The work of a thousand generations will construct my Côte d'Ivoire. She will appear before the nations in the brightness of her glory. This is her unique destiny, since my brave and proud ancestors died to defend her, I will live to love her.Footnote 1
These lyrics of a patriotic song featured as a chorus in a performance by Ivorian youth at the opening ceremony of the Forum des Jeunes pour le Cinquantenaire, held on 22 July 2010. Two actors dressed in traditional Akan cloth and representing the generation of independence fighters handed over a placard in the shape of the Ivorian territory to the ‘Ivorian youth’. A group of Ivorian students wearing orange (the first colour of the national flag) came onto the stage, representing the youth of 2010; they were followed by a group of younger students personifying the Côte d'Ivoire of 2040 who were dressed in white (the second colour of the national flag) and a group of smaller children clothed in green (the third colour of the national flag), symbolizing the Côte d'Ivoire of the centenary in 2060. All of them recited patriotic verses that declared their responsibility as citizens of the nation to continue the ‘fifty years of struggle’ that were to be celebrated. The Forum des Jeunes was a private initiative of a group of young men on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of Ivorian independence, which was going to be celebrated shortly afterwards, on 7 August 2010.Footnote 2
This patriotic sketch illustrates the perception of many of the young people who engaged in the Ivorian independence jubilee festivities. They considered the cinquantenaire,Footnote 3 in fact, not a commemorative event for ‘the old’ but an occasion for ‘the young’ to ask what had gone wrong and how it could be fixed in the future. Not only those who had struggled in the 1940s were to be commemorated, but each generation that had contributed to and would continue to work for the independence of Côte d'Ivoire. Consequently, it was not an event of fifty years ago that was commemorated but rather fifty years of continuous struggle.
This reading fitted the general design of the Ivorian cinquantenaire commemorations. The National Commission for the Organization of the Cinquantenaire of Independence of Côte d'Ivoire (CNOCICI) was headed by the historian Pierre Kipré, by that time ambassador of Côte d'Ivoire in France. The cinquantenaire was commemorated with events throughout the jubilee year. But at the heart of the CNOCICI programme was a number of academic colloquia held in inland Côte d'Ivoire between March and August that had the objective of drawing lessons from the past in order to prepare for the future, to ‘correct the failures committed by the father of independence, Félix Houphouët-Boigny’,Footnote 4 and more generally to counter a popular and nostalgic attitude of ‘before, when all was well’ (Aké and Kipré Reference Aké and Kipré2011: 8). In his opening speech of the jubilee year, Laurent Gbagbo rephrased a bon mot of Houphouët-Boigny: ‘we in Africa … we have sung too much, danced too much, laughed too much … now we have to reflect upon where we come from and where we want to go.’ The Forum des Jeunes was designed to fit with this leading motto of the Ivorian cinquantenaire, which, unlike other independence jubilee celebrations, did not place much emphasis on the ‘classical’ formats of national day commemoration practices such as a giant military and civil parade, cultural performances, historical re-enactments, wreath-laying ceremonies at the tombs of the nation's martyrs, or the unveiling of monuments (see Lentz Reference Lentz2013b for a comparative perspective on the jubilee year 2010). According to Michael Geisler, national days of commemoration are ‘unstable signifiers’ (Reference Geisler, McCrone and McPherson2009: 10). Even though national day celebrations are largely orchestrated by the state, they still rely on the participation of the people in the performance of nationhood – and performances always bear the risk of failure or slippage. It is in these ‘potential points of rupture [that] moments of critique and the articulation of alternative projects become visible’ (Lentz Reference Lentz2013a: 209). In this sense, commemorative practices such as national day celebrations may be viewed as lieux de mémoire of a mnemonic community. I will take a step further by arguing that, in Côte d'Ivoire, it is the notion of ‘independence’ itself that may be explored as a lieu de mémoire, telling us something about the Ivorian nation as a mnemonic community at work.
In July and August 2010, I organized a number of group interviews with young, mostly male, Ivorians in Abidjan. The young men were aged between nineteen and thirty, some of them were students, others school dropouts or graduates looking for jobs or internships, and most of them still lived with their parents, other relatives or elder brothers. In these talks, the commemorative event was always immediately linked to the question of independence itself:
Marcellin Oué:Footnote 5 We have to ask ourselves several questions: fifty years … and we still live on the remnants of what was achieved [in the golden Sixties]. But there is no durable development … Really, for me, there is no real independence in Côte d'Ivoire … neither politically, nor economically … Thus we have to mobilize the youth, mobilize them today to prepare the struggles of tomorrow.
Koné Souleymane: This cinquantenaire should have served to [reflect] in order to emerge … to build a better nation … There is no sense in adorning the city [with national coloured flags] and tomorrow everything stays the same.
