Yamoussoukro

Yamoussoukro began as NʼGokro, a Baoulé village of a few hundred people in the savanna between the Bandama and NʼZi rivers, and took its later name from Yamousso, a village queen who was an ancestor of Félix Houphouët-Boigny. He was born here in about 1905 into a chiefly planter family, trained as a medical assistant, built a career in cocoa farming and trade-union politics, and led the country to independence in 1960 as its first president.

From the 1960s onwards he redirected national money towards his birthplace. Engineers laid out a grid of multi-lane boulevards with hundreds of street lamps, dug ornamental lakes, and built a polytechnic institute, hotels, a conference foundation, an airport with a runway sized for the largest aircraft, and a golf course, all on a scale the population did not need. In March 1983 Yamoussoukro was declared the political and administrative capital, though most ministries, embassies and business stayed in Abidjan, where they largely remain.

The Basilica of Our Lady of Peace, built between 1985 and 1989 and consecrated by Pope John Paul II in September 1990, was the culmination and the most argued-about of these projects, paid for, the president said, from his own means. He died in 1993, and his funeral was held in the basilica. Yamoussoukro lay close to the line that divided the country during the conflict of the 2000s but was held by the government side, and it has grown steadily since reunification, above all as a university town.

This is the heart of Baoulé country, and Baoulé identity shapes the town: the language is heard everywhere alongside French, chieftaincy still carries weight, and funerals are major social events that bring families back from Abidjan for days of drumming, dancing and feasting. Baoulé carving — portrait figures, goli masks and the figures of spirit spouses — comes from villages within a short drive, and woven strip cloth is worn at ceremonies and gifted at weddings.

The town is also a capital, and that gives it a second character: official ceremonies, visiting delegations, conferences at the Houphouët-Boigny Foundation, and the memory of the first president, whose name is attached to the polytechnic, the foundation and much else. Catholic life is unusually visible for a town of this size because of the basilica, which draws pilgrims and hosts ordinations, while the Grand Mosque serves a large Muslim community of northern and migrant origin, and the two coexist quietly.

Student life gives the place its youth. The polytechnic and the teacher-training and agricultural schools fill the maquis and the football pitches, and small music venues play coupé-décalé and zouglou. Manners are formal by Ivorian standards: greetings are long, elders are deferred to, and the right hand is used for giving and receiving.

The 2014 census counted 361,893 people in Yamoussoukro, a figure that covers the whole autonomous district — its single commune shares the district's borders — as well as the town itself; the built-up city is considerably smaller and feels it. The population is mostly Baoulé, with Dioula traders, northern migrants and communities from Burkina Faso and Mali, and a student body that swells the town in term time.

Administration, education and farming carry the economy. The district offices, the polytechnic and the schools are the big employers, and around them are the market trades, transport, hotels and the building sector. Beyond the boulevards the land is farmed for yams, cassava, plantain, rice and increasingly cashews, and fishing works Lake Kossou to the north-west.

The day starts early and pauses in the afternoon heat. Mornings belong to the market and the schools; evenings to the maquis, where grilled fish and chicken appear on the charcoal and the plastic chairs fill. The town's enduring problem is its unfinished ambition: the avenues, hotels and public buildings were designed for a capital that never fully arrived, so maintenance, water and electricity supply, street lighting and jobs for graduates are the issues people raise.

Yam is the staple. It is pounded with plantain or cassava into foutou, a smooth elastic dough eaten by hand and dipped into sauce claire, a light aubergine and tomato sauce, or sauce graine, made from boiled palm nuts, or sauce arachide, thick with groundnut paste. The Baoulé country grows dozens of yam varieties and the market piles them up by the hundred in the months after the harvest.

Kedjenou is the dish for celebrations: 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, traditionally shaken rather than stirred. The everyday alternative is grilled food — poisson braisé, whole fish scored, spiced and cooked over charcoal, or chicken, served with attiéké, the granular fermented cassava couscous that stands in for rice, and a fierce relish of chilli, onion and tomato. Alloco, ripe plantain fried in palm oil, is the snack bought on any street corner.

To drink, there is bangui, the palm wine tapped in the villages and sold in bottles and calabashes, ginger juice, bissap made from hibiscus flowers, strong sweet coffee and Ivorian beer. Roadside sellers offer roasted maize, groundnuts, mangoes in season and small bags of water, and the maquis stay open long after the offices have emptied.