It's 8.40pm, the night is dark and the wind is strong. It rushes through the tall trees with their burnt bodies, pulling away from the canopy formed by the cocoa trees. For if what lies above the canopy is doomed to die, the rest has become the planter's treasure chamber. "In my ancestors' time, there were rice fields and forest here [...] I planted cocoa here," says Jean-Bap- tiste, an old Guéré planter. In 20 years Ivorian forests have been reduced by 90%, the world's largest deforestation between 2000 and 2020, ahead of Amazonia.
But the villagers who are the vectors of this violence against the land are the forced pawns in an intensive production system. In the entire cocoa sector - of which Côte d'Ivoire is the world's leading producer (40%) - only 2% of sales go to the farmers. The result is the destruction of the biodiversity that forged local cultures, and which is now becoming a shadow of its former self: "Before the asphalt, there were monkeys next to the village. Now the forest is gone, and so is the old world," murmurs Kignon, secretary of the Massa village chiefdom. In the absence of a natural habitat, the forest elephant, the emblem and animal from which the country takes its name, is critically endangered. From 100,000 in the 1960s, there are now just 220 scattered across a territory scarred by flames.
While traveling through the Baule, Godie and Senoufo lands, and while the African Nations Cup was in full swing and Ivorians were chanting the name of the elephants -their national team- I went into the villages to meet planters, sorcerers, chiefs... As I asked them about their lives in the field and their relationship with elephants and ivory - their disappearing emblems - one ultimate question emerged: In a world caught up in the wheels of consumerism, is there any margin for elephants?
In this land bordering the Gulf of Guinea, the story of the elephants and the Ivorians is a very modern tale of the enslavement of the Nature-Human duality. It's a tale of production multiplied tenfold, to the point of erasing identity.