Félix Houphouët-Boigny

Félix Houphouët-Boigny was born in Yamoussoukro, in French Ivory Coast, on the eighteenth of October 1905, the son of a Baoulé chief. He trained as a medical assistant at the École de Médecine de l'Afrique Occidentale Française in Dakar (1925) and practiced rural medicine through the 1930s while inheriting the chiefdom of N'Gokro on his father's death.

He entered French colonial politics in 1944 as a co-founder of the Syndicat Agricole Africain — the African planters' union that successfully ended the colonial system of forced labor in French West Africa. He was elected to the French National Assembly in 1945 and held cabinet positions in three successive Fourth Republic governments. He co-founded the Rassemblement Démocratique Africain in 1946 — the principal francophone African political organization of the late colonial period.

He led Côte d'Ivoire to independence on the seventh of August 1960 and served as its first President for the next thirty-three years until his death in 1993.

His political model — sustained close alignment with France through the Françafrique system, political stability under a single dominant party, encouragement of French commercial investment, and the deliberate avoidance of Pan-African political union — produced the longest sustained economic expansion of any post-independence African state through the 1960s and early 1970s (the Ivorian miracle). The model collapsed under the commodity-price drops of the 1980s; the country has not fully recovered.

He completed the Basilica of Our Lady of Peace in Yamoussoukro in 1989 — the largest Christian church in the world — at a cost approximately equal to the country's entire foreign debt.

He died in Yamoussoukro on the seventh of December 1993, age eighty-eight.

He is honored here as the planter-statesman whose thirty-three years defined the Françafrique model of independence.