Yamoussoukro, Man & the Centre-West

The centre is Baoulé country. Oral tradition tells how Queen Abla Pokou led part of the Akan people west from the Asante lands in the 18th century, sacrificing her son to cross a flooded river, and how her followers took the name Baoulé. Their kingdom, with its royal seat at Sakassou, spread across the savannas between the Bandama and N'Zi rivers. To the west lived the Gouro, the Bété around Daloa and Gagnoa, and in the mountains the Dan, also called Yacouba, and the Wè, or Guéré, in small independent communities without kings.

French conquest in the 1890s and 1900s met long resistance, especially from the Baoulé and the western forest peoples. In the colonial era Bouaké grew as a railway and trading town, and cocoa and coffee spread into the Bété forests. Félix Houphouët-Boigny, born into a Baoulé chiefly family at Yamoussoukro, rose from this planter class to lead the country from independence in 1960; he transformed his home village into a planned city and in 1983 made it the official capital, while Abidjan remained the economic capital.

In the 2002–07 conflict the country was divided in two. The Forces Nouvelles rebels made Bouaké their headquarters, and a buffer, the "zone of confidence" patrolled by UN and French troops, ran across the centre and west between them and the government-held south until the Ouagadougou agreement of 2007. The west suffered heavily again during the post-election crisis of 2010–11, including mass killings at Duékoué in March 2011.

The Baoulé are renowned for their carving: portrait figures, masks for the goli dance, and the figures of spirit spouses kept in homes. Their royal regalia, their woven cloth and a love of long, courteous speech link them to the wider Akan world. The Gouro of the Marahoué are known for the zaouli, a fast-footed masked dance listed by UNESCO as intangible heritage in 2017.

In the western mountains mask culture runs through everything. Among the Dan and Wè, masks are not objects but spirits that judge disputes, teach initiates and entertain; stilt dancers perform on poles several metres high, and the region's mask festivals draw performers from many villages. Sacred forests surround many villages and are closed to outsiders.

The Bété country of Daloa and Gagnoa has its own musical line: Ernesto Djédjé created the dance style ziglibithy there in the 1970s, a forerunner of later Abidjan pop. Religion across the region is mixed — Christian and traditional in the forest west and among the Baoulé, with a large Muslim population in Bouaké and among migrants — and Dioula is spoken in the markets alongside Baoulé, Bété and Dan.

Bouaké is the largest city, with well over half a million people, a textile and agricultural-processing centre and a huge wholesale market for yams, cattle and goods from the north. Yamoussoukro is smaller, a planned capital of wide boulevards, the Houphouët-Boigny Foundation and the polytechnic institute; many ministries still sit in Abidjan. Daloa, Gagnoa, Divo, Man and Duékoué are the main towns of the west.

The west and centre-west are cocoa and coffee country, and Daloa, Gagnoa and Divo are market towns for the crop, with rubber and rice grown more widely each year. The Baoulé savannas grow yams, cashews and cotton, and fishing works Lake Kossou. Around Man the land yields coffee, rice and kola, and the mountains hold iron ore deposits of interest to mining companies.

Life follows the farming year, with markets on fixed days drawing villages into the towns. Reconciliation after the conflicts, land tenure, road conditions and jobs for the young are the main local issues.

Yam is the staple of the Baoulé centre, pounded into foutou, the smooth dough eaten by hand, and served with sauce claire, a light aubergine-based sauce, or with sauce graine, made from palm nuts. Bouaké's markets pile up yams in dozens of varieties. Kedjenou, chicken or guinea fowl sealed in a clay pot with vegetables and chilli and cooked slowly, is a classic Ivorian dish.

In the forest west the base changes to rice, eaten with rich leaf sauces and palm oil, and to cassava and plantain. Smoked fish, snails and bushmeat have long flavoured the sauces, though much hunting is now illegal. Around Man, dishes are often cooked with local rice and hot peppers.

Everywhere the maquis serve grilled chicken and fish with attiéké or alloco, fried plantain. Palm wine is tapped in the villages, and in Bouaké and the towns with northern populations tchapalo, a spiced maize beer from the north, is brewed and sold by the calabash.

Yamoussoukro's Basilica of Our Lady of Peace, consecrated by Pope John Paul II in 1990, rises above the savanna with its dome, colonnades and vast stained-glass windows. Nearby are the lakes around the presidential palace, the Houphouët-Boigny Foundation, a mosque and the polytechnic. Bouaké, an hour and a half north, is a working city whose great market is its main sight; around it lie the villages of the Baoulé country, with their carvers and weavers, the old royal town of Sakassou, the pottery of Katiola and the large Lake Kossou on the Bandama. The Marahoué National Park lies to the west, though most of its forest has been cleared.

Daloa and Gagnoa, the main towns of the Bété cocoa country, are bases rather than sights, with busy markets and the forest farms around them.

In the far west, Man lies in a bowl of granite mountains. The Dent de Man, a tooth-shaped summit, can be climbed with a guide; the Cascade de Man is a waterfall in the forest just outside town; and Mont Tonkoui, one of the country's two highest summits, rises nearby. The Dan villages of the western hills around Biankouma and Danané keep their masks and stilt dancers and their bridges woven from lianas across the rivers. The Mont Sangbé and Mont Péko national parks protect forested hills, and at the Guinean border the Ivorian slopes of Mount Nimba form part of a strict nature reserve listed, with its Guinean side, as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.