Portuguese maps named a coast for ivory, not for today’s borders
Côte d’Ivoire—Ivory Coast—faces the Gulf of Guinea with political capital Yamoussoukro inland and economic weight on the shore. Fifteenth-century Portuguese skippers tagged West Africa’s “ivory coast” between Capes Palmas and Three Points—lines that only roughly match the modern republic.
Because translations of the name multiplied, the government declared in April 1986 that Côte d’Ivoire would be the formal name for diplomatic protocol in every language. Fifteenth-century Portuguese traders had called the shore between Cape Palmas and Cape Three Points the ivory coast, or the Coast of Teeth, a stretch that only roughly matches the modern republic, whose capital is Yamoussoukro.
Humid soils preserve few bones, but polished shale axes and remains of cooking and fishing hint at a sizable population in the Upper Palaeolithic, 15,000 to 10,000 BC. Those first inhabitants were displaced or absorbed by ancestors of groups such as the Ehotilé, Kotrowou, and Zéhiri, who moved south before the sixteenth century. The region lay on the forest fringe of trans-Saharan trade run by the Ghana, Mali, and Songhai empires, whose decline pushed migrations into the rainforest.
Five states flourished before European rule. The Dyula founded the Muslim Kong Empire in the early eighteenth century among Sénoufo farmers; Akan refugees from the rising Ashanti built the Abron kingdom of Gyaaman near Bondoukou; and the Baoulé created a centralised state under three rulers that later broke into chiefdoms yet fiercely resisted France. The country suffered less from the Atlantic slave trade than neighbouring Ghana, since slave ships preferred other coasts.
The Portuguese made the first recorded European voyage to the region in 1482. France gained a lasting foothold only in 1843–44, when Admiral Bouët-Willaumez signed protectorate treaties with the kings of Grand-Bassam and Assinie, and it declared a colony in 1893. After independence a strong presidency ruled, and cocoa and coffee made the country West Africa’s economic star of the 1960s and 1970s.
Source: Ivory Coast
