In 1950 this was a village of five hundred people.
Yamoussoukro was called N'Gokro and was a Baoulé village. Today it is the political capital of Ivory Coast, with eight- and ten-lane avenues, rows of streetlights disappearing into the horizon and empty plots between one building and the next. It was built for a city that has not yet arrived, and that gap between the plan and the life is what makes it fascinating.
01 From N'Gokro to capital
The name explains almost everything. The village was called N'Gokro, and “kro” means town in the Baoulé language. In the early twentieth century a woman, Yamousso, governed it, and from her comes today's place name: Yamousso's town. In 1901 it counted some 475 inhabitants.
Half a century later it was still tiny: in 1950 it had around 500 inhabitants. By 1975 there were 37,253. The 2021 census recorded over 340,000 in the municipality, and the autonomous district that carries its name covers 2,075 square kilometres, an area comparable to the world's large metropolitan regions.
02 Ten-lane avenues
The first thing that disorients you on arrival is the scale of the road network. The city was laid out as a grid of eight- and ten-lane avenues, lit by very long rows of streetlights and separated by plots that largely remain unbuilt, covered in tall grass and scrub.
The effect is hard to convey without seeing it: you cross a sixty-metre-wide avenue without looking, because nothing is coming. Away from the axes leading to Abidjan, Bouaké and Daloa, traffic is thin at any hour. The verges are red earth with no finished pavement, and the grass eats into the edges.
It helps to read it for what it is: infrastructure built in advance, waiting for a density that did not arrive at the expected rate. It is the opposite of almost any other African city this size, where life spills into the street. Here the street spills over the life.
03 The scattered buildings
The other peculiarity is that the important buildings do not form a centre: they stand alone, each surrounded by open country. The Félix Houphouët-Boigny Foundation, devoted to peace research, rises isolated on a plain, with an enormous paved forecourt and a ceremonial axis running down towards the city. The Hotel Président, from 1973, is a 285-room concrete block by the Tunisian architect Olivier Cacoub. The golf club, from 1980, was designed by the Frenchman Roger Taillibert with two concrete shells.
To these add the campus of the former National Higher School of Public Works, completed around 1979 by Henry Pottier with Philippe Godin and Jacques Rechsteiner: four concrete cubes linked by walkways and shielded by a screen of twenty-five monumental arches. And, visible from almost anywhere, the dome of the basilica consecrated in 1990, which is the skyline's reference point.
04 How you get around
It is not a walking city, and not for safety reasons but geometric ones: the distances between landmarks run to several kilometres along shadeless avenues. The practical approach is a shared taxi, or hiring a car with a driver for half a day and stringing the sights together, since they all sit on two or three axes.
Access from Abidjan is some 240 kilometres by motorway, a long three hours by car or around four by intercity coach, which run frequently. There is also an international airport, sized in its day for large aircraft, with very little scheduled traffic.
Two days are ample to see the city properly. The usual mistake is treating it as a one-hour stop on the way somewhere else: that way you only see empty avenues. Given time, what emerges is a city of ordinary neighbourhoods, markets and workshops living inside a plan drawn four sizes too big.
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