Dédy Sylla: The problem is, we have difficulties to work together, for the future … that's what sets us back. It's not enough to celebrate the cinquantenaire, to celebrate fifty years of independence, no! We have to change the mentalities of our people. The government, each time they place people in the government and they refuse to work, to do what is necessary to move forward, instead we are regressing. I don't think we are any more independent than our grandfathers were in the 1950s …
Marcellin Oué: I told you, I was in Yamoussoukro [at the grand colloquium organized by the CNOCICI], but really, I didn't feel … much commitment to what really is at stake [in the cinquantenaire]. The people there didn't even reflect, they told each other those old stories, they didn't say anything [of relevance] … In fact, it is only the youth … who has led a national debate about this question of development …Footnote 6
With its leading theme ‘What vision has the Ivorian youth of the future of Côte d'Ivoire after fifty years of independence’, the Forum des Jeunes was based on very similar ideas to those expressed by these young men. Organized by a group of young political actors, the Forum des Jeunes probably was the most contested programme of the Ivorian jubilee. It was going to be today's youth and their children who would have to ‘sit down for the centenary and complain about the same failures as in 2010’, Jean-Jacques Moulod, one of the organizers, explained to me. The elders were living in the past, and were discussing again and again the rights and wrongs of decisions that had been taken in the process of decolonization. As Moulod and his peers had taken up the fight of their ancestors, they felt that they should participate in the independence jubilee festivities.Footnote 7 After all, it was their generation that was going to be judged responsible for the nation of tomorrow by future generations.Footnote 8 In line with the performance described in the vignette, Moussa Coulibaly, the president of the sub-commission Youth and Mobilization, who was charged with ensuring massive participation in the cinquantenaire, interpreted the cinquantenaire not only as a moment of balancing the past and projecting the future but as a sort of rite de passage in which the youth was symbolically given responsibility for the fifty years to come.Footnote 9
During the post-electoral crisis of 2010–11, headlines in the Ivorian press and appeals to ‘patriotic mobilization’ constantly referred to this idea of independence as something that was still at stake and not a fifty-year-old story to be ‘commemorated’. How can one explain the fact that young men in Abidjan took up arms to fight against the threatening ‘recolonization’ of their nation via the installation of Alassane Ouattara as president?Footnote 10 That young people who had no living memories of colonization and the decolonization process drew upon this era to construct genealogies of resistance? Instrumentalist explanations about youth being turned into militias and their moral and economic lack of perspective being exploited by power-greedy politicians do not explain why this strategy was so ‘successful’.Footnote 11
Referring back to independence in Côte d'Ivoire is a matter of politics and agency; independence is constantly re-narrated with new events, new martyrs, new battles woven in. It links individual lives to the nation's destiny, and thus it is a very powerful lieu de mémoire for the Ivorian nation. Historical time was imagined not as successive but rather as coexisting. The lieu de mémoire ‘independence’ was not situated in 1960 but in the present. Moniot argues that Nora's concept of lieu de mémoire was ‘French’ to the degree that it was impossible to transfer it to Africa – in short, ‘to make Nora in the tropics’ (Moniot Reference Moniot, Chrétien and Triaud1999: 13) – and suggests replacing it with the concept of enjeux de mémoire, emphasizing the contested nature of collective memory (Triaud Reference Triaud, Chrétien and Triaud1999: 10).Footnote 12 I argue that the strength of the concept lieu de mémoire lies precisely in the possibility of grasping how – in their capacity to capture ‘a maximum of meaning in the fewest of signs’ (Nora Reference Nora1989: 19) – lieux de mémoire indeed may accommodate competing histories of the past, contradictory political projects of the present and conflicting visions of the future (Lentz Reference Lentz2013b: 234). In fact, the Ivorian expansion of the lieu de mémoire ‘independence’ to include a variety of hitherto ‘forgotten’ battlefields and heroes – with some of them situated in the present and even in the future – may be read as a sign of its importance and constituent power.
One common trope of this re-imagining of the commemorative event was to understand it in terms of kinship and generation: there were fathers and children of independence, each having different feelings and expectations towards the commemoration of its fiftieth anniversary, and there were several generations of combatants in the struggle for decolonization. In this paper, I offer a close reading of the Forum des Jeunes and the image of a generation of youth as a vanguard force in an ongoing struggle for independence and a new nation. The analysis of statements and performances of both rupture and continuity in self-images of the (mainly pro-Gbagbo) Ivorian youth helps us to understand the connections between political discourses of renewal and the politics of commemoration. In order to situate these performances of being part of the youth within a broader context, I will look at the use of kinship metaphors and the imagery of generations in Ivorian political culture since independence. Thus, on the one hand, the paper attempts to explore the cultural expressions of contemporary Ivorian politics and, on the other, to analyse performances of the past in the present and the positions young people may take or are given in the nation's past, present and future.
CONCEPTS OF YOUTH AND GENERATION IN COMMUNITY MAKING AND COMMEMORATION
Since the 1980s, Africanist scholars have acknowledged the complexity of emic concepts of youth (both in the sense of les jeunes and la jeunesse) as a historically constructed social category and a relational concept (D'Almeida-Topor Reference D'Almeida-Topor, D'Almeida-Topor, Coquery-Vidrovitch and Goerg1992: 15–6).Footnote 13 In his study about the imagination of a vanguard generation of revolutionary youth in Zanzibar, Burgess argues that it is via the study of the process through which the idea of belonging to a generation gains local significance that the temporal and fluid character and the inherent ambiguities of ‘youth’ and generation as forms of identity can be understood (Burgess Reference Burgess, Abbink and van Kessels2005: 75). According to Burgess: ‘Youth nurtured a sense of their own importance in their nation's history as either a vanguard generation or as clients entrusted with the task of carrying out the will of party elders’ (ibid.: 76). These two different possibilities of assuming a position within the nationalist project can also be found in Côte d'Ivoire. Looking at youth as an identity category, Arnaut analyses how youth is ‘politically, socio-economically, and culturally constructed and constructs itself in contested discourses of history and society’ (Arnaut Reference Arnaut2004: 322). After the attempted coup d’état in 2002, young Ivorians loyal to Gbagbo, such as the Jeunes Patriotes, constructed ‘genealogies of resistance’ of leftist opposition to Houphouët-Boigny that spanned the entire history of modern Côte d'Ivoire since the 1940s (ibid.: 364). They stressed the fact that they were young and unadulterated by what is called politique politicienne (meaning politics in the ugly sense of the word, implying patronage and nepotism, corruption and greed for power) and claimed to represent a ‘new generation’ and even a ‘new nation’. By contrast, the Forces Nouvelles, the political wing of the rebel movement, despite their name, emphasized their maturity (Arnaut Reference Arnaut, Abbink and van Kessels2005: 114).
