As part of my dissertation, I'm preparing to study the problem of the concept of "Nation" (as opposed to state, or ethnicity) in Africa. It's a particularly knotty problem in a lot of ways. First, one of the conditions the world imposes on itself is that there be states, governmental entities, with sovereign control over territories (whether they choose to enforce borders, or any other measure of their sovereignty is another matter and does not touch the at least formal equality of sovereignty that is assumed to exist among all nations of the world for the purposes of international communication, trade, diplomacy, and all other relations). The globe has been mapped, and boundaries have been in place, imposed or not, and now circumscribe groups of people which derive their rights only as citizens of states. African states cannot "enter", as it were, conditions of modernity, or any rapport with the world outside, without first developing states which operate as theoretical equals to the European states. A lot can be said about how such a system was ever installed, but it's here now, and Africa has to deal with it. In much of Africa, however, the sense of nationhood did NOT grow out of a sense of brotherly affiliation with groups beyond kin and tribe, as European nations did. Of course there have always been minority populations, but in general European political evolution over centuries has produced a one state per nation solution. In much of Africa, however, borders were enforced by foreign powers without regard for the evolution of affiliations between identity groups. Their sense of nation, therefore, has necessarily more shallow roots. It's no surprise, then, that oftentimes the more recently reconfigured ethnic belonging can break through the arbitrariness of imposed borders and threaten national unity.
The Côte d'Ivoire has become an interesting test-case for discussing such problems for many reasons, the first of which being that it, more than any other former French colonies in West-Africa has relied on France as a model of nationhood, and French as the linguistic solder with which to weld the nation. The figure of Félix Houphouët-Boigny, first as minister in the De Gaulle government, then as President of single-party independent Côte d'Ivoire, looms large as a symbol of Ivorian desire to unite disparate ethnic elements in the forging of a nation, all the while maintaining an official closeness to the former colonizing power. While Sénégal, perhaps, shares a similar figure of divided loyalties—albeit with an added literary element—in Léopold Senghor, even Sénégal officialized indigenous languages, for example, as a way to acknowledge the legitimacy, even primacy, of ethnic self-identifications in the composition of a national citizenry over and above the more French-inflected identity of former-French-subject. The Côte d'Ivoire, by contrast, saw the French language as the only possible unifying lingua franca possible for its collection of ethnic elements. This official sanction of the French language is symbolically linked to the official sanction of French discourses against which Ivorian discourses have always had to play.
Also contributing to the uniqueness of the Ivorian identity crisis has been the official post-independence discourse on the founding of the nation, which emphasizes the fiction of a virtually empty territory onto which many tribal groups immigrated within the last 2 or 3 centuries, each laying a not-long-established claim to a homeland whose borders were eventually circumscribed by the colonial carving up of the African map. This foundational narrative attempted to weaken the claim of any one group to original autochthony, thereby legitimizing the current multicultural amalgam as constitutive of the national identity.
This discourse of multiculturalism, however, eventually produced the opposite of its intended effect, as waves of immigrants from all quarters of Africa, but most notably from the Moslem countries to the north (Burkina Faso, Mali), surged in to the economically prospering and relatively peaceful Côte d'Ivoire throughout the 70s and 80s. To this date, the Côte d'Ivoire counts almost a full third of its residents as immigrants. As one can easily imagine, this mass of immigrants is not easily assimilable and thus has become a contributing condition to anti-immigrant sentiment. As the economic prosperity evaporated into hardship in the 90s, the vast immigrant population rapidly became scapegoats, as well as a political football for a budding democracy moving toward its first multi-party elections. The ruling party seriously threatened, seen as responsible for the economic decline after 30 years of power, Henri Konan Bédié, successor to Houphouët-Boigny, began to stress a new, more exclusionary discourse of "Ivoirité" as a justification to disallow the candidacy of his most serious opponent[1]. The grounds were as much an affirmation of Ivorian-ness as opposed to the immigrant-ness of non-native residents, as they were also inescapably ethnic—the homeland of Allasane Ouattara, the excluded candidate, happens to straddle the border of Burkina Faso, and Ouattara's mother was said to be from the wrong side of it for him to be fully Ivorian. Thus the official discourses of tolerance of "immigrant" identities intended by the original multicultural policies to enable the inclusion of the 60 or so ethnicities within Ivorian territory to feel fully and valuably Ivorian finally enabled the exclusion of some citizens from the political process based on that very ethnic identity.
This single act of ethnic exclusion, coupled with the discourse of exclusionary "Ivoirité" quickly became symbolic of and motivational for the fracture in the national identity. Before Bédié's first elected 5-year term was up, there was a coup d'état, and several of the major northern ethnic groups claimed control of a large enough stretch of territory—peopled by groups culturally linked through Islam—to apply for separate nationhood status with the UN. For the last five years, a civil war, complicated by a controversial French military involvement under the guise of UN peacekeeping, has splintered what was once considered West Africa's oasis of peace and prosperity into bitterly opposed warring groups.
[1] I am emphasizing one element of this exclusionary new discourse of Ivoirité in order to single it out for study. Of course, Ivoirité did not come about solely to exclude a single political candidate. Christian Bouquet lays out a much more complicated socio-political landscape which Ivoirité became a response to. Among other things, Houphouët-Boigny had maintained an open-borders policy, and had especially invited West Africans from lands having more oppressive political regimes (Guinée, Mali, Burkina Faso, even Ghana) almost from the beginning in the 1960s. He also invited them to stay and work the land, granting them deeds for the land they worked along with citizenship without the requirement to repudiate their former nationalities after a certain period of residency. This was of great political benefit to Houphouët-Boigny, who maintained a veneer of a democratic mandate throughout his rule as single-party dictator, and who used his popularity with the large and growing immigrant community (along with their easily obtained voter cards) to stay in power. A generation later, with the advent of IMF imposed multi-party politics, this large voting bloc was not only excluded from the political process by Ivoirité, but a 1998 law revoked land-use rights, and many prosperous cocoa, coffee, and rubber plantations owned by the now formally labeled "foreigners" were seized by opportunistic partisans of Ivoirité, leading to violence and a mass exodus to the North. This more economic consequence of the discourse of Ivoirité also fed into the current civil war. Christian Bouquet, "Être Étranger En Côte D'ivoire: La Nébuleuse "Dioula"," Géopolitique Africaine 9 (2003).
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