The history of Ivory Coast

Ivory Coast, officially Côte d'Ivoire, stretches from the lagoons and rainforest of the Gulf of Guinea to the savanna of the West African interior. Before colonial rule its north was linked to the great Sahelian empires and the Muslim trading networks of the Dyula, whose city of Kong became the centre of an empire in the eighteenth century, while Akan peoples moving west from the Asante world founded the Baoulé and Agni kingdoms of the east and centre. France turned treaties on the coast into a colony in 1893 and conquered the interior against fierce resistance. After independence in 1960, Félix Houphouët-Boigny made the country the richest in French-speaking West Africa on the strength of cocoa and coffee, but the struggles over his succession and over who counted as Ivorian led to two civil wars between 2002 and 2011.

The humid climate preserves bone poorly, so the earliest human presence is known mainly from stone tools, polished axes of shale and the remains of cooking and fishing, which suggest people were living here by the late Stone Age. Shell middens along the coastal lagoons date back to around 1500 BCE. The earliest known inhabitants were later absorbed or displaced by the ancestors of today's peoples, and several groups, including the Ehotilé around Aboisso, the Zéhiri of Grand-Lahou and the Ega and Diès near Divo, were established before the sixteenth century.

The land divides into distinct cultural zones that still shape the country. The dense rainforest of the south and west did not favour large states. There the Kru-speaking peoples, such as the Bété, Guéré and Wè, and the Mande-speaking Dan lived in villages and clusters of villages governed by elders, lineages and initiation societies, farming yams, rice and plantains and trading kola nuts northwards. The lagoon peoples of the south-east fished and traded along the waterways. In the north lived Gur-speaking farmers, above all the Senufo, renowned for their sculpture and for the Poro initiation society that organised village life.

Trade across the Sahara linked the edge of the forest to North Africa for centuries, and gold and kola from the south fed the markets of Djenné, Gao and Timbuktu. The Ghana Empire, the Mali Empire and later the Songhai Empire grew rich on this traffic. Mali's direct rule reached only the far north-west of modern Ivory Coast, around Odienné, but its influence was felt much further south, and the wars and political breakups that followed the decline of Mali and Songhai pushed many peoples towards the forest belt.

The most lasting influence came from Mande-speaking Muslim merchants, known as Wangara and later as Dyula. From the fourteenth century they founded trading towns along the forest fringe, including Begho, Bouna, Bondoukou and Kong, where they dealt in gold, kola, cloth and slaves and spread Islam. Their towns became places of Quranic learning, while most of the farming population around them kept their own religions.

In the early eighteenth century a Dyula warrior and merchant named Seku Watara united local leaders, overthrew the ruler of Kong and launched a series of campaigns to control the trade routes. His war houses pushed north to Sya, the later Bobo-Dioulasso in Burkina Faso, by 1737, and in 1739 his brother Famagan led an army west that defeated forces sent from Timbuktu and besieged Ségou, capital of the Bambara kingdom, for nine months. After Seku's death around 1745 the Kong Empire became a looser confederation of Watara lords, but Kong remained a wealthy market for gold and kola and a centre of Islamic scholarship, famous for its mud-brick mosques.

To the east, the rise of the Asante Empire in what is now Ghana sent waves of Akan-speaking peoples westwards. The Abron founded the kingdom of Gyaman around Bondoukou in the late seventeenth century; it fell under Asante overlordship in 1740 but remained an important Muslim and commercial town. Around 1730, according to tradition, Queen Abla Pokou led another group of Akan refugees west across the Comoé, and her people founded the Baoulé kingdom with its capital at Sakassou. The Baoulé built a centralised state under three successive rulers before splitting into smaller chiefdoms, and they became the largest people of central Ivory Coast. The Agni founded the kingdoms of Indénié and Sanwi, the latter with its royal seat at Krinjabo near the coast. Wars between Kong and Asante in the mid-eighteenth century destroyed Begho but ended in stalemate.

