Sagacité:: On Celebrity and Criminality in Côte d'Ivoire, 1987-2017

Most Wanted The Popular Culture of Illegality Rivke Jaffe and Martijn Oosterbaan (eds.) Amsterdam University Press The publication of this book is made possible by funding from the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) and from the Research Center for Material Culture (RCMC) of the National Museum of World Cultures (NMVW) in the Netherlands. Cover illustration: photo Peter Hilz Cover design and lay out: Gijs Mathijs Ontwerpers ISBN 978 94 6372 752 5 NUR 670 © R. Jaffe, M. Oosterbaan / Amsterdam University Press B.V., Amsterdam 2019 All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the written permission of both the copyright owner and the author of the book. Every effort has been made to obtain permission to use all copyrighted illustrations reproduced in this book. Nonetheless, whosoever believes to have rights to this material is advised to contact the publisher. 115 10. Sagacité: On Celebrity and Criminality in Côte d’Ivoire, 1987-2017 Sasha Newell National Hero – Douk Saga (2005)1 I am the Ambassador of Joy in Côte d’Ivoire I am the summit of the mountain, there is always a summit I am the summit of summits, I am the summit of the Himalayas. I am strong, truly strong, and very very strong, seriously strong. People don’t like people, but people advance, people don’t like people, but they like people’s money. One is not president for nothing, one is president when you’re strong. I am the president Douk Saga, the first of his generation. ► In Abidjan, the capital of Côte d’Ivoire, urban popular culture has been rife with illegality for 1 For a video of the song, see: www. youtube.com/watch?v=0OX4yDtRCQk. the last thirty years; the greatest culture heroes, the celebrities, the favorite dances, and the songs to which people sing along have been directly or indirectly connected to Abidjan’s informal economy and the criminal networks that structure it. To be clear, a great deal of this is a matter of stylistic imitation rather than actual criminality. Not everyone in Abidjan supports crime or even tolerates it. But the popular imagination, the romance and drama of Abidjanese social life, is fired by the lives of the nouchi (bandits) and their stories, which fill the representational media of popular culture (Newell 2012; Newell 2006). There is no greater example than the figure of Douk Saga, who embodied in his short life all of the dramatic elements of Abidjan’s criminal lifestyle and popular culture and can be considered a kind of pivot point between two 116 criminal types and the aesthetics that went along with them. Saga was a young man of modest means who went to Europe and somehow (the origins of his money and fame remain murky) came across vast sums of money, which he used to produce a record as well as a new style of Ivorian music – coupé-décalé – in one fell swoop transforming the style of clothing, dance, music, and the performance of success that made the Abidjan street scene move. Returning from Europe just after the attempted coup d’état of 2002, with two men backed by their respective armies claiming to be elected president, Saga brought his new apolitical party music and its “message of joy”, calling himself “president” and handing out money everywhere he went. Traveling with his “Jet Set” entourage, smoking oversized cigars in expensive cars, wearing high-end designer label T-shirts and jeans, pouring French champagne over his shoes, he created a new vocabulary for showing off: travaillement (“working it”, to throw money out to the public while dancing), les boucantiers (those who make “noise” about themselves, what Ivorians had previously called bluffeurs), pro- dada (the act of producing oneself performatively). Rumors spread instantly about how he financed his music and his image through crime in Europe (stealing credit cards from the mail, according to one source), and he once admitted that he created his success by building excitement for his songs in African nightclubs around Europe by giving money away on the dance floor while his song played. ◄◄ Saga built his trademark upon a preexisting intertwinement between heroes of popular culture, a nascent national music industry, and an illicit economy 117 ← Figure 1. Douk Saga, the inventor of coupé-décalé and boucantier en chef. Here he is depicted in the act of “travailler” or “working it”, throwing money to his audience. Artwork by Tristan Perreton. ↓ Figure 2. Boucantiers on display at a maquis. run by informal social networks. In the heyday of organized crime in the 1990s, kingpin Jon Pololo solidified Côte d’Ivoire’s criminal networks into a loose pyramidal structure over which he presided. Pololo was a pop culture hero, appearing dashingly in television interviews and calling himself a king. He explicitly encouraged crime because he said “one must redistribute a little”. McGovern describes the possibility that Corsican mafia put down roots in Abidjan “early in the Houphouet-Boigny era”, that is, the beginning of the first president’s reign in the mid-twentieth century (2011: 166). This would explain the origin of Ivorian meaning of the word maquis, originally referring to the hideouts of Corsican bandits, but applied in Abidjan to refer to largely outdoor, informal bar/restaurants that spill onto the street, the principle public space in which nouchi bandits – and Ivorians generally – perform identity. Regardless of the cultural origins of Abidjan’s criminal scene, its socio-economic ones were clear, as the Ivorian miracle of the 1960s cocoa boom faded into the decadence of a social promise gone sour. As it became more and more difficult for Ivorians to find respectable sources of income, the glorious figures cut by criminals became tempting (and more respectable). The slippage of the state’s hold on popularity provided an opening for new grassroots definitions of the Ivorian identity and culture. Houphouet-Boigny, who had long mastered the art of capturing his public, was unable to stem the excitement around the movement for multi-party politics at the end of the 1980s. In order to tarnish the reputation of a rabble-rousing socialist history professor named Laurent Gbagbo (later a contested President from 2001 to 2012), Houphouet-Boigny hired the nouchi and ziguéhi – a form of criminal identity devoted to muscle-building (Kouame 2017)– 118 ↓ Figure 3. Maquis street style. networks to start riots during the political marches and demonstrations of the opposition in order to blame the latter for civil disruption. Many of the more prominent gang leaders were able to earn regular state salaries during this period. As state services broke down with the downturn in the economy, criminal networks took on informal security roles, protecting and keeping order within their own