More generally, one could argue that the use of kinship terminology provided the grammar for very different ideas about the societal role youth was to assume in the nation. Eriksen has referred to the nation as a ‘metaphoric kin group’ (Reference Eriksen2004: 59), while many modern nations drew upon kinship metaphors to ‘naturalize’ the social construct of the nation. At times, it is the nation itself that is described as a human (such as mère patrie), being kin to its citizens and to other nations (Eriksen Reference Eriksen, Hastrup and Olwig1997). The bond that ties the individual members of a nation to each other and the interpersonal networks creating cultural intimacy are also sometimes perceived in terms of kinship (Eriksen Reference Eriksen2004: 56–60). We should keep in mind that kinship is not only about descent and blood lines but also about alliances and affinity (ibid.: 59) – and therefore about the process of making someone belong to the family. In Ivorian political culture, kinship metaphors usually emphasize the ‘descent’ aspect of kinship. Informal networks and relationships, both in the realm of politics and in urban moral economies, stress metaphorical descent and, at the same time, reduce the relevance of ‘biological’ kin (see Newell Reference Newell2012: 73–80). As a strategy of inclusion or exclusion, using kinship metaphors not only indicates who I am and where I belong but also who I want to be.
The same is true for generations, which may be analysed as actively generating a position (Reynolds Whyte et al. Reference Rüsen2008: 2–3). Speaking and acting as a generation of youth constitutes an act of demanding a position within the socio-political structure of a collective. What I am interested in here is this active, creative aspect of generational belonging, in the sense of how young (and older) Ivorians make use of their (self-)positioning as a generation and as youth. When young political actors evoke a generation of ‘youngsters’, they play politics according to well-rehearsed rules. Memory work lends itself to this kind of study because references to models drawn from the past are essential ingredients of any identity-forging process. I will argue that the way in which young (and older) Ivorians imagined themselves as youth who have to assume a special role on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of independence was rooted in well-rehearsed models of Ivorian nationalist rhetoric. Moreover, the manner in which memory entrepreneurs such as the organizers of the Forum evoked independence and earlier generations of independence combatants is an extremely forward-looking usage of the past (Pickering and Keightley Reference Pickering and Keightley2006: 937). In his ‘ethnography of the past’, Arnaut argues that the three generations of young contestants against gerontocratism and neocolonialism (building on three different moments of rupture: the désapparentement Footnote 14 and the debates surrounding it in 1950, the democratic turn in 1990, and the 1999 coup d’état) are not to be regarded as successive generations, but rather as coexisting discursively and thus providing some kind of repertoire for present generations (Arnaut Reference Arnaut2004: 336–7). Considering concepts of generation and youth as ‘powerful instruments in the politics of history … ambivalently [encompassing] continuity and rupture, inclusion and exclusion’ (Arnaut Reference Arnaut, Abbink and van Kessels2005: 112) helps us to understand the wholeheartedness with which young Ivorians, who have neither experienced colonialism nor the era of independence, debate and relate their lives and political visions to the history of independence, as expressed in oratory, writings and performances of the Ivorian patriotic youth.Footnote 15 Given the importance of visions for the future in this memory work, I consider it helpful to study these ‘generations’ within a theory of historical times as temporal layers (Zeitschichten) that, unlike a history of periods, points to the coexistence and co-efficacy of different times (Koselleck Reference Koselleck2013: 9). Analysing the ‘genealogies of resistance’ (Arnaut Reference Arnaut2004: 364) of young political actors with the methodological toolkit of Reinhart Koselleck's historical theory helps us understand how historical time is made through the interaction of experience and expectations of imagined pasts and futures.
FATHERS, CHILDREN AND GRANDCHILDREN: KINSHIP METAPHORS IN IVORIAN POLITICAL CULTURE
Côte d'Ivoire's anti-colonial movement was born among Ivorian planters in the 1940s. It was their independent union, the African Agricultural Labour Union, led by Félix Houphouët-Boigny, which later turned into the party that would lead Côte d'Ivoire to independence in 1960, the Democratic Party of Côte d'Ivoire (PDCI). When Houphouët-Boigny struck an alliance with François Mitterrand's centre-left Democratic and Socialist Union of Resistance in 1952, this marked the beginning of a strong collaboration with France and an engaged commitment to a ‘peaceful transition’ to independence. Houphouët-Boigny became the first advocate of the loi cadre (Overseas Reform Act) that would give partial autonomy to the territories of French West Africa. The so-called ‘Ivorian way’ caused conflicts with more radical leftist forces within Côte d'Ivoire, particularly young educated men.Footnote 16 After independence, Houphouët-Boigny opted for a system of single-party rule and the PDCI turned into the state party. Many of the institutions that had made the Côte d'Ivoire colony rich were not touched after independence. Houphouët-Boigny further developed the plantation economy and encouraged labour migration from the north and from neighbouring countries, turning Côte d'Ivoire into the biggest cocoa-producing country in the world. French consultants continued to have a great deal of influence in Ivorian politics, and bilateral agreements concerning economic cooperation and defence further contributed to the maintenance of the basic relationship between France and its former colony. Houphouët-Boigny ruled the country as a charismatic ‘father of the nation’, drawing on the memory of his biggest success, the abolition of forced labour in 1946, and on the economic growth of the 1960s and 1970s, which would be known as the ‘Ivorian miracle’. The pillars of Houphouët-Boigny's nationalist project were economic success, the idea of Côte d'Ivoire as an exemplar in the sub-region and a strong system of state patrimonialism, as well as Catholicism and Akan principles of seniority as models for the state–citizen relationship. Only as recently as 1990, after more than thirty years of single-party rule, did Côte d'Ivoire reinstitute a multi-party system allowing for opposition against Houphouët-Boigny's policies to be articulated politically. As in other African countries, student protests played a significant role in the demands for a multi-party system. The Ivorian Popular Front (FPI) of Laurent Gbagbo was the first serious opposition party to run against the PDCI.
