Further north, the planned grid gives way to large blocks of uninterrupted settlements that form the area’s slum-like characteristic, that is repeated along the Branco Bay water frontage, only to be interrupted every now and then by large campuses of organisations such as the UN.
Home to a local football club and a strong sense of community, it is this area that has been battling against the construction of a new bridge over the highway west of it which will potentially displace thousands of residents.
I walked as far west as I could on Rue des Abrons past a tiny mosque, feeling as if I was interrupting the chaotic calm of mothers in their households, preparing supper where their boys hurriedly carrying goods between their homes and the makeshift market stalls. I reached an opening before what appeared to be abandoned rail tracks and turned south towards Plateau to try to make my way out of the area. I watched as few cows walked past me, followed by a crowd of school kids ascending the stairs from the highway down below, crossing the tracks and giant piles of trash and disposed meat, before I was told not to take photos with my phone.
How different the whole place felt, smelled and looked, just 15 minutes’ walking distance from the lush, organised and sterile neighbourhood just to the south of it.
I finally found shade on the concourse of the National Library of Côte d’Ivoire, a large but an unimposing building that seemed to be popular with locals who wanted to browse through books, grab cheap lunch at its cafeteria or just lie down to cool themselves off. I took the moment to catch my breath and re-regulate my blood flow.
