from James Wilcox
Anti-Gaullism allows the London Tines to be frank about the French puppet state of Ivory Coast, West Africa, In the April lst is.sue one could read the followings
"From one of the 300 bedrooms of the Hotel Ivoire one looks out across the librie lagoon to the centre of Abidjan, knoymas the plateau. The hotel, completed only a short time ago, must be one of the most striking anomalies in Africa. No expense has been spared in its constr uction and ombellishment. Its walls are padded with imitation leather, the doors of one its sév6ral.’bats are decdrated with: gold-inkaid;porcelain. From the air-conditioned ccmfort of the public rooms a guest can strollon to extensive lawns, past fountains that play at night under multi-coloured floodlights, to a swimming pool and outdoor rest= eurant. The Ivoire is the porfect status symbol, the unequivocal doclaration that Abidjan, set on the edgo of thick tropical forest, tut only four degrees west of Paris, is a French town in every practical respecte @a0
"In a country of some 60 tribal groups the Fronch, and the African elite, who are culturally and economically French by assimilation, are by far tho most important....the French provide not only a large prop=— ortion of the higher administration, but the whole of the commercial mid4le class, including retail trade...
t,.,..the average ifrican...is to be found not on the plateau or the residential quarter of Cocody in which stands the Hotel Ivoire but in the townships of Treichville and Adjame. One may wander through their streets, an English-language guide book to Abidjan declares, "and hear everywhere the call of the drums, of balatons, and of bands accompanied by hand-clapping and moving chants." One may also wandor through the streets of Troichville, the older of the townships, at night and see rows of recumbent bodies sleeping on the pavements or beneath lean—to shacks or corrugated iron. Here is Africa. It is only a mile from tho plateau, but it is a totally different world. The Buropean economy and the African have no meeting point. Money, and different habits of life, impose a separation as clearcut in the economic sphere as does South Africa's apartheid in the racial...
™bidjan, like the hotel, is an anomaly, but anyone, who is in . °° business here will want, quite understandably.” to keop* that woyelt! If one wants similar reports about Nigeria turn to Le Monde.