In Ivorian political culture, kinship metaphors have a long tradition and play a major role in many modern institutions.Footnote 17 A number of scholars have analysed Houphouët-Boigny's leadership style as a gerontocracy or ‘nanaïsme’, with the old men in power as senior members of the national family, headed by Houphouët-Boigny as father or grandfather (nanan) (Bakary Akin Reference Bakary Akin1992; Toungara Reference Toungara1995).Footnote 18 The relationship of grandfathers with their grandchildren is usually characterized less by disciplinary measures than by sympathy and respect. Therefore, revolutionary uprisings of youth could be looked upon with grandfatherly comprehension, but disrespect was punished severely. Consequently, Houphouët-Boigny dealt with young opponents in a very ‘grandfatherly’ manner: he punished them by sending them to prison and then asked them to beg pardon for their disrespectful behaviour in order to be granted forgiveness.Footnote 19
Even though the sanctions for disobedient children and grandchildren changed over time, the basic pattern of (grand)fatherly disappointment followed by the child's begging for pardon and reconciliation, including the appointing of the prodigal son returning home to a minister's or ambassador's post, was repeated continuously up to the 1990s. Often, the public statements in which the ‘rebellious children’ demanded the ‘pardon’ of their ainés (elders) were dictated, such as the letter the students imprisoned in Akouédo (among them Laurent Gbagbo) wrote to the president before they were liberated (Proteau Reference Proteau2002: 66).
But even when they were not dictated, over the years, the political order was perceived in terms of social order to such a degree that the ‘disobedient children’ and the media knew exactly how to evoke the allusions to family that were expected of them, as is demonstrated twenty years later by the statement of Laurent Akoun, former president of the ‘rebellious’ teachers union SYNESCI, and the article written in Fraternité Matin about the public reconciliation:
Laurent Akoun demanded the pardon of the head of state, the pardon of the father that he will never cease to be for Ivorians. The pardon is granted, because they have shown remorse and in consequence they were reintegrated into the great family of national education, by the generosity of the president. The minister [of education] Balla Keita commented: ‘The father's arms have always been open awaiting the return of the spoilt children.’Footnote 20
Especially in the realm of secondary education, where new generations of ‘rebellious’ students and unionists continuously questioned the PDCI regime, the government's rhetoric regarding these ‘troublemakers’ often blended political order with social order (Proteau Reference Proteau2002: 95). Proteau rightly highlights the fact that an awareness of the ambiguity of the political rhetoric of Houphouët-Boigny and Balla Keita helps in understanding the legitimation of repression as a means of education or correction: just as the father flogs his son, the state sanctions its ‘spoilt children’ (ibid.: 96). After a series of ‘dialogues’ with the Ivorian youth, which were meant to reconcile the ‘father of the nation’ with his disobedient children and to welcome the lost sons back to their place at the national table, Houphouët-Boigny stated: ‘You are all my brothers, my sons, and my grandchildren; good or bad, you are all my brothers, my sons, my grandchildren’ (Houphouët-Boigny cited in Chappell Reference Chappell1989: 672). The relationship between the ‘youth’ and the ‘establishment’ was described with a term that stresses kinship: ainés (elders or seniors).
