A few weeks ago, I had the opportunity to visit some of the Ehotilé islands, located opposite Assinie. There are six, but I was only able to visit three. It is on these islands that the Ehotilé people lived a very long time ago, before coming to live on the mainland. The place is heavenly and protected, and there are all kinds of birds and medicinal plants. But what struck me the most was the presence on one of these islands of two barrels of French cannons that experts who have seen them before me date from the time of King Louis XIV in France. Their weight should be around one ton. One of these cannon barrels is almost entirely buried in the mud and will certainly disappear if nothing is done to get it out quickly. The second barrel could have been placed on very fragile pieces of wood, but if nobody takes care of it, it too will disappear in the mud. And it is a part of our history that will have disappeared like so many other parts of this history, because we would not have been able to preserve it.
These two canons are for me the testimony of our meeting, of Assinie's meeting with France, a country to which the destiny of ours was so linked that we speak its language and that many of us consider little or as their second home. If I believe the story that was taught to me by books, and that can be found on the Internet, it was in 1637 that five Capuchin missionaries, who came from Saint-Malo in France, settled in Assinie to evangelize. Three of them died and the other two migrated to Axim, which is in the country that later became Ghana. In 1687, new missionaries accompanied by French traders returned to settle in Assinie where they built a fort. Among them were a certain knight of Amon and an admiral named Jean-Baptiste du Casse who will be received at the court of the king of Assinie. They will leave with two young men from the court, Aniaba and Banga who will be presented to the court of Louis XIV. Aniaba will be baptized by the famous Bishop Bossuet de Meaux, and the two young people will become officers in the Regiment of the King of France before returning to Assinie where their traces will be lost.
It was Arthur Verdier who was the first to enhance the Assinie region by creating the first plantations of coffee and cocoa trees there, while from 1885, Assinie became the center from which, heading north, exploration missions of the rest of what will become Côte d'Ivoire. Assinie will subsequently lose its importance in favor of Grand-Bassam, then Bingerville and Abidjan.
All of this is history. Our history that we should guard against losing. A people who do not know their history is a tree without roots and we, Ivorians, have apparently chosen not to have a history, or to retain from our history only what the one who colonized us gave us bequeathed. Thus we only have as war memorials those erected by colonial France to honor its dead of the two world wars. We have ourselves destroyed the monument we erected to our own dead. The most prestigious streets of the most modern district of our largest city still bear the names that the French were good enough to give to those of their people who "civilized" us, that is to say, who massacred us, for tell all. We have not yet understood the importance of places of memory in the development of our identity and tourism. I will not cease here to denounce the Baoulé people, to which I belong, a people who have provided two Presidents of the Republic to Côte d'Ivoire, as well as eminent historians, and who have not yet understood the importance of create a place to commemorate the sacrifice of the son of its first queen, Abla Pokou, a sacrifice that gave this people their name and their existence. People who pride themselves on having created a demi-god baptized Houphouët-Boigny and who are not even able to plant a simple sign at the entrance to the city where he was born and buried to inform visitors. O shame!
Let's save the cannons of the Ehotilé Islands before it's too late. Their rescue will not ruin the Ivory Coast, and French people could spend the money to go watch them. Let's stop being this Margouillat people who destroy everything they build with their feet with their tails.
By Venance Konan
*This article has been translated from French into English by Marcus Boni Teiga
