San-Pédro

There was no city here until the state decided to build one. The site at the mouth of the San-Pédro river was a stretch of Kru-speaking coast, with fishing villages and thick forest behind and no road of consequence. Portuguese and later other European ships had traded along this shore since the 15th century, and the men of the Kru coast were known across West Africa as sailors and dockworkers, but the colonial economy ran through Grand-Bassam and then Abidjan, far to the east.

In the late 1960s the government of Félix Houphouët-Boigny set out to open the south-west. An authority was created to plan a port, a city and the roads to serve them, the harbour opened in the early 1970s, and a town was laid out on a grid beside it with an administrative centre, industrial zones and residential districts. Settlers from all over Côte d'Ivoire and from Burkina Faso, Mali and Guinea arrived to clear forest for cocoa and coffee, and the port grew into the main outlet for the crop.

Growth outran the plan. Bardo and other quarters spread beyond the designed city as workers arrived faster than housing, and land disputes between newcomers and the original inhabitants sharpened during the conflict that split the country from 2002 and the post-election crisis of 2010–11, though the region stayed on the government-held side. Since then the port has been enlarged and deepened, a stadium was built for the 2023 Africa Cup of Nations, and cocoa processing has been added to the trade in raw beans.

San-Pédro is a city of arrivals. The coastal Kru-speaking peoples, whose villages line the shore east and west, are the original inhabitants, and their attachment to fishing, to lineage elders and to the sea shapes the older settlements. The city itself was filled by everyone else: Baoulé, Senufo, Malinké and Bété Ivorians, along with Burkinabè, Malian and Guinean families, so that Dioula is the language of the market and French of everything official.

Fanti fishing families from Ghana are part of that mixture, and their painted pirogues, net-fishing and fish-smoking are visible along the coast, with women running the smoking and the sale of the catch. Mosques and churches of several denominations stand within streets of one another, and the religious calendar of both is marked openly.

Life is organised around work. The port runs in shifts, the cocoa season sets the tempo from October, and football is the shared passion, with the stadium a source of local pride since the 2023 tournament. Evenings belong to the maquis, where grilled fish, coupé-décalé and zouglou make the city's nightlife. Manners are West African and unhurried: greetings before requests, respect for age, and patience with the negotiations that precede almost any arrangement.

The city had about 165,000 people at the 2014 census, the sixth-largest in the country, with about 262,000 in the sub-prefecture around it, and it is still growing as migration from the interior continues. Most live in the popular quarters, Bardo above all, rather than in the planned centre, and housing, water and drainage have not kept up with the arrivals.

The port dominates the economy: cocoa beans above all, along with cashews, rubber, palm oil, timber and, increasingly, processed cocoa products, plus the fishing fleet, the warehouses, the hauliers and the customs and shipping businesses that depend on them. Plantation agriculture surrounds the city, and a small mining sector inland adds traffic.

The working day begins early on the quays and in the markets and slows in the afternoon heat. Rain shapes the year more than temperature, flooding low-lying streets in the long wet season. The persistent local issues are deforestation as cocoa has pushed into the last forest reserves, child labour on some farms, which the industry and the government are trying to tackle, land disputes between communities, and the strain that port growth places on a city built for far fewer people.

The coast eats fish, and San-Pédro eats a great deal of it. Whole fish — carp, capitaine, tilapia, barracuda, sole — is grilled over wood and served with attiéké, the fermented cassava couscous, and a dressing of raw onion, tomato and chilli. Prawns, crab and lobster come from the small ports along the coast, and smoked fish from the Fanti smokehouses goes into sauces and stews.

Sauces carry the home cooking of the south-west. Sauce graine, made from the pulp of palm nuts, is cooked with smoked fish or meat and eaten with rice or foutou, pounded plantain and cassava; sauce claire is built on aubergine and seasoned with akpi; and leafy sauces of cassava leaves or other greens are common. Placali, a sticky fermented cassava dough, is the accompaniment in many households. Kedjenou, chicken sealed in a pot with peppers and tomato, is the celebration dish, and choukouya, spiced grilled mutton, is a maquis standard.

Garba — attiéké with fried tuna — is the cheap everyday plate, and alloco, ripe plantain fried in palm oil with a chilli-onion relish, is sold from evening grills. Drinks are bangui, the palm wine tapped across the region, koutoukou distilled from it, gnamakoudji ginger juice, bissap from hibiscus, coconut water and cold local lager. Little of the cocoa that passes through the port is eaten here: almost all of it leaves as beans.