Turning these ideas of the ‘Ivorian family’ upside down, a number of ‘rebellious’ youth and student associations, such as the Fédération des Étudiants d'Afrique Noire en France (FEANF) and its successors, played on the image of youth as being the thorn in the side of elder politicians corrupted by power.Footnote 21 With the restoration of the multi-party system, a new student association evolved, the Fédération Éstudiantine et Scolaire de Côte d'Ivoire (FESCI).Footnote 22 Within the FESCI, the relationship between active members has also often been viewed in terms of kinship. According to Arnaut, the term parent was used as some sort of password in the beginning when activists held clandestine meetings. Later, it was used publicly as an identity label and as a term of reference and address.Footnote 23
The ‘family talk’ of the FESCI served to express the rupture with the biological families of many activists and established the new alliances within the student union as a ‘new family’. Apart from the term parent, seniority within the student movement was also indicated by terms drawn from the realm of kinship traditions: seniors (anciens or vieux père/vieille mère, according either to the position within the group or to the length of service), juniors (bon petits: the supporters of a senior or fiston/fistine) and ‘elder brothers’ (grand frères: teachers, professors and other compassionate and sympathetic outsiders who supported the movement).Footnote 24 Nonetheless, there was a perceived difference between the FESCI ‘elders’ and elder brothers and the ‘old elders’ such as Houphouët-Boigny. The FESCI family, or the ‘new elders’, claimed to defend the values of meritocracy and defiance against the paternalism, corruption and co-option of the gerontocracy of the ‘old elders’ (Arnaut Reference Arnaut2004: 347–59).Footnote 25
In line with the well-established image of the family-nation headed by a father-president, Houphouët-Boigny's death in office in 1993 was followed by the ‘war of the heirs’ between Prime Minister Alassane Ouattara and the President of the Parliament, Henri Konan Bédié, both claiming succession to the presidency. Ouattara announced Houphouët-Boigny's death on state television with the words: ‘Ivoiriennes, my sisters, Ivoiriens, my brothers, the Côte d'Ivoire is orphaned.’Footnote 26 In the end, it was his ‘son’ Henri Konan Bédié who followed in Houphouët-Boigny's footsteps. According to FESCI activists who were imprisoned around the time of Houphouët-Boigny's death, Bédié sent one of his ministers to prison to tell them that ‘the Côte d'Ivoire of the grandfather is no more’, implying that it was now the father who was in charge and who should be feared as ‘more directly supervising, personally manipulating, and (if unsuccessful) more mercilessly penalizing his disobedient children’ (Arnaut Reference Arnaut2004: 250). The conflict between Ouattara and Bédié was followed by the creation of a splinter party, the Rassemblement des Républicains (RDR). Led by Djena Kobina and supporting the neoliberal reforms Ouattara had started as prime minister, the RDR was accused by Bédié of being an ethno-regionalist party of the (largely Muslim) north – however, in light of the ultra-nationalist and largely anti-northern political philosophy of ivoirité,Footnote 27 the RDR turned into a de facto ‘northern people's party’, thus making the PDCI's nightmare come true (see Crook Reference Crook1997: 224–7). It was on the basis of ivoirité that Alassane Ouattara, accused of being a Burkinabè who had obtained Ivorian nationality by fraud, was repeatedly excluded from running for the presidency. Thus, ultimately, it was his inability to prove that he, too, was an offspring of the ‘Ivorian family’ that was used against him. In a way, ivoirité and the debate about autochthony dominating Ivorian political discourse since the 1990s took the idea of the nation as an ensemble of primordial kin groups to extremes (Cutolo Reference Cutolo2010). In the realm of student organizations too, the question of ivoirité led to the fragmentation of the FESCI, as former secretary general Soro Guillaume (himself from the north) supported Ouattara against the position of acting secretary general Charles Blé Goudé (from western Côte d'Ivoire).
As already implicated in the image of Bédié as a ‘son’, kinship metaphors and the discursive imagination of different political generations also played an important role within the PDCI. The gerontocracy of the PDCI turned anyone into ‘youth’ who did not belong to the anciens, a term used to mean the first age cohort of PDCI cadres dominated by Houphouët-Boigny himself. Therefore, someone like Henri Konan Bédié, who had managed a number of ambassadorial and ministerial portfolios over the years, essentially never ceased to be ‘the son’ (or la petite rivière, in comparison with the plus grand Baobab Footnote 28 – Houphouët-Boigny – as expressed in a different metaphorical framework common in Ivorian popular culture).Footnote 29
In 1999, a coup d’état banished Bédié from power. In 2000, Alassane Ouattara was, once again, excluded from presenting himself as a candidate in the presidential elections because he could not convincingly ‘prove’ his ivoirité. The mixture of the nationalist discourse of ‘refondation’Footnote 30 and the xenophobic concept of ‘Ivorians of the trunk’ who have to defend their nation's interests against foreign influences resulted in accusations against Ouattara and other ‘false Ivorians’ as those who supposedly threatened Ivorian independence from within its borders.
This discourse was reinforced in 2002 when a partly successful coup d’état turned into a rebellion that split the country in two: a rebel-held north and a government-controlled south. The FPI accused the rebels of being puppets defending the interests of France. The rebellion served the Gbagbo camp as proof that patriotic resistance had to be organized in order to defend the newly begun programme of refondation. In the collective memory of Gbagbo's followers, 19 September was construed as a therapeutic crisis, as the long-awaited and necessary war of liberation. Gbagbo and his young ultra-nationalist supporters imagined the resurgence of the civil war in the aftermath of the contested presidential elections in 2010 as just another battle in this struggle.Footnote 31 Youth and student associations such as the FESCI and later the Jeunes Patriotes played a major role in the civil war. In 2004, after the incidents at the Hotel Ivoire, where the French army killed about sixty young demonstrators protesting against the destruction of the Ivorian air force, Charles Blé Goudé founded the Pan-African Congress of Patriotic Youth. In his speech at the launch ceremony, Gbagbo imagined the struggle of the ‘patriotic youth’ as the continuation of the struggle for independence:
I want to tell you, the youth of Côte d'Ivoire, that each generation does its work. The generation of Houphouët proclaimed independence. Whether what they did was good or not good doesn't matter; it's history. My generation has the duty … to ensure that colonization, against which our parents have struggled, does not come back in a different form. For you, the youth, there are other struggles coming. I am struggling for my generation. I am struggling on the earth our ancestors have left for us. You have to know that during colonization many of our people died … Again, during the era of the struggle for independence, many of us died. Today, the lady you see here [the mother of one of the demonstrators killed by the French army in front of the Hotel Ivoire on 9 November 2004], her son has died in our struggle for dignity and respect.Footnote 32
The Ivorian civil war was imagined as the continuation of the struggle Houphouët-Boigny and his companions had begun in the 1940s. Moreover, by referring to Houphouët-Boigny and his companions as ‘parents’ and ‘ancestors’ and by literally employing the term ‘generation’, the link between those who had struggled against forced labour and colonization in the 1940s and those who protested against France's interference in the civil war in 2004 is drawn on the basis of kinship and political generations. Interestingly, all three generations are not only perceived as distinct and succeeding each other, but at the same time as coexisting and influencing each other.
