Ivory Coast has dissolved its electoral commission after widespread criticism over its independence and management. Fletcher and Octavio dig into what that means for democracy in West Africa, and how colonial history, cocoa, and national identity keep shaping the present.
Costa de Marfil disuelve su comisión electoral después de críticas sobre su independencia y gestión. Fletcher y Octavio exploran qué significa esto para la democracia en África Occidental y cómo la historia colonial, el cacao y la identidad nacional siguen dando forma al presente.
8 essential A2-level terms from this episode, with translations and example sentences in Spanish.
| Spanish | English | Example |
|---|---|---|
| comisión | commission | La comisión electoral organiza las elecciones. |
| elecciones | elections | Las elecciones son importantes para la democracia. |
| independiente | independent | El juez debe ser independiente. |
| marfil | ivory | Costa de Marfil produce mucho cacao. |
| cacao | cocoa | El cacao viene de África y América. |
| tensión | tension | Hay tensión entre el norte y el sur del país. |
| neutral | neutral | El árbitro debe ser neutral en el partido. |
| identidad | identity | La identidad cultural es importante para muchas personas. |
Here's a country I keep coming back to whenever I want to understand how post-colonial Africa actually works in practice.
Ivory Coast dissolved its entire electoral commission this week.
Sí.
Yes.
La comisión es muy importante.
The commission is very important.
Sin comisión, no hay elecciones limpias.
Without a commission, there are no clean elections.
Right, and the official line is that this is a reform move, a fresh start.
But you have to ask who that fresh start serves, and that question has a very long answer in Ivory Coast.
Costa de Marfil tiene muchos problemas con las elecciones.
Ivory Coast has many problems with elections.
Hay violencia.
There is violence.
Hay dudas.
There are doubts.
And those doubts go back decades.
For listeners who may not know this country well, give me the thirty-second version of why Ivory Coast matters.
Es el país más grande de cacao del mundo.
It is the world's biggest cocoa country.
Cuarenta por ciento del cacao es de allí.
Forty percent of cocoa comes from there.
Forty percent.
Which means that chocolate bar in your pocket, the one you bought at the airport, almost certainly started as a pod on a tree somewhere in the western part of Ivory Coast.
Sí.
Yes.
Y también hay café, petróleo, madera.
And also coffee, oil, timber.
Es un país rico.
It is a rich country.
Rich in resources but with an incredibly complicated political history.
And I think the key to understanding what's happening with this election commission is understanding a word most Spanish speakers have never heard: ivoirité.
Ivoirité.
Ivoirité.
Es una idea difícil.
It is a difficult idea.
Significa, ¿quién es realmente de Costa de Marfil?
It means, who is really from Ivory Coast?
Exactly.
And this idea didn't fall from the sky.
It was invented, politically, in the 1990s as a way of excluding certain candidates from running for president.
Specifically candidates from the north, who tend to be Muslim.
El norte es diferente del sur.
The north is different from the south.
El sur es cristiano.
The south is Christian.
El norte es musulmán.
The north is Muslim.
Hay mucha tensión.
There is a lot of tension.
And that tension has a face.
The person who got blocked by ivoirité most famously was Alassane Ouattara, who has been the president of Ivory Coast since 2011 and who is still in power today.
Ouattara es del norte.
Ouattara is from the north.
Sus enemigos dicen que no es ivoriano.
His enemies say he is not Ivorian.
Pero eso es falso.
But that is false.
It's a pattern that shows up across the continent, honestly.
You make citizenship a question of ancestry or religion, and suddenly you have a constitutional weapon that can be pointed at anyone inconvenient.
Y la comisión electoral tiene este problema también.
And the electoral commission has this problem too.
Las personas en la comisión no son independientes.
The people on the commission are not independent.
Walk me through that a bit, because the word independent does a lot of work in this context.
La comisión debe ser neutral.
The commission must be neutral.
Pero en Costa de Marfil, el gobierno elige a las personas de la comisión.
But in Ivory Coast, the government chooses the people on the commission.
Which is like asking the team to also referee their own match.
And the opposition parties have been saying this for years.
The 2020 election was boycotted by the main opposition precisely because they didn't trust the process.
Sí, el boicot.
Yes, the boycott.
Ouattara gana con noventa y cuatro por ciento.
Ouattara wins with ninety-four percent.
Pero nadie compite.
But nobody competes.
Ninety-four percent when your main opponents aren't on the ballot is one of those numbers that tells you everything and nothing at the same time.
Exacto.
Exactly.
Y ahora hay elecciones en 2025.
And now there are elections in 2025.
La comisión nueva es importante para la oposición.
The new commission is important for the opposition.
So dissolving the old one and starting fresh could be a genuine concession to critics, or it could be a way of rebuilding the same structure with different names on the doors.
The question is which one it is.
Los partidos de oposición no confían todavía.
The opposition parties don't trust it yet.
Dicen, vamos a ver.
They say, let's see.
That measured skepticism feels appropriate.
I covered the 2010 post-election crisis from Nairobi, and what happened in Ivory Coast that year was devastating.