neighborhoods. A new form of music emerged called zouglou, professionalizing and electrifying an informal verbal and rhythmic style of street musicians and youth groups. Although zouglou and its handkerchief-tying clothing style originated in the university and its movement for multi-partyism, while the nouchi solidified their own strength by working for the state, the two initially opposed movements quickly began to merge into a more unified scene celebrating the new locally produced urban popular culture. Some the greatest hits of Ivorian popular culture, like Magic System’s “Premier Gaou”, came from nouchi origins on the streets of Abidjan, and their songs were critical, practically ethnographic, descriptions of that life. The maquis became the public site for dancing and singing aloud to this new music, a place to see and be seen, to participate in urban culture and to see the bluffeurs “make a show”. Young men used the open space of the street to produce themselves through consumption, spending lavishly and aggressively to declare their social power and their transcendence of Abidjanese social hierarchy. By 2000, although Pololo’s gangs had 119 lost their structural power as well as their state-sponsorship when Houphouet’s party was overthrown by General Guei’s Christmas coup, the nouchi were the unquestioned stars of street life, earning literal applause from passersby when they put on their beautiful clothes. Though undeniably disreputable and often highly criticized by the general public, there was an undeniable romance to the life of the nouchi, who lived from day to day off their own creativity and readiness to adapt and manipulate situations, as well as their glorious displays of consumption. Saga turned up the wattage on this preexisting performative street style, moving from secondhand American streetwear to designer labels, from playfully political lyrics to trance-inducing dance music, from pilfering wallets to mysterious but highly lucrative criminal profits in Europe, from playing at being rich to playing the role of the President himself. ►►| Today’s criminal figures are the brouteurs, cybercriminals who work in internet cafes to scam wealthier people across the Global North by impersonating romantic partners of both genders and creating fictitious intimacy. Crime in the streets is down: money is siphoned primarily out of the global stream of data and digital virtuality’s capacity for shape-shifting and instantaneous travel without ever crossing a border. Employing the language of “repaying the colonial debt”, even non-criminal Ivorians have few ethical squabbles with this kind of scam. The brouteurs drive in polished Mercedes and BMWs, they seat themselves at maquis with giant bowls filled with ice and champagne, and they impose themselves on a dance floor not only with expensive clothing and dashing dance moves, but cold hard cash. The brouteurs pull a giant wad of cash from their pockets (often in multiple currencies) and disperse it across the dance floor to the general public. The fact that the maquis is typically open to the street is crucial here because they are not redistributing money to their own network as the nouchi in the past were prone to do, but rather to a general and open-ended public, a public with no clear limits, expecting only anonymous adoration and respect for their generosity. Using flashy 120 street names much like their analog predecessors, these digital criminals hijack any stage they can, capturing the spotlight as the DJs sing their praises and their money rains down from the air. Brouteurs have given newspaper, radio, and television interviews, and circulated videos of themselves online. Brouteur fashion has evolved as well, now defined by preppy shorts, Italian label flipflops, a button-down shirt, and a designer label man-purse. The brouteurs also cite Douk Saga as their ancestor, claiming his fantastic wealth came from the art of online scamming, and it was he who taught Ivorians how to do this. I believe this is a retro- spective explanation for his rise to fame and wealth, which many people struggled to understand at the time. Since brouteurs continue to mimic and transform his redefinition of the Ivorian success story, they are right to claim him as founding figure. However, there is evidence that the symbolic role of crime in Abidjan is losing its place of prestige. The meteoric success of the brouteurs is increasingly linked to dark magic of blood sacrifice, and a rash of child disappearances was blamed on the brouteurs in 2015, along with their spectacular car accidents that often end the lives of the scammers themselves. This internet magic, called Zamou, 121 ← Figure 4. DJs animate a small maquis in Yopougon with coupé-décalé, hoping to incite the crowd to compete with each other and buy more drinks so that they can get paid. is also traced to Douk Saga. My old friends from the France-Amerique quartier said: “The strangest thing about him is that his pockets always looked completely flat, as though he had nothing in them, but then the money never seemed to stop coming out of them. That has to have been magic.” In Yopougon, my friend Adou told me that Zamou is a pact with the devil that gives you a limited number References Kouame, S.Y. (2017). Nouchis, ziguéhis et microbes d’Abidjan: déclassement et distinction sociale par la violence de rue en Côte d’Ivoire. Politique Africaine, 148(4): 89-107. McGovern, M. (2011). Making War in Côte d’Ivoire. Chicago: University of Chicago Press Newell, S. (2006). Estranged Belongings: A Moral Economy of Theft in Abidjan. Anthropological Theory, 6(2): 179-203. Newell, S. (2012). The Modernity Bluff: Crime, Consumption, and Citizenship in Côte d’Ivoire. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. of years of endless fame and wealth, but at the exact moment the spell ends, you will die. Douk Saga’s fame only lasted three years before he died of an incurable illness. The brouteurs are increasingly seen as trafficking in human organs and stolen infants, an infamy that gives their glorious consumption the taint of evil. ■ What makes Abidjan’s popular culture particularly fascinating is the way in which a culture of illegality has permeated the creation of urban and even national culture, because these figures established themselves as culture heroes battling for the everyman, representing the dream of transcending class status and the great walls along the periphery of the Global South in order to become successful figures on not only a national arena, but in the case of Douk Saga, that of the music world itself. And in this sense he was truly an ancestor figure for the brouteur, who enact their scams within the global stage of the internet, transcending every frontier barricade to siphon the wealth and commodities of the North homeward.