THE FORUM DES JEUNES POUR LE CINQUANTENAIRE: ‘DOING BEING YOUTH’
The narrative of several generations of combatants was still prevailing in 2010 when, in his speech at the opening ceremony, the president of the Forum des Jeunes, Damana Pickass, referred to ‘the war that had been imposed on Côte d'Ivoire for eight long and painful years’ as ‘a war of recolonization’. Damana Pickass, born in 1970, is one of the leaders of the so-called Ivorian patriotic youth. From the 1990s onwards he held several leading positions within the student federation the FESCI and in the ‘patriotic galaxy’.Footnote 33 By 2010, Damana Pickass had become an influential member of the FPI, especially in his role as a special consultant in youth matters to Affi N'Guessan, president of the FPI, and as one of the FPI representatives in the Independent Electoral Commission (CEI).Footnote 34 Obviously, Damana Pickass hardly qualifies as youth, neither by age nor by social or economic status. Nonetheless, as president of the Forum des Jeunes, he spoke and acted on behalf of the Ivorian patriotic youth. The same is true of most of his companions in the organizing committee, and even for many of the Forum's invited participants. Two different types of people participated in the Forum des Jeunes: resource people, who were invited to present papers (most of them were PhD students and postdoctoral academics; some were political entrepreneurs in the realm of the ‘patriotic galaxy’), and ordinary participants, who engaged in the discussions and debates but did not present papers. While many among the first group had long passed the status of ‘youth’, with regard to age as well as to social and economic status, most among the latter group were students under the age of thirty.
When I asked him to tell me why he had decided to engage in the commemoration of the fiftieth anniversary of independence, he explained:
We appreciate independence with respect to the sacrifices our parents made, because certainly there have been struggles and battles, people have lost their lives. The end of forced labour and all that – it is with respect to that that we can talk about independence … So independence for us is the end of the whip … But it is not the emancipation of the people, not the emancipation to take their destiny into their own hands.Footnote 35
Pickass’ decision to take part in the commemorative festivities was driven, as he explained, by a feeling of responsibility as a representative or leader of the Ivorian youth:
The destiny of our country is dear to us … It is our generation who will shape the next fifty years … This is why it is important that the people know our perspective and take it into consideration … We have our vision of society … Because [the cinquantenaire] is not in the realm of politique politicienne … it is the cinquantenaire of all of Côte d'Ivoire.Footnote 36
In this statement, Damana used an inclusive ‘we’ and ‘our’ in expressions such as ‘our generation’, ‘our point of view’ and ‘our vision of society’. This ‘we’, he claimed, is not a political but a generational ‘we’: ‘We, the Ivorian youth.’ At the same time, however, he did not define the generational ‘we’ by age or social status, but by the shared experience of being in the vanguard of the nation's renewal. The tumultuous years of the student protests against PDCI rule in the 1990s are perceived as a moment of political awakening. The civil war years and the ‘patriotic resistance’ led by the leaders of patriotic youth organizations appear to be the logical consequence of this struggle.Footnote 37 As such, it is clearly a political ‘we’. The generation is political in the ‘noble’ sense of politics, not in the sense of politique politicienne (politicking). The common characteristic of the youth, according to Damana Pickass’ definition, is that they live in and act for the future, not the past. Hence, Pickass used the term ‘youth’ with a particular societal and political project in mind.
The apparent contradiction between situating himself outside politique politicienne and at the same time participating in it by holding positions within the party in power may be explained by Koselleck's idea of the ‘simultaneity of the non-simultaneous’ (Koselleck Reference Koselleck2013: 9). Even though Pickass has to be regarded as belonging to the group of ‘political entrepreneurs’ within politique politicienne, with the Forum des Jeunes he evoked a time-surpassing generation of youths who were protesting against politics in this sense. His expressions and performances of being ‘youth’ recalled the time when he was still a FESCI activist, and reframed this experience in the light of the more recent Jeunes Patriotes movement and projected it into the future. At the same time, this definition of a generation of youth located those who refused to participate in the patriotic reimagining of the nation not only outside the history of the nation (Arnaut Reference Arnaut2004: 372) but even outside the nation's future.Footnote 38
One of those who refused to participate in the Forum des Jeunes was Serge Gnahoré of the Coalition pour le Changement, a youth association close to the opposition party RDR. He generally agreed that the cinquantenaire was to be seen as a point of departure for the future, but in his opinion this had not been the case. Instead, he said:
they have celebrated themselves … they have spent billions … although our preoccupation as youth is different … This did not make us, an ageing youth, happy. We will not stay young; we are growing older. Today, if you are thirty-eight they will still call you youth. Elsewhere, it is not like that! At thirty-eight you have your responsibilities. But here you are a youth.Footnote 39
According to Serge Gnahoré, there actually was a generation of Ivorian youth, but the common feature of this ‘generation of youth’ was its constant denial of agency. This approach understands youth as the transition to adulthood (in the sense of adolescence). The differentiation marker here is power. The difference between ‘young’ and ‘old’ is that the young are desperate and involuntarily stuck in the category of the powerless ‘youth’ while the old are those in power. For him, Pickass and those participating in the Forum were ‘old youth’ or ‘false youth’.
Both Pickass and Gnahoré shared the idea that the cinquantenaire was less an affair of the past than a commitment to the future: a moment of stock-taking and projection. There was indeed a generation of ‘youth’ who should have been involved in the festivities. Both of their quotations also evoke the unavoidable, even natural, necessity of rupture with the past: Pickass with his Forum des Jeunes, which aimed to translate the visions of Ivorian youth into an action plan for future politics, and Gnahoré by organizing a satirical fake independence day ceremony in the Abidjanese suburb of Abobo.Footnote 40 The old ones had had their chance, and now it was the youth who were going to take over, to start afresh. However, opinions differed on who should be called ‘youth’ and who should have the power to decide in this matter.
