Eamonn Fitzgerald's Rainy Day

The Ivory Coast is at war and the country is now divided into government and rebel held areas. The immediate cause was the mutiny on 19 September by about 750 troops who tried to seize installations in Abidjan, Bouake and Korhogo. In an interview with the BBC's Network Africa, a rebel called Corporal Kwasi said they had been treated like "slaves" by the government and were rebelling against "dictatorship hiding under the guise of democracy". The soldiers who started the rebellion were recruited by General Robert Guei during his 10 month period in power as the country's military ruler. Guei, by the way, was killed in Abidjan during the uprising. In the meantime, the former colonial power France has deployed troops to evacuate European and North American nationals, and has now sent a headquarters and logistical unit to help the Ivorian army.

In political terms, the country is split into those who support president Laurent Gbagbo and are mainly Christian and from the south and west and those who support opposition leader Alassane Ouattara and tend to be Muslims from the north. As the rebels in Abidjan were crushed, the security forces and civilian supporters of the government attacked shantytowns housing immigrants, many of whom were blamed by southern Ivorians for backing the rebels. The government-run television station has openly accused the more than two million Burkinabes living in Ivory Coast of being responsible for the country's problems. As we know, West Africa has a recent history of conflicts in one state spilling over into neighbouring countries (the wars in Liberia and Sierra Leone), so there is an added danger to the growing tension between Ivory Coast and Burkina Faso.

The savagery of these conflicts is stunning. Take, for instance, this Economist report of what happened recently near the Congo town of Bunia, which borders Uganda:

"Last month, militiamen from the Lendu tribe, with painted faces and leaf circlets in their hair, broke into a hospital, where many of the staff and patients were from the rival Hemas, a tribe allied to the Ugandans. The Lendu warriors went from bed to bed, cutting up the occupants. By the time they had dragged out the children hiding in the roof and torched a nearby village, they had killed 1,000 people."

More than 30 years ago, an angry and unsparing V.S. Naipaul, portrayed the failure of postcolonial Africa with In A Free State. Last year's Nobel Prize winner gives us the horror and the squalor, the dislocation and the dread that are the legacy of empire. The line that separates privileged outsiders from terrified locals has never been depicted with such precision. When one thinks about the current Ivory Coast situation, the first paragraph is uncannily accurate:

"In this country in Africa there was a president and there was also a king. They belonged to different tribes. The enmity of the tribes was old, and with independence their anxieties about one another became acute. The king and the president intrigued with the local representatives of white governments. The white men who were appealed to liked the king personally. But the president was stronger; the new army was wholly his, of his tribe; and the white men decided that the president was to be supported. So that at last, this weekend, the president was able to send his army against the king's people."