Ivory Coast

From the Dyula trading empire of Kong and the Baoulé migration under Queen Abla Pokou to French conquest, the cocoa-fuelled 'Ivorian miracle' under Houphouët-Boigny, and the civil wars that tested the nation.

Côte d'Ivoire takes its European name from the ivory once shipped from its coast. Long before that trade, its northern savannas were drawn into the trans-Saharan commerce of the Ghana and Mali empires, and Mandé merchants known as the Dyula built the trading city of Kong into the heart of an empire founded about 1710 that grew rich on gold and kola nuts. In the mid-eighteenth century the Baoulé arrived from the east, led by tradition under Queen Abla Pokou, who broke from the Asante; other Akan refugees founded the Agni kingdoms, while Senufo and Mandé peoples held the north. France made the territory a colony in 1893, crushing the resistance of Samori Touré by 1898, and bound it into French West Africa as a forced-labour economy producing cocoa and coffee. The planter Félix Houphouët-Boigny led the campaign that abolished forced labour in 1946 and brought the country to independence on 7 August 1960. Decades of one-party stability and rapid growth — the 'Ivorian miracle' — gave way after his death in 1993 to disputes over the doctrine of 'Ivoirité', a civil war from 2002, and a violent post-election crisis in 2010–2011, before a fragile recovery under Alassane Ouattara.