During the three so-called ‘days of reflection’ of the Forum des Jeunes, young Ivorians discussed the state of the nation. Young academics, mostly PhD students as well as political activists, presented their analysis of the deficiencies of the past and the present and proposed solutions for a better future in which Côte d'Ivoire would be truly independent.
Among the contributors was Adolphe Blé Kessé, an Ivorian political scientist, who has gained controversial popularity with a book in which he claims that the Ivorian civil war was part of the Ivorian independence struggle (Kessé Reference Kessé2005). In his presentation at the Forum des Jeunes, he repeated this argument, but this time focused on the generational aspect of the conflict and on future courses of action. The Ivorian political class, he said, could be divided into two blocs. One was the ‘bloc of the heirs of historical legitimacy’ or the ‘bloc of Houphouétistes’, and the other the ‘bloc of the heirs of refondation’. The political history of the future Côte d'Ivoire was going to be the history of a fight between these two opposing blocs. In the discussion that followed his presentation, he referred to the bloc of Houphouétistes, or heirs of historical legitimacy, as the ‘bloc of the old’. Soro Guillaume, for example, used to be ‘one of us’, Kessé said, but then decided to change sides and now belongs to ‘the old’. Those belonging to the ‘bloc of the heirs of historical legitimacy’ were only interested in preserving their privileged status. They were engaged in clientelist networks and used politics only as a means of accumulating riches, not even shying away from war. They were characterized by ‘their refusal of change and alteration [that had] driven the country into political violence finally leading to the war of 2002. This war had blocked the programme of the political, economic, cultural and social liberation of Côte d'Ivoire.’ For the heirs of refondation, in contrast, politics was noble. They repudiated violence and engaged in the development of democracy in Côte d'Ivoire. According to Kessé, the heirs of the second bloc belonged to a new generation, which detested gerontocracy and paternalism and lived and acted solely to achieve a better future.Footnote 41 In the way in which Kessé's contribution reproduces the past, an imagined future and an imagined past are born in the interstices between selected experiences and expectations, and are used to link the lives of young and old Ivorians together as collectives.
‘Young’ and ‘old’ are used here to mark a difference between those who supposedly refuse change and those who fight for revolutionary new beginnings. Youth, here, is understood as a collective identity in the sense of a ‘new generation’, a generation that has suffered sufficiently under Houphouët-Boigny and the single-party system and therefore knows about the need to reconstruct a society that has been socialized into an autocratic one-party system. Not having experienced the one-party system, young Ivorians are thus as innocent and hungry for change as they are susceptible to nostalgic yearnings for the so-called ‘good old days’.Footnote 42
Age does not play any role in how this generation is imagined. People such as ninety-seven-year-old Bernard Dadié, a celebrated Ivorian writer, who had been among the PDCI activists imprisoned in the colonial prison of Grand Bassam from 1946 to 1949, are integrated into this generation of youth even though they are referred to as doyen (eldest). It was their memories that the Jeunes Patriotes used as reservoirs of memory and as guarantees of the legitimacy of their struggle. Bernard Dadié featured prominently in Sidiki Bakaba's documentary La victoire aux mains nues (2005) about the incidents of November 2004, in which he stated:
[T]he struggle of today joins yesterday's struggle. It is a continuity in searching … in the struggle for complete independence … these young people do not have the same fears as we had before; these young people have travelled to France … and have not known … not experienced what we have experienced as colonized, as French subjects.
Talking about the same subject in one of his essays, he even constructs a bond of descent by stating that the Jeunes Patriotes were ‘writing a beautiful history, which is neither going to be falsified, nor truncated, nor forgotten, as had been the case with your precursors’ (Dadié Reference Dadié2004: 54). These quotations from Bernard Dadié nicely point to the interstices of experience and expectation as being precisely the place where history happens and where generations are imagined.
CONCLUSION
In this paper I have looked at one of the most debated programmes of the Ivorian cinquantenaire. The participants in the Forum des Jeunes claimed that the cinquantenaire theme of reflection (on the failures of the past in creating a better future) was addressed less to the veterans than to those who were going to form the nation of tomorrow. However, the question of who is part of the Ivorian youth and whether the Forum really spoke for youth in its entirety was contested heatedly. There were two different but at the same time complementary imaginaries concerning the role of the youth for Ivorian independence and its commemoration. One can be described as the narrative of several generations of combatants for independence, stressing continuity. The second is the narrative of a revolutionary youth, stressing rupture and renewal. The commemorative arena of self-imaginaries that the cinquantenaire provided showed that both perspectives were understood in terms of kinship.
I have shown that both narratives have traces in Ivorian political history and have to be examined in the context of their genealogy in order to understand how and why histories of independence still serve young Ivorians as building blocks for both their individual and collective identities as part of the Ivorian nation. My digression into the genealogy of kinship metaphors in Ivorian political culture has shown that it is not only the young who used ‘youth’ to mark belonging or exclusion. Emic concepts of ‘youth’ and ‘generation’ have been used by young (and older) political actors in the imagination of a national collective, but for different purposes. Taking seriously these statements and performances of ‘doing being youth’ (to paraphrase Sachs Reference Sachs, Atkinson and Heritage1984), and seeing them as part of a wider philosophy of time, provides an insight into the making of collective memory. Along the way, this approach helps to avoid essentialist notions of identity and collective memory as they are regarded not only as extremely fluid but also as multifaceted, blending older and later representations into trajectories of empowerment (van Dijk Reference van Dijk and Werbner1998: 156).
