A Friend in Town

In the U.S. this week, for the regulation Washington round of banquets and Manhattan ticker-tape parade, is Ivory Coast's debonair President Felix Houphouet-Boigny, 56, an African nationalist whose credo is refreshingly different from the views of many other black African leaders. Colonialism, he believes, did much good in Africa, and the white man, as well as democracy, is essential to the continent's future. Said he as he got off the boat: "I am filled with emotion to arrive in this most solid democracy in the world."

What makes Houphouet-Boigny's beliefs important is his position as undisputed boss of the strongest, fastest growing and most influential of all the nations in Africa's former French Community, a fragmented empire that dominates the continent's huge western shoulder.

Skyscrapers in the Sun. He presides over one of the hottest (average temperature: 90DEG) lands on earth, a steaming, lush thicket the size of New Mexico. Although much of Ivory Coast (pop. 3,500,000) consists of juju and squalid villages, it is moving ahead at a breathtaking pace. Its harbor at Abidjan, the capital, handles the world's third largest coffee crop, the fourth biggest cocoa output. Behind the docks is a booming city of 200,000, which for European charm and modern creature comforts matches anything in Africa. Superb restaurants offer French food (at outlandish prices), and towering construction cranes cut the skyline as sleek little skyscrapers of reinforced concrete and glass--all air-conditioned--rise story by story in the tropical sun.

Abidjan's prosperity, and Houphouet-Boigny's success, were largely made in France. The sprawling Renault auto assembly plant on Abidjan's outskirts is one reminder of the large amount of private French capital flooding into Ivory Coast; the heavily laden coffee craft steaming out of Abidjan's harbor symbolize the preferential trade agreements that Paris renews year after year. France hands out $50 million in annual subsidies and other aid to help keep the little republic solvent--and pro-French. But Houphouet-Boigny needs little wooing, for he has been in love with France for years. He and his chic. Dior-dressed wife, Marie-Therese, 31, still keep a Paris apartment for holidays.

Red Flirtation. Ivory Coast's leader got his start as a country doctor in the backwoods. His contact with village chiefs and the unhappy masses gave Houphouet (he later added Boigny, which means "battering ram" in his native Baoule tongue) an itch for politics; in the 19405 he formed Ivory Coast's first political party, later organized nationalist politicians in all French West Africa territories into one large political group, the Rassemblement Democratique Africain. For a time. Houphouet-Boigny's RDA was allied with the French Communists, but eventually he dropped his Red friends; bv then, he was a Deputy in the French National Assembly, later held seats (Minister of State. Minister of Public Health and Population) in the French Cabinet.

Throughout the fiery '50s. when nationalism swept West Africa. Houphouet never abandoned his effort to bring about unity among the emerging black states under French guidance. When at last Charles de Gaulle's African Community crumbled. Houphouet was eloquently distressed: "I found myself waiting in front of the cathedral with the wilted flowers of the federation in my arms." Today he remains a friend of De Gaulle's; sometimes, referring to his hero's country home, he will call his own modest house in the village of Yamoussoukro "Colom-bey-les-Deux-Eglises." Houphouet-Boigny's sentiments have hardly endeared him to the hotheads of Africa--the Nkrumahs. the Toures and the Nassers--whose political existence is largely based on cursing yesterday's colonialism and extolling today's "positive neutralism.'' This foggy ideology, says Houphouet, is "merely a veneer behind which lies the Communist world." To Ghana's high-flying President Kwame Nkrumah. Houphouet years ago snanped, "You go your way. I'll go mine with the 'old colonialists.' as you put it. In ten years we shall see who has done the most for his country."

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