Portuguese sailors reached the coast in the late fifteenth century during the Age of Discovery, and Dutch, English and French ships followed. The ivory trade gave the coast its name in the seventeenth century, until hunting exhausted the elephant herds near the shore. A heavy surf and the lack of natural harbours kept Europeans from building forts, so the coast suffered far less from the Atlantic slave trade than neighbouring Gold Coast, although slaving and slave raiding did take place inland. A French mission at Assinie in 1687 was short-lived.

French interest revived in the nineteenth century. In 1843 and 1844 Admiral Louis Édouard Bouët-Willaumez signed treaties with the rulers of Grand-Bassam and Assinie, placing their lands under French protection in return for annual payments, and fortified trading posts were built. After defeat by Prussia in 1871, France withdrew its garrisons and left the posts in the hands of a Marseille trader, Arthur Verdier.

The Scramble for Africa, formalised at the conference called by Otto von Bismarck in Berlin in 1884 and 1885, required claims to be backed by effective occupation. Between 1887 and 1889 the explorer Louis-Gustave Binger crossed the interior and signed treaties, including one at Kong, while Verdier's agent Marcel Treich-Laplène signed others. Britain recognised French claims, and on 10 March 1893 Ivory Coast became a French colony, with Binger as its first governor; agreements with Liberia and Britain fixed its western and eastern borders.

Many rulers had not understood that the treaties surrendered sovereignty, and conquest was violent and slow. The greatest opponent was Samori Touré, whose Wassoulou Empire, driven east by French advances in Guinea and Mali, swept into the north in the 1890s. His army forged and repaired its own firearms. Kong submitted to him in 1895, and when its merchants turned towards the French he destroyed the city, probably in 1897. Samori was captured in 1898 and exiled to Gabon.

From 1904 the colony was part of French West Africa, governed from Dakar. A head tax imposed in 1900 provoked revolts, and Governor Gabriel Angoulvant, appointed in 1908, waged a brutal campaign of so-called pacification until about 1915, burning villages, deporting chiefs and forcibly regrouping settlements. The Baoulé, the Abbey and peoples of the western forest fought the longest. The capital moved from Grand-Bassam to Bingerville after yellow fever epidemics, and then to Abidjan in the 1930s.

Colonial rule rested on forced labour. Africans were subjects, not citizens, and fell under the indigénat, a separate code allowing arbitrary punishment. Men were conscripted to build roads and the railway north from Abidjan, to work on European coffee and cocoa plantations and in the forests, and as soldiers in World War I. Labour was so prized that in 1932 much of Upper Volta was attached to Ivory Coast to supply workers. During World War II the colony was ruled by Vichy until 1943, and the regime favoured European planters over African farmers in allocating labour.

Félix Houphouët-Boigny, a doctor and wealthy Baoulé cocoa planter, founded the African Agricultural Union in 1944 to defend African farmers. Elected to the French Constituent Assembly in 1945, he gave his name to the law of April 1946 that abolished forced labour across the French empire, a measure that made him a hero. In the same year he founded the Democratic Party of Côte d'Ivoire (PDCI) and helped launch the African Democratic Rally (RDA) across French Africa. Its early alliance with the French Communists brought harsh repression in 1949 and 1950, after which Houphouët broke with the Communists and chose cooperation with France. He served as a minister in French governments in the late 1950s.

After the reforms that followed the Brazzaville conference of 1944, called by Charles de Gaulle, Africans became citizens in 1946, and the 1956 framework law gave the territories elected governments. Houphouët opposed a West African federation, preferring direct links between each territory and France. Ivory Coast became an autonomous republic in the French Community in December 1958 and fully independent on 7 August 1960, part of the wider decolonisation of Africa.

