Lavish Church Looks Out at Ivory Coast Poverty

Just after 2 p.m. each day the men would come streaming out in clusters, shading their eyes against the bleached sky, from a white mosque that stood modestly in the distance.

Their afternoon obeisances to Mecca over, they passed over a field and through a military checkpoint before picking up their tools. Then they would join the rest of a work force of 900 men and strive against a deadline to complete the largest Roman Catholic church in the world.

That a heavily Muslim work force built this monument to Christianity is only one of the paradoxical aspects of this unique work site.

Our Lady of Peace of Yamoussoukro is a beacon of African piety built with almost no African materials, save local sand to be mixed with French cement. Its vast central enclosure, capacious enough for up to 18,000 worshipers, is decorated with 24 stained-glass windows 78 feet tall, among which only one black African face is represented: that of Felix Houphouet-Boigny, the president of Ivory Coast and the basilica’s creator.

After three years of construction on the site of a former palm plantation, by a work force of as many as 1,500 at a time, the basilica was officially completed late last month. With the installation of the last of its tens of thousands of marble and granite stones, panes of stained glass, planks of richly stained hardwood and cushions of leather, a legion of contractors transferred the monumental edifice to the government of Ivory Coast.

The end of construction work here is not likely to mark the end of the questions about this project. Only three months ago, Pope John Paul II finally agreed, after years of importuning by Ivory Coast officials, to accept the basilica as a Vatican charge and take over its estimated $1.5-million annual upkeep. The Vatican has still not announced when--or if--the Pope will come here to consecrate this monument to Catholicism’s struggle in Africa against Islam.

What discomfits the Vatican is the spectacle of a country spending about $200 million on a cathedral exceeding the height of St. Peter’s in Rome by 37 feet while its standard of living has fallen by half in the last five years, and where the prospects of improvement, given the long slump in the price of its main export--cocoa--are slim.

And a spectacle it is: One approaches the church through an 84,000-square-foot esplanade, bounded by a peristyle of 120 granite columns and opening off a central alley the length of six football fields; a dome crowned by a bronze cross reaching nearly 500 feet high caps the round enclosure of floor-to-balcony stained glass.

From within the 21,000-square-foot rotunda, the aluminum dome appears in places almost translucent--the result, says one of the designers, of its having been ground down to adjust the room’s difficult acoustics.

Ivorians long ago wearied of criticism over the basilica’s cost, which they say has been financed entirely out of Houphouet-Boigny’s private fortune. An official of one international agency who questioned the source of the money recalls getting a blunt ministerial reply: “ ‘Monsieur, it’s none of your business,’ they said. ‘It’s the president’s money.’ ”

To be fair, continued this official, “We go through the state budget with a fine-toothed comb, and we don’t see any (public) money going to the basilica. Although, of course, we can’t police all the expenditures. . . . “

Some Ivorians ascribe the carping to racism, particularly among the critical French press.

“They describe (Yamoussoukro) as a city that is too beautiful for Negroes,” complained Laurent Dona Fologo, the minister of information, last year. “Why a basilica, a palace of marble, institutions of higher education for these Negroes, who know no better than their unpaved roads, their little chapels in the bush, their slums and no-star hotels?”

For his part, Houphouet-Boigny (pronounced OO-fway BWA-nyi) argues that his funding of the church, which he places at $134 million, would not accomplish much if applied to serious problems in Ivory Coast’s economy.

“How would the crisis besetting my country be changed by my little 40 billion (CFA francs, the Ivorian currency), if 40 billion it is?” he asked the French Catholic journal La Croix last year.

As for his fortune, diplomats and other observers here say it evidently derives largely from his extensive cocoa plantations. The president is one of the largest landholders in Ivory Coast.

While there is no question that he has grown wealthy during his rule, maintaining a home in France as well as several in his homeland, he does seem to have refrained from the kind of graft and thievery engaged in on a majestic scale by some of his fellow African leaders.

