Hearts heavy, whites feeling driven from Africa

Today, almost all the whites have fled Ivory Coast, hastily leaving behind cars, homes, and jobs. Only around 3,000 remain. Some cannot afford to relocate, others are just packing slowly. Most find it hard to accept Mr. N'Guessan's words.

"But I am married to an Ivorian!" protests Mahmoud Khaled, a Frenchman of Moroccan descent, born in the Ivory Coast. Mr. Khaled manages the Patisserie Abidjanaise, a popular 24-hour cafe where whites and blacks used to mingle over morning croissants. Of the 20,000 French nationals that were here, some 8,000 were Africans with dual nationality, married to whites. "If we are not safe here among our own," argues Mr. Khaled, "we are not safe anywhere in Africa."

Robert Rotberg, director of Intrastate Conflict and Conflict Resolution at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government in Cambridge, Mass., warns against seeing the situation here - or even that in Zimbabwe, where President Robert Mugabe has waged a harsh campaign against white land owners - as a lesson in black-white relations in Africa. This sort of crisis, he argues, is not inevitable.

"Of course there is a role for whites in the new 21st-century Africa, just as there is for other non-Africans such as Indians, Chinese, or Lebanese," he says. "There will long be a role in developing nations for persons with expertise - technical, administrative, or commercial - to help Africans develop their polities and economies.... It is not a question of whether [whites] should have settled in Africa or not. They did. It behooves Africa to retain loyal foreigners who can help."

But, says the Frenchman, the government of President Laurent Gbagbo turns a blind eye to this logic. "We are hostages of his government," he argues. "Gbagbo encourages the people to attack us, which says to the French government: Don't push me too hard on a peace deal, because I have your nationals at my mercy."

Foreign diplomats here mostly agree that Mr. Gbagbo did little to stop the violence against the French. After weeks of silence, he pleaded for calm, and demonstrations against the French immediately ceased.

African art, collected lovingly over the years, adorns the hallways and hangs on all the walls in the house of the Frenchman. There are masks of the Yacouba tribe and ceramics bought from Korogo's famed potters. There are paintings - filled with deep blues and rust color - by Ivory Coast's most renowned artists, and ancient wall hangings from the markets of the south. His best piece, a small Lobi tribe statue from the northeast, rests on the mantelpiece, under a special lamp, encased by glass. All this will soon be shipped off to join the family in France. He will stay with the bare space, hoping against hope that the nightmare will soon end.

But when the movers come by with boxes and styrofoam padding, he sends them away. "I know I risk losing it all," he says. "But I adore the art of my country ... and my heart will break when it is gone."

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