Ouattara won the runoff, Gbagbo refused to leave, and somewhere between three thousand and five thousand people died in the violence that followed.
Es una historia muy triste.
It is a very sad story.
Gbagbo va a la corte internacional.
Gbagbo goes to the international court.
Es el primer expresidente allí.
He is the first former president there.
First sitting head of state ever indicted by the ICC.
And he was ultimately acquitted, which created its own controversy.
But what that whole episode revealed is that in Ivory Coast, elections are not just political events.
They carry the weight of every unresolved grievance about who belongs and who doesn't.
La identidad es el problema real.
Identity is the real problem.
El cacao y el café vienen de inmigrantes del norte y de Burkina Faso.
The cocoa and coffee come from immigrants from the north and from Burkina Faso.
Which is one of the great ironies of the whole ivoirité debate.
The economic miracle that made Ivory Coast the envy of West Africa was built substantially on migrant labor.
And then the political class turned around and questioned whether those same people truly belonged.
Houphouët-Boigny, el primer presidente, dice que todos son bienvenidos.
Houphouët-Boigny, the first president, says everyone is welcome.
Trabajadores de muchos países vienen.
Workers from many countries come.
Houphouët-Boigny, who ruled from independence in 1960 until his death in 1993, was a genuinely fascinating figure.
He built Abidjan into one of the most cosmopolitan cities in Africa.
He also built a cathedral in his home village, Yamoussoukro, that is larger than Saint Peter's in Rome.
The man had a certain sense of scale.
La basílica.
The basilica.
Sí.
Yes.
Es increíble.
It is incredible.
Nadie va, pero está allí.
Nobody goes, but it is there.
A massive air-conditioned basilica in the middle of a tropical capital that cost somewhere around three hundred million dollars in 1990 money.
It seats seven thousand people and the town around it has maybe three hundred thousand.
There's a certain philosophical statement being made there and I'm still not sure what it is.
El poder.
Power.
Es siempre el poder.
It is always power.
En África, en Europa, en todas partes.
In Africa, in Europe, everywhere.
Hard to argue with that.
So where does this leave Ivory Coast going into the next election cycle?
Because the dissolution of the commission is the news, but the real story is whether the country can actually hold a credible vote.
Ouattara tiene muchos años en el poder.
Ouattara has many years in power.
Hay personas que quieren un cambio.
There are people who want change.
Las elecciones son muy importantes.
The elections are very important.
He's been in power since 2011.
He ran for a third term in 2020 on a constitutional technicality, arguing the 2016 constitution reset his term count.
Even some of his supporters were uncomfortable with that argument.
The fatigue of a long incumbency is real.
Y la economía también es un problema.
And the economy is also a problem.
El precio del cacao sube mucho.
The price of cocoa goes up a lot.
Pero la gente normal no tiene más dinero.
But ordinary people don't have more money.
That gap between commodity prices and lived reality for farmers is one of the most durable injustices in the global food supply.
Cocoa hit record highs recently, somewhere around ten thousand dollars a ton, and the farmers growing it are still among the poorest people in the world.
Exacto.
Exactly.
El chocolate en Europa es barato.
Chocolate in Europe is cheap.
El trabajo en Costa de Marfil es muy duro y el salario es bajo.
The work in Ivory Coast is very hard and the wage is low.
There's a word I want to ask you about, actually, before we wrap.
You used it earlier and I know the English root but the Spanish version is doing something different.
The word marfil.
Because ivory, in English, comes from the elephant.
But in Spanish it's marfil.
Where does that come from?
Marfil viene del árabe.
Marfil comes from Arabic.
Significa, el hueso del elefante.
It means, the bone of the elephant.
Los árabes traen esta palabra a España.
The Arabs bring this word to Spain.
So the country's name in Spanish, Costa de Marfil, is carrying an Arabic word inside it, which itself describes an African animal traded across the Mediterranean for centuries.
The name of the country is basically a fossil of the spice trade.
Sí.
Yes.
El español tiene muchas palabras del árabe.
Spanish has many words from Arabic.
Almohada, aceite, algebra.
Pillow, oil, algebra.
Son palabras árabes.
They are Arabic words.
Eight hundred years of Arab presence on the Iberian Peninsula left the language with somewhere around four thousand Arabic loanwords.
Every time a Spanish speaker says aceite, they're speaking a fragment of Al-Andalus.
I find that genuinely beautiful and also a little vertiginous.
Fletcher, para mí es normal.
Fletcher, for me it is normal.
Pero entiendo tu sorpresa.
But I understand your surprise.
Para un americano es muy diferente.
For an American it is very different.
American English has its own layers, but they're shallower and more recent.
There's something about a language that's been absorbing the world for a thousand years that just hits differently.
Anyway.
Costa de Marfil.
A country built on cocoa, divided by identity, now trying to rebuild the machinery of trust one more time.
Worth watching.
Sí.
Yes.
Y come chocolate esta semana.
And eat chocolate this week.
Piensa en Costa de Marfil cuando comes.
Think about Ivory Coast when you eat it.