Bouaké

Bouaké lies in the savanna of the Baoulé, the Akan people whose ancestors moved west from the Asante lands in the eighteenth century under Queen Abla Pokou and settled the country between the Bandama and NʼZi rivers. The site was a village and market when the French arrived at the end of the nineteenth century, and after a long and violent conquest of the Baoulé country they made it a post and then a commercial centre.

The railway decided its future. When the line pushed north from Abidjan towards the Sahel it reached Bouaké in 1912, and the town became the place where kola, cotton, cattle and manufactured goods changed hands between forest and savanna. Cotton mills followed, above all the Gonfreville works, and by independence in 1960 Bouaké was the second city of the country and its industrial centre outside Abidjan, with a Catholic cathedral, a large market and a fast-growing population of traders from the north and from Mali and Burkina Faso.

The rebellion of September 2002 made Bouaké the headquarters of the Forces Nouvelles, and for most of the following decade the city was the capital of the half of the country north of the buffer zone, cut off from Abidjan, its economy and its public services badly damaged. In November 2004 an air strike on a French military position in the city killed nine French soldiers and an American civilian and triggered a crisis between France and the Ivorian government. Reunification followed the Ouagadougou agreement of 2007, and since 2011 investment, the university and the rebuilt stadium have restored much of the city's standing.

Bouaké is the cultural capital of the Baoulé. Their carving is among the most admired in West Africa — portrait figures of ancestors, the goli masks brought out on the great village occasions, and the blolo figures of spirit spouses — and it is made in villages within reach of the city. Baoulé weaving produces narrow strips sewn into heavy ceremonial cloth, and gold ornaments and long, formal oratory link the culture to the wider Akan world of Ghana.

The city is also a meeting point. Dioula-speaking Muslim traders from the north run much of the commerce and give the quarters around Koko their character, and communities from Burkina Faso, Mali and Guinea have lived here for generations alongside Baoulé Christians and followers of traditional religion. The result is a city where mosques and churches stand in the same streets and where the carnival, held at the end of February or the start of March with parades, floats and masked groups, belongs to everybody.

Funerals are the great ceremonies, drawing relatives home from Abidjan for days of drumming and feasting, and Paquinou, the Baoulé homecoming at Easter, empties the coastal city into these villages every year. Football is followed closely, and the 2023 Africa Cup of Nations matches played in the rebuilt stadium were a mark of the city's return to national life.

About 740,000 people lived in Bouaké at the 2021 census, which makes it the second-largest city in the country after Abidjan. Its population is mostly Baoulé, with very large northern Ivorian and West African trading communities, and the university adds a large student population.

Trade is the business of the city. The great market supplies a wide region with yams, cattle, cloth and goods brought down the road and the railway from Burkina Faso and Mali, and lorries and three-wheelers fill the streets around it. Cotton ginning and textiles, cashew and food processing, transport, administration and education provide most formal jobs, while a great deal of work is informal, in market stalls, workshops and repair yards.

Life in the quarters is lived largely outdoors: courtyards, corner shops, tailors working under awnings, and in the evening the grills and plastic chairs of the maquis. The conflict years left their mark on public services, and water and electricity supply, the state of the roads, youth unemployment and the slow repair of the city's industry are the issues people talk about.

Yam rules the Baoulé table. It is boiled and pounded into foutou, a smooth, heavy dough eaten by hand, and dipped into sauce graine made from boiled palm nuts, sauce arachide thick with groundnut paste, or sauce claire, a light aubergine and tomato broth. The market sells yams of many varieties by the sack in the months after harvest, and the crop sets the rhythm of the farming year in the villages around the city.

Kedjenou is the dish for guests: chicken or guinea fowl with tomato, aubergine, onion and chilli, sealed in a covered pot and cooked slowly so that it steams in its own juices. The everyday meals are grilled — poisson braisé, whole fish scored and spiced over charcoal, or chicken — served with attiéké, the granular fermented cassava couscous, and a relish of chilli, onion and tomato. Garba, fried tuna with attiéké, is the cheap standby of students and workers, and alloco, plantain fried in palm oil, is sold on every busy corner.

The northern presence shows in the food as well: grilled mutton seasoned with spice and onion, brochettes, rice with a meat and tomato sauce, and dèguè, millet grains in curdled milk. Bissap from hibiscus, ginger juice, palm wine and Ivorian beer are the usual drinks, with tchapalo, the maize beer of the north, sold in the trading quarters.