In interviews, Houphouet-Boigny quickly turns the subject away from “how much?” and toward “why”: This grand Romanesque church on the site of the village where he was born is his gift to the church and the Virgin Mary.

As he told a group of French choirboys visiting Ivory Coast last year, “This will represent a donation from my family to the Holy See as a tribute to Mary, mother of Jesus, and a wish I have cherished since I was 11 years old.”

He might also note its potential to be a shrine for the expanding population of Roman Catholics in Africa, the only continent where Christianity is growing.

The landscape dominated by the basilica was once an area of abject huts. Today, Yamoussoukro, named for the President’s mother Yamoussou, is now a city of about 100,000.

In this spot 120 miles inland from Abidjan, the political and commercial center of the country, the president has erected a grand palace surrounded by a moat stocked with crocodiles. Its other official structures include an agricultural college that was opposed as wasteful by the World Bank, a grand hotel that is empty most of the time and lavish headquarters for such quasi-official bodies as the Houphouet-Boigny Peace Foundation.

The basilica is a capstone to the careers of three men who each in their own way have shaped modern Ivory Coast: Houphouet-Boigny himself, the Lebanese-Ivorian architect Pierre Elie Fakhoury, and the Ivorian government’s unusual master-builder, Antoine Cesario.

Much about the basilica recapitulates Houphouet-Boigny’s own career and the way he built this country. Take the sheer catholicity of its construction crew.

“A minimum of the workers are Ivorians,” said Jean-Luc Verhaegue, the French architect who serves as site manager. Most are Ghanaians or Burkinabes (natives of neighboring Burkina Faso).

That matches the unique demographics of Houphouet-Boigny’s Ivory Coast. As many as half of its more than 10 million people are foreigners. Some are French who helped settle what became France’s favorite ex-colony and stayed, but most came from neighboring African countries to work the rich cocoa plantations. As a local proverb has it, this is a country that was built with “Ivorian cocoa, French brains and Burkinabe labor.”

The materials are similarly alien. Verhaegue cites the provenance of each element as he takes a visitor around the bustling site, stepping gingerly over the open channels in the cement floor that will carry air-conditioning ducts (American-made) up from a basement that is a veritable air-conditioning factory.

The maroon leather that lines the pews comes from Italy. The stained glass of the 24 windows is from France. The organ and the 32 speakers through which it will sound are American. As Verhaegue continues in this vein, hundreds of Africans are tapping, milling, sawing and polishing.

Houphouet-Boigny rejected the plans of two other architects before he settled on Pierre Fakhoury, 46, who was born in Abidjan of Lebanese stock. Fakhoury says the president never articulated his vision. But it is clear that in this architect Houphouet-Boigny knew he had found someone who shared his sense of scale.

Fakhoury’s distinguishing feature is a shock of unkempt black hair that, with his diminutive stature, gives him a strong resemblance to the actor Danny de Vito. Ask him to describe his career, and one gets a nearly incomprehensible torrent of language that periodically slows to underscore some insight, such as this:

“To build a church like this you need three things: Talent, genius--and madness!”

And perhaps practice. For Fakhoury has made something of a name for himself as a designer of West African vanity projects. Several Yamoussoukro landmarks, from housing developments to grandiose bank quarters, are his, as are some of the most distinctive skyscrapers of Abidjan.

Like many Ivorians, Fakhoury muses incessantly about how the basilica will go over in Europe. He expects the project to help make his name in France, and talks incessantly about a plan--whether it has actually been commissioned is unclear--to build a Palladian mansion for a millionaire on the Riviera.

Everything in the basilica is Fakhoury-designed, from the hardwood frames of the pews and the altar of spidery steel girders, to the 360-foot-wide design of the Dove of Peace gracing the floor of its imposing columned esplanade, and the stained-glass windows. Among the figures in these windows, drawn mostly from the Bible and Catholic liturgy, only two are recognizable: Houphouet-Boigny, and behind him peering over his shoulder in a red robe, Fakhoury.