Koselleck has attempted to understand this plurality of memories and histories and their agency-creating potential through the concept of temporal layers and the ‘simultaneity of the non-simultaneous’. In 1928, Wilhelm Pinder introduced the ‘simultaneity of the non-simultaneous’ in relation to concepts of historical periods and, more specifically, to generations, before it was further developed by Karl Mannheim (Reference Mannheim1964). However, Mannheim's concept of generation, with an emphasis on shared experiences and substantial or essential aspects of generational belonging, does not take into account the actual processes of generational Vergemeinschaftung Footnote 43 (Weber Reference Weber1972: 21), which, I argue, are central to understanding the efficacy of generational or genealogical models in the making of communities. I have argued that looking at these processes of Vergemeinschaftung as interactions of past, present and future may open an analytical window onto the making of collective memory and nation building. While common sense suggests that concepts of renaissance and new beginnings always involve a recourse to the past, the reversal of this relationship (that commemorating the past often encompasses projections into the future) is often deemed too ‘banal’ to be taken into scholarly consideration. Reinhart Koselleck has described how future and past interact in experiences of time (Reference Koselleck1995: 12). Memory in itself does not generate meaning. It is the perspective on the future, the ‘horizon of expectation’, which is constitutive for the sense-making potential of memory.Footnote 44 Looking at memory work with its perspective on the future helps us overcome the ‘justification’ approach that often accompanies the study of memory politics (where remembering the past is understood as a tool legitimizing the present). During the Forum des Jeunes, young Ivorians engaged in different self-imaginations and self-performances that tied their individual lives to the nation's destiny – as one out of a thousand generations working for a bright future for Côte d'Ivoire. Thinking about ‘doing being youth’ as a differentiation marker in Ivorian political culture from a memory perspective may help explain the usage of the past without exoticizing African politicsFootnote 45 and without looking at youth and politics from the position of the gerontocrat who both denies the young actors’ agency and essentializes generational identities (Arnaut Reference Arnaut2004: 333–6).
In the meantime, the Jeunes Patriotes and their vision of a new, younger nation have been overtaken by the post-electoral crisis. Under Ouattara's presidency, kinship still persists as an important pattern for describing political alliances and for demanding mercy or understanding for political seniors. In early 2013, about a year and a half after the fall of the Gbagbo regime, Charles Blé Goudé, the leader of the Jeunes Patriotes and former secretary general of the FESCI, was arrested in Ghana and deported to Côte d'Ivoire. Joël Poté, interim president of Goudé's Jeunes Patriotes, met Minister of the Interior Hamed Bakayoko to plead for amnesty for Charles Blé Goudé. In his speech, he made use of well-known patterns of kinship:
We ask the President of the Republic to free his son Charles Blé Goudé. The ideological differences of yesterday should not constitute barriers to political dialogue today … In these difficult times Côte d'Ivoire needs a father rather than a president. We ask you to intermediate so that the President liberates his son … and to enact a law of general amnesty for all prisoners.Footnote 46
What had started as a critique of the ‘father of the nation complex’ in Ivorian political culture with Harris Memel-Fotê's ‘Des ancêtres fondateurs aux pères de la nation’ (Reference Memel-Fotê1991) returned to well-established patterns of reference. Ouattara, who claims the heritage of Félix Houphouët-Boigny, is asked to assume the role of father in dealing with opponents and ‘rebellious’ children. The 1990 wave of African democratizations, which saw the rise of the FESCI and which would later be celebrated as the birth of a ‘new generation’ and the beginning of a ‘second independence’ by Gbagbo and his supporters, was seen by Memel-Fotê as the beginning of a new (democratic) era of anti-patrimonial politics: ‘The time of the fathers of the nation has passed … A nation cannot have a father. She is the result of the people's will’ (Reference Memel-Fotê1991: 263–4). By 2013, and in the face of Ouattara's rigid persecution and prosecution of pro-Gbagbo youth militias, the ‘pardoning father’ trope seemed to be a promising way out. Indeed, this turn of events, too, has a model in the past: in 1969, shortly before the independence day festivities, Laurent Gbagbo (spokesman of the dissolved anti-PDCI student's association UGECI at the time) was released from the military camp of Akouédo and was invited to Yamoussoukro by Houphouët-Boigny for a reconciliation meeting (Grah Mel Reference Grah Mel2010: 363). Gbagbo and Djédjé Mady (spokesman of the pro-government Mouvement des Étudiants et Élèves de Côte d'Ivoire, MEECI), the ‘quarrelling brothers’ (Gbagbo and Mady are from neighbouring villages in western Côte d'Ivoire), publicly shook hands under the mediation of Houphouët-Boigny himself. The reconciliation was crowned with a so-called ‘family picture’ in which the young men surrounded their ‘father’ Houphouët-Boigny.Footnote 47 However, history has taught us that this reconciliation did not last long. It remains to be seen whether the Ouattara government succeeds in reconciling the ‘quarrelling brothers’ and the divided youth, and how far appeals to a common generational belonging or to kinship will play a role in this.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Point Sud workshop ‘Celebrating the nation, debating the nation: independence, jubilees, national days and the politics of commemoration in Africa’ in Bamako in 2012. I would like to thank the participants of the workshop and particularly Carola Lentz, Kathrin Heitz, Christine Pflicht and the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on the manuscript.
