Early in December of 2003, I tried to track down Ahmadou Kourouma, one of Ivory Coast's, and Africa's, most accomplished writers. I lived in Abidjan at the time and was covering the Ivorian civil war for the Associated Press. I'd grown weary of making the same phone calls every day, several times a day. Rebel spokesmen, government spokesmen, army spokesmen, peacekeeper spokesmen—it was a dull and predictable bunch.
Kourouma had spent much of his life in exile, due to the criticism he'd showered on Ivorian politics over the years. He was no friend of the current government, and when a failed coup launched Ivory Coast into civil war in September of 2002, he'd fled abroad again, to France.
I had recently finished reading Allah n'est pas obligé, Kourouma's novel about a ten-year-old Ivorian boy who is forced to become a child soldier in Liberia. Published in 2000—the English translation, Allah Doesn't Have To, comes out this summer—the story made a profound impression on me. I felt like I'd been permitted a peek behind the curtain at a gruesome facet of war, giving me an understanding that was, if still confused, at least now more nuanced.
That was the kind of insight I needed regarding Ivory Coast. I wanted to find a new way to write about the conflict. I knew well by now the important players in the war—knew what their responses to my questions would be, even knew, sometimes, the political or military moves they would make before they made them. But I couldn't grasp the "why" of any of it. I couldn't fathom the bloodthirsty threats, the slaughtering of civilians, the sheer unwillingness to talk peace. I couldn't, in short, understand why Ivory Coast, which I'd first gotten to know as a Peace Corps volunteer in the mid-1990s, seemed hell-bent on destroying itself.
Kourouma, I hoped, could tell me. But he died before I got to him. A few days after I'd begun my search, I read in the news that he'd passed away in France following surgery to treat a tumor. He was seventy-six years old. There was little written about his death in the Ivorian press. It seemed an ignominious departure for a man who'd been called "Africa's Voltaire."
And yet, there was something fitting about it. Kourouma had, after all, spent nearly forty years warning that things would, in the words of his Nigerian counterpart Chinua Achebe, fall apart. Local newspapers, nearly all of them cogs in someone's political machine, weren't apt to spill much ink in eulogy. Kourouma was widely mourned in France, but in Ivory Coast he simply vanished, almost without a sound. When I called a colleague of his in Abidjan several days after his death, she didn't even know he was gone.
Two weeks later I moved back to New York, exhausted by the conflict. In my bag was a copy of Kourouma's first novel, Les soleils des indépendances, which was published in 1968. I'd been told that it was a remarkable portrait of the rupture between traditional African culture and the power-hungry generation that emerged in postcolonial Ivory Coast, a clash that reverberates still today. I started the book several times, but my mediocre French made the process too much like work.
Kourouma never gained much of a following in the United States, so English versions of his books are hard to come by. But I recently found a copy of The Suns of Independence, Adrian Adams's 1981 translation of Kourouma's slim novel. It is the story of Fama and Salimata, a husband and wife in "Ebony Coast," living in a seaside city much like Abidjan, in the years after the country won independence from France.
Fama is in line to become chief of his tribe, but with the colonial era over, he has lost all of the privilege that should have been his. He and his wife live in a slum, where Salimata sells rice porridge and Fama stalks about in a gloomy rage, fuming that members of the country's new ruling class don't respect him.