This is an authorized translation in English of a post in French by @terresco: La vie sous un coup d'Etat, partie 2

^{As my primary language is not English, there are probably some mistakes in my translation.}

Remember that the person who speaks here is NOT me, Vincent Celier (@vcelier), but @terresco, a French guy.

---

Abidjan 1999, the president is overthrown

In the year 1999, I had been an expatriate for almost 6 years in Ivory Coast, stationed in Abidjan. The idyllic life and the political context (see previous article) did not let us guess that things could go wrong. It is true that some spoke of problems, predicted that something was going to happen. But there is always one to prophesy the worst in all conditions. All in all we listened to those we considered as indecipherable pessimists with a polite but distracted ear.

* * * * *

Christmas at the beach

We were approaching the December holidays. The last Christmas of our Ivorian contract. We decided not to travel and spend two weeks on our favorite beach. From the name of a nearby village: Assinie, the beach stretches from Abidjan but it is in Assinie that it becomes magical. The white sand, planted with coconut trees generating a saving shade made it a dream beach. For us who were surfing it was perfection, the waves came to break down tirelessly all year round. Not the best waves in the world, but it was our waves, just for us.

Assinie, accessible in about an hour and a half, was the favorite destination of expatriates and Lebanese of Abidjan for weekends. We had straw huts built on the beach between the coconut trees. These small, patchwork huts that populated coconut groves on some twenty kilometers of beach represented our paradise. They were disparate, from the most basic to the palace.

Our location was located almost at the end of the beach, near the river marking the border with Ghana. We could not get there by car because at this place the beach was separated from the land by a large lagoon. It was necessary to carry all our stuff on a pirogue. There was of course no electricity except if you owned a generator, no water, no shop. We negotiate some fresh fish with the fishermen of the village, for the rest we had to bring everything, foresee everything. In other words, we were cut off from the world.

Preparations and first suspicions

Certainly a tropical Christmas does not have the charm of a Christmas under the snow. But we still had to celebrate the occasion. We had brought some food and some good bottles. We were waiting for friends for Christmas day.

Two days before the date I found that there really was not a lot of people, Assinie can not compare to La Grande Motte in August, certainly, but the weekend or the holidays many come to pass a moment in their hut. This time it was a desert, we were alone.

The harmattan, that desert wind that brings relative freshness when it comes to the coast, hiding the sky with a microscopic and traveling veil of dust, lowering the humidity rate was a blessing. This year it was doing us the honor of his visit, making the climate pleasant and the waves perfect.

No more doubts

On the morning of the 25th, we had to face the facts, something was not normal. We did not have a mobile phone, although the first ones had appeared two years before, and in any case there was no network. It's a rather peculiar feeling to have no way of knowing what was happening while being convinced that something had happened.

A little further there was a fishing village. We sometimes bought fish there, at other times we would help them pull the huge nets that looped from the beach across the sea. An almost daily activity, hard but fun for us who did it as a hobby, to which participated the whole village in good humor.

The fishermen were mostly Ghanaians, it was not easy to understand each other but we knew each other. Africans often have radios whose used batteries return a formidable sizzle. However, they really like their radio, permanently stuck to their ear. It would be amazing if I could not glean some information. This was the case when one of the fishermen told me that they had killed Konan Bédié. It was not in these terms, much more imaged, with all the beauty of the African expression but the stress that I experienced made me forget the formula.

Konan Bédié was not dead, but rumors circulate at high speed in these cases, growing in stages. But where we were, everything was unclear and we had no way to get more news. Here of course, in this corner of the end of the world where there was nothing to steal except the beauty of nature, everything was normal. What to do? Two choices were available to us. The first was to stay here and wait safely for the next events. We would have no reliable information about the events. It would be necessary to return one day. Imagine there is a civil war we would be stuck here without help. In Abidjan there was a barracks of French soldiers, the ones we sometimes criticize but that we are happy to find in these situations. Protection and evacuation was possible as we saw two years later.

But let's not anticipate, our first choice having its limits we opted, rightly or wrongly I still do not know today, for the second option: return immediately to Abidjan. We knew there were risks, but when this kind of storm breaks loose anything can happen. We were leaving without a weather forecast to face this storm. We had to travel 80 kilometers by car, then cross Abidjan since we lived on the other side of this city so extensive. We could not avoid the entrance and the airport, the bridge. Bottlenecks probably decisive.

* * * * *

The decision was made, unanimously of two, my wife and me. There was only to implement it. I had read too many war reporter books at this time because I see myself preparing my camera, hidden under my seat, ready to serve. The sixty or seventy kilometers before the entry of Abidjan we are surprised by the calm, nothing unusual except for much less traffic than usual. In fact almost no traffic and no more police barrage either. It is rather reassured that we arrived in the shantytowns announcing the arrival in the area of ​​the airport and the entrance of the city.

We were maybe a little naive but not stupid we knew it would not be as easy to go home ... indeed.

(to be continued)

-- @terresco

Part 1