Felix Houphouet-Boigny
Felix Houphouet-Boigny governed Ivory Coast for thirty-three years, kept the French connection every one of his neighbours cut, and was richer than the state he ran. He was a doctor and a cocoa planter, and his first political act was to organise African planters against the forced labour the colonial system supplied to European ones. The union he built became a party, he was elected to the French parliament in 1945, and the law abolishing forced labour in the French empire carries his name. He was a minister in four French governments and argued against federating French West Africa, on the reasoning that Ivory Coast was paying for the poorer territories and would do better alone. He was right about the arithmetic and it made him enemies for a generation. Independence in 1960 changed less there than anywhere. He kept the CFA franc, French troops, French administrators and French investment, and cocoa and coffee gave the country the fastest growth in Africa for two decades - the Ivorian miracle, built on immigrant labour from Burkina Faso and Mali. It ended when commodity prices fell in the 1980s. He had by then begun building a basilica larger than St Peter's at his birthplace, paid for by means he declined to explain, and had moved the capital there. He died in office in 1993 having named no successor, and the question of who counted as Ivorian - the one his own labour policy had created - produced two civil wars within a decade.
- Lived: 1905 CE – 1993 CE
- Nationality: Ivorian
- Roles: head_of_state, politician
