by Javier Blas People used to call Abidjan the Manhattan of West
Africa. It was the 1960s, and the commercial capital of Ivory
Coast was alive with possibility. No longer a French colony, the
country had a booming cocoa industry whose profits coursed
through Abidjan. “Cocoa francs” laid the boulevards of the
upmarket Cocody neighbourhood and built the skyscrapers in the
business district of Le Plateau. Famous singers and actors flew
in from Paris. The city’s casinos brimmed and bubbled. The
nation became a byword for stability and prosperity in west
Africa, while the world ate more and more chocolate. As the
1960s became the 1970s and then the 1980s, cocoa remained to
Ivory Coast what oil was to Saudi Arabia or Nigeria: a geyser of
cash. Brown gold. The French brought cocoa to Ivory Coast, but
it was Félix Houphouët-Boigny, the country’s first president
(and a former cocoa planter), who masterminded the development
of a multi-billion-dollar national crop that could meet strong
demand for chocolate in Europe a