Abidjan’s name may come from a colonial misunderstanding
Ivory Coast’s largest city and government seat held about 6.3 million people in the 2021 census. A 1931 wharf, 1933 colonial capital status and the 1951 Vridi Canal turbocharged growth. Tchaman oral tradition says the name began when a local reply was misheard as a place-name.
The Tchaman story, preserved in the Encyclopedic Dictionary of Côte d'Ivoire, tells of an old man hauling branches to mend his roof who met a European asking the name of the nearest village. Not understanding, and fearing he had to explain himself, the man ran off crying that he had only been cutting leaves in the Ebrié language, and the stranger wrote the phrase down as the place-name. The site was then a small Atchan fishing village. After yellow fever epidemics drove French settlers out of Grand-Bassam in 1896, they picked this lagoon shore in 1898, and it became a town in 1903.
Bingerville served as the colony's capital from 1900 until 1934, yet Abidjan's rail terminus, opened in 1904, and its Port-Bouët wharf made it the commercial hub long before a 1934 decree made it the third capital. The colonial layout followed a grid, with settlers on the Plateau and Ivorians to the north, divided by the Gallieni barracks where the courthouse now stands. In the 1940s the Plateau gained the Bardon Park Hotel, the first air-conditioned hotel operating in French-speaking Africa. Cutting the 15-meter-deep Vridi Canal through to the sea let the Ébrié Lagoon become a deep harbor, and by the late 1950s the city was rivaling Dakar as West Africa's financial center.
Independence in 1960 brought a boom: the population leapt from 180,000 that year to about 1.27 million by 1978, and most of today's skyline dates from that era. Upscale Cocody grew up then, home to the French embassy, the Hotel Ivoire with its once-unique African ice rink, and, since 2009, the largest American embassy in West Africa. Pope John Paul II broke ground in 1980 for St. Paul's Cathedral, designed by Aldo Spirito and finished in 1985.
Decline set in during the 1980s, and in 1983 President Houphouët-Boigny moved the political capital to his birthplace, Yamoussoukro, leaving Abidjan as the economic capital with the embassies. Civil wars scarred the city between 2002 and 2011, ending with Laurent Gbagbo's capture there in April 2011. Today it holds about a fifth of the national population and is the largest French-speaking city in West Africa.
Source: Abidjan
