01/24/2024 Bikepacking The Ivory Coast Day 169 : Soyonsprudente and the Flash Mob

In English, “Soyons Prudente” means “Let’s be careful.” In the Ivory Coast, I see this every day on my phone: right next to the “Orange” carrier brand in the upper left hand corner. Orange is the equivalent of ATT or Verizon in the US. What is the purpose of this “be careful” message from Orange? So far, my internet searches have been fruitless. 🍊

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I’ve been cycling through a relatively remote portion of the Ivory Coast. In selecting the route, I’m trying to strike a balance between my preferred climate (dry) and not going too far North into the trouble areas bordering Mali and Burkina Faso. Because the dirt roads are difficult, finding quiet ones is not difficult.

Reaching into the center of the country, though, I’m finding that people are quite shy, often regarding me with suspicious looks. More than ever, people have run away and hidden from me. What gives?

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Along these isolated dirt roads, I frequently encounter low-key checkpoints. It’s difficult to determine how official they are: it’s always a rope across the road with plastic bags tied every few inches like flags (for visibility). I’ve been stopped at some of these and asked for one of the following:

1-My phone number (so I can take the person to the USA)
2-My photo (for Facebook, though sometimes they claim it’s “for the patron”),
3-Money (only twice; I just climbed under the rope and ignored them)

The vast majority of these checkpoints, they ask for nothing and simply wave me on with a friendly smile.

The interesting thing is that the local people are the ones who are getting stopped. And more interesting is that I often see them pay small amounts of money. Since when is it that the “white guy” is the one getting the free pass?

I don’t know the true answer, because whenever I ask about the checkpoints, the officers will only tell me, “they are for security.”

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Whenever I can’t find an answer to something, I do what any self respecting human might do: I make one up. But before we get to the made-up part, I’ll tell you what I did find online.

It turns out that 80 or so years ago, many people were brought into the Ivory Coast from neighboring Burkina Faso and Mali to work in the agricultural sector. The people stayed, but because of Ivory Coast laws, they could not become citizens; even if they were born here. According to the internet, there are somewhere between 1/4 and 3/4 million people still in this situation. The problem? They “cannot go to high school, get a formal job, open a bank account, own land, travel freely or vote.”

Ivory Coast even had a couple of civil wars related to this: “On the surface, the conflict appears to be a squabble over election results. In reality, the election dispute is a manifestation of deep divisions that are underlined by ethnicity, nationality, religion and fragmentation among Ivorian society along geographical lines.” Those lines are between the North and South; I’ll post a map. By now, you might be noticing a pattern of (recent) civil war in these West African countries…

Could this explain the money quietly being exchanged at the checkpoints? Are people informally traveling past lines which they aren’t allowed to cross? Maybe it helps explain the suspicious looks when I, a foreigner, pass through? Does it explain why I only see children herding the cows… because they couldn’t go to school even if they wanted to? And what is it that Orange telling is to be careful of?

That last paragraph: Well, I made all of that up. Feel free to draw your own conclusions, or enlighten if you know more.

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When I was a kid, my mom would rarely let us watch TV; she always called it “the idiot box.”

I grew up thinking my mom was very clever with words, until today when I checked the internet, and lo-and-behold, there even is a Wikipedia page entitled, “The Idiot Box.” Up until now, I thought she had made that up. The reason I decided to do this search was because I’ve been noticing that the way people behave in the Ivory Coast is so different from the other sub-Saharan countries I’ve been visiting lately.

As usual, please accept my disclaimer that not everyone behaves this way; but there is a pronounced difference worth mentioning.

More than ever, when I come to a village, I’ll now see the men (young and old) sitting around watching TV. Like Sierra Leone, there are still some men who just seem to sit around all day as if they are waiting for me to arrive. Something about me cycling past these omphaloskepsing men triggers the kissing sound to emanate from their mouth. Yesterday, I stopped and looked at a kisser and blew him a kiss back. I knew right away this wasn’t the right thing to do when he and his friends looked at me like, WTF? 😳

Anyway, back to the TV. It seems I get less kissing now, thanks to more people having their attention occupied by television. Perhaps counterintuitively the “idiot box” makes them behave less like kissing idiots. Not sure if this makes mom right or wrong.

Just to confirm my observations, I looked online. Ivory Coast has 64 televisions per one thousand people. This may not seem like a lot if you compare it to the 754 TVs/k in the USA…until to contrast it with the mere 9 TVs/k in Guinea. That is a 700% difference between the Ivory Coast and Guinea! A casual scientist might conclude that the natural evolution of man is from kissing to television.

… and when I say “man,” I mean “men,” because the women are all too busy pumping water, washing clothes, or carrying trees to be bothered with kissing at me.

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Whenever I buy my food, or especially water, I’ll often sit on the steps or crouch in the dirt near the place where I made the purchase. Although I’ll rarely eat in front of others, I’m not afraid to drink water. Historically, this has been a good ice breaker, as people come to talk or ask questions. In some places, I’ve even had women who had been sitting bring me their chair.

Here in the Ivory Coast, it seems that the intellectual stimulation of the television supersedes that of the stranger on the bicycle. Conversations don’t start as often.. and if they do, they briefly explode into a flash mob that quickly dissipates after all the selfies have been taken.

This has already happened 4 times in the Ivory Coast; that’s enough that I can call it “a thing”. If I see someone trying to sneak a photo, I’ll smile broadly and wave. This gives them the signal that I’m open to being photographed. Encouraged, they now come to wordlessly put their arm around me and take a selfie with both of us. As soon as this happens, all the people who were sitting around in the wings, come running to take their selfie. Without words, they will grab me, manipulate me like a rag-doll into the desired position for their selfie, take a few shots (or video) and then go back to what they were doing; smoking or watching TV.

Wanting to be friendly, I smiled agreeably with everyone the first few times this happened - even getting a couple of my own shots. Yesterday, though, before all the people had finished with me, I pushed through the crowd leaving behind a memorable, unorthodox selfie angle for the latecomers: Their face composed with a unique angle of my derrière.

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