Houphouët-Boigny ruled for 33 years at the head of a one-party state. Unlike Kwame Nkrumah in Ghana, he rejected socialism, kept close ties with France, welcomed French advisers and investment, and stayed firmly in the Western camp during the Cold War. He also led the Council of the Entente with Niger, Upper Volta and Dahomey, now Benin. Farmers were paid good prices, migrants from Upper Volta, Mali and Guinea poured in to work the plantations, and growth averaged close to 10 per cent a year for two decades. By 1979 Ivory Coast was the world's largest cocoa producer, and Abidjan, with its deepwater port opened through the Vridi canal in 1950, became one of West Africa's leading cities.

Opposition was not tolerated: an alleged plot in 1963 led to purges, and a Bété revolt at Gagnoa in 1970 was crushed with many deaths. In 1983 the capital was officially moved to Yamoussoukro, Houphouët's home village, where his vast Basilica of Our Lady of Peace, among the largest churches in the world, was consecrated by Pope John Paul II in 1990. By then the collapse of cocoa and coffee prices in the 1980s had brought heavy debt and austerity. Strikes and student protests forced the introduction of multiparty politics in 1990, and Houphouët defeated Laurent Gbagbo in that year's election. He died on 7 December 1993.

His successor, Henri Konan Bédié, promoted the idea of ivoirité, a notion of authentic Ivorian identity that was used to exclude Alassane Ouattara, a former prime minister from the Muslim north whose parentage was disputed as Burkinabé, and that cast suspicion on millions of northerners and immigrants. On 24 December 1999 General Robert Guéï seized power in the country's first coup. In the October 2000 election, from which Ouattara was barred, Guéï tried to claim victory, but street protests brought Gbagbo to power, amid violence in which mass graves were later found.

On 19 September 2002 a mutiny grew into a rebellion that seized the north, with its centre at Bouaké. France sent troops to hold a ceasefire line, a peace deal was signed near Paris in January 2003, and in 2004 the United Nations deployed a peacekeeping mission. Killings of opposition demonstrators in Abidjan in March 2004 and attacks on migrants and northerners marked the conflict, while militias and fighters from Liberia and Sierra Leone took part in the west. In November 2004 government air strikes killed nine French soldiers at Bouaké; France destroyed the Ivorian air force, and anti-French riots drove thousands of foreigners out of Abidjan. A 2007 agreement made the rebel leader Guillaume Soro prime minister, but elections were postponed until 2010.

The run-off of November 2010 was declared won by Ouattara by the electoral commission, with about 54 per cent, but the Constitutional Council, led by a Gbagbo ally, annulled votes in the north and declared Gbagbo the winner. Both men took the oath of office. Ouattara was recognised by the United Nations, the African Union and ECOWAS, and in the war that followed about 3,000 people were killed and hundreds of thousands displaced; massacres in the western town of Duékoué were among the worst atrocities, and human rights groups documented abuses by both sides. With the support of UN and French forces, Ouattara's troops captured Gbagbo in Abidjan on 11 April 2011. He was sent to the International Criminal Court, which acquitted him of crimes against humanity in 2019.

Under Ouattara the economy recovered quickly, with some of the highest growth rates in Africa, new roads, bridges and power plants, and Ivory Coast remained the world's leading cocoa producer. Insecurity did not vanish: jihadists linked to al-Qaeda killed 18 people at the beach resort of Grand-Bassam in March 2016, and army mutinies over pay shook the government in 2017. A new constitution in 2016 was used by Ouattara to argue that he could run again, and he won a disputed third term in 2020 in an election boycotted by the opposition, with deadly unrest around the vote.

In February 2025 France handed over its last military base in the country, at Port-Bouët, to Ivorian forces, ending a permanent presence that dated from independence. In the presidential election of 25 October 2025, from which Gbagbo and the main opposition candidate, Tidjane Thiam, were excluded, Ouattara won a fourth term with about nine-tenths of the vote, after the government banned protests against the exclusions. His party, the Rally of Houphouëtists for Democracy and Peace, then won a large majority in the parliamentary elections of 27 December 2025, which Gbagbo's party boycotted.