Now before the International Criminal Court, the former president of Côte d’Ivoire started his political life as a political activist. The man who defied his country’s first autocratic ruler ended up defeated – by what he fought for.

By Bram Posthumus

Everyone at the hotel bar in the Guinean forest town of N’zérékoré was glued to the television screen. They, like me, were watching incredible images of a dishevelled former Ivorian president Laurent Gbagbo and his wife Simone emerging from a bunker room in their Abidjan residence, while
soldiers were ordering them about. ‘It looks like the end of a religious cult,’ one of the Guinean spectators
observed.

It was never supposed to end like this for the former history professor, the man who started the pro-democracy movement in his country. Already as a student in the 1970s, he had run-ins with the regime of the first and longest ruling president of Côte d’Ivoire, the aristocratic and autocratic Félix Houphouët-Boigny. He spent two years in jail for his troubles before going into exile: to France, the former colonial power, where he got his doctorate.

Hippy activist
Old pictures show a dashing lean man with long hair – almost the hippy activist. As a historian he was very familiar with the epic tale of an old Malian ruler, Sundiata Keita. Sundiata was forced into exile through the
machinations of his elders but then came back in Mali’s darkest hour as a strong warrior. He united the kingdom and brought it prosperity. Gbagbo loved and cherished that story. He even re-worked it into a theatre play. He also knew that the north of his own country once belonged to that empire...

His left-leaning ideals came from within his family. His father had fought in the French army during World War 2 and had been a prisoner of war. He was a lifelong committed trade unionist. Laurent took up that mantle. Even in his last full-length interviews with the Paris weekly Jeune Afrique, he continued to portray himself as a militant of the left who wanted his country to move forward, independently. Long after the French Parti Socialiste had dropped him like the hot potato he had become, Gbagbo still maintained close friendships with leading individuals from that party.

Socialist signature
His own Front Populaire Ivoirien (FPI), which he set up in 1982 had a clearly socialist signature. It was the time of his second long exile in France, after he had once again pointed out to the ageing Houphouët-Boigny that multi-party democracy really was the best way forward. The Old Man (Le Vieux), as Ivorians called him, was offended – but Gbagbo’s time would come.

First step: 1990. Gbagbo is elected Member of Parliament. Next: 1993. Le Vieux dies and politics in Côte d’Ivoire take increasingly wild twists and turns. In 1999, a general tries and briefly succeeds seizing power in a short-lived coup while the FPI declares Gbagbo their candidate for the presidential elections. These take place, in the year 2000. He is the only candidate and so he becomes “the badly elected president,” in Ivorian parlance.

And then, the ideological track becomes less clear. Yes, he claims he was striving for universal health care and a number of other good socialist things for the people. After all, Côte d’Ivoire is rich – much richer than its neighbours, who sent their sons and daughters to the economic magnet in their thousands.

So in principle, these things were affordable. But how did these ideals get tangled with the shrill xenophobic noise – very much the trademark of his predecessor Henri Konan-Bédié, who had invented the concept of “Ivoirité”? Was it because of what happened in 2002, when a failed armed rebellion resulted in a short-lived civil war that split the country in two? Pogroms followed and thousands of Burkinabe arrived in their country with nothing more than the shirts on their backs, after having spent their entire lives working Ivorian plantations.

For or against?
He clearly had a bout of that “opposition-in-power” syndrome. A lifetime in opposition, it took him at least five years to get used to the idea that he was, in fact, in charge. Meanwhile, FPI rhetoric had become
fiercely anti-French, anti-white and anti-foreigner. Was he forgetting that a statesman, something he clearly aspired to, had to be “for” something – not “against” everything?

And then again: how did his socialism of old get tangled up with the gruelling prayer sessions that went on for hours and hours? Was that the increasing influence of his second wife Simone Ehivet, widely believed to be the real hardliner within the FPI? Did she bring in the dubious preachers and religious guides that promised the Gbagbo’s “victory”, even when the opposition army was knocking on their door?

‘I am the new order,’ he proudly proclaimed in his last great Jeune Afrique interview, in December 2009. He also said that he quite liked the idea of a fight of one against all – a foreshadowing of the mentality that
would send him and his wife to that bunker room. A sad end for a sharp mind. If only he had stayed close to Sundiata Keita’s story, who knows... he could have been the greatest president Côte d’Ivoire had ever seen.