Creativity
Le peuple n’aime pas le peuple
A person who has been chased by a panther will tell a different story from someone who has seen a panther chasing somebody else”. This comment by the author (a young activist for sustainable family farming) from the Ivory Coast, serves to underscore the importance of this autobiographical story (Le peuple n’aime pas le people – The people do not like the people), which is a personal experience against the background of the Ivorian civil war.
Kouakou Gbahi KouaKou, Le peuple n’aime pas le peuple. La Côte d’Ivoire dans la guerre civile, Collection Témoins, Gallimard, Paris 2006
A victim of the racketeering of soldiers on all sides, Kouakou Gbahi Kouakou describes his odyssey, his travels between the Charybdis of the rebels' acts of violence and the Scylla of the ‘patriots’ all fired up by xenophobic fanaticism. He speaks with sincerity about day-to-day excitement that is soon overtaken by new feelings of disillusionment. But he does not allow himself to be overcome by paranoid beliefs or blaming others for disaster. “We all helped screw everything up, each side making a generous contribution to its rapid decomposition”, confesses one of the characters in the book.
A young intellectual who did not complete his studies, Kouakou, the country boy from Béoumi, makes a cool appraisal of the situation that allowed power-crazy politicians to plunge his country into deep crisis. This is because his own age group is the most affected. As he writes, “the instability and harrowing living conditions of young Ivorians may not necessarily have been the cause of the politico-military uprising of 19 September, but they were the main reason for the popular success not only of the rebellion but also what is called in Abidjan the resistance”. He ends up finding a makeshift solution in exile and ultimately succeeds in reaching a conclusion coloured by hope. “I also knew it was still not over, not for me, nor for them, as long as we had not understood the natural need to live together”, he writes.
And what is perhaps more of a pleasure is that the story reveals a genuine literary ability, full of quotations from the juicy nouchi dialect of Abidjan and the savannah of his childhood. Here is one example to make you think: “if a blind person says he is going to hit you with a brick, it means he already has one under his foot”.
