ViVe

To the adoring masses of Ghana, Prime Minister Kwame Nkrumah is "Showboy," and Guineans pay tribute to the strength of their President Sekou Toure by calling him "Elephant." But on the Ivory Coast (which lies between Ghana and Guinea, and wants no part of their merger), crowds have tagged their own strongman with the simple name of "Vive." The name could not be more apt: few men in the kaleidoscopic politics of French Africa have shown a greater talent for survival than 53-year-old Felix Houphouet-Boigny.

Houphouet first became the idol of his people shortly after World War II, when he launched a campaign against the French settlers who raided villages for the laborers they needed and then, at harvest's end, paid each victim barely enough to get home again. When the French tried to gather evidence against Houphouet, who was then following the Communist line, they found not a single African who would inform. The French soon gave up the chase--having made a conquest. After throwing off his Communist ties. Houphouet popped up in Paris, became French West Africa's leading champion of cooperation with France. Paris poured money into the Ivory Coast, and Houphouet himself, already a member of the French National Assembly, became the indispensable black man in every French Cabinet. His Marxist enemies back home pictured him as an "African Bao Dai," willing to sacrifice his people for the pleasures and prestige he enjoyed in Paris.

Three-Way Race. Three great movements are now contending for the political future of French West Africa, a stretch of territory eight times the size of France. One favors a set of small nations, each closely tied with France; this is Houphouet's view, and De Gaulle calls him "a great Frenchman and a great African." At the opposite extreme is Guinea's Sekou

Toure, who alone voted no to De Gaulle's French constitution setting up a new French Community. He is for African independence first and hang the economic consequences. In between are those who want independence without losing the economic benefits of links with France. Four months ago they set up the ambitious Mali Federation, combining Dahomey, Upper Volta, Senegal and the French Sudan. The big question for French West Africa: Which of the three movements will finally win out?

At the start it looked as if Houphouet had been overtaken by history. But behind the scenes he worked agilely to undermine the Mali, freely predicted that the federation would collapse. He is already half right. Fearing to antagonize the Ivory Coast, which hires its workers and is its access to the sea, Upper Volta last winter decided to pull out of Mali. So did Dahomey. Now Houphouet and the leaders of Mali share a common concern over Sekou Toure's ominous flirtation with the Soviet Union and its satellites.

Go Home. While in Paris, Houphouet ran his Ivory Coast preserve by longdistance phone, but his followers kept complaining: "When you are not here, we don't do anything." Last month, after his party dutifully won every one of the 100 seats in the Ivory Coast Assembly, Houphouet decided that his influence in Africa would be far greater if he were to quit Paris and become Premier of his country. Last week, as the crowds of Abidjan roared, "Vive! Vive! Vive!", the Assembly installed him in office. The new Premier announced that he would never allow an opposition party that wanted to cut loose from France, and that henceforth the glories of the French African Community would be taught "as catechisms" in all Ivory Coast schools.

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