Word: cotonou
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...intellectuals who once were civil servants in other nations of French West Africa but were booted out when those countries achieved independence. Soglo launched an austerity program that embittered his top-heavy government's 12,000 civil servants, who crowd the cafes of Dahomey's commercial capital, Cotonou. He cut salaries by 30%, froze recruitment and promotion in the civil service and did away with air conditioning in government offices...
...imports of Dahomey's elite. Nor can its poor people, who live mostly in thatched huts or in bamboo huts set on stilts in muddy lagoons, afford the $3,000,000 presidential palace that its rulers have built, or the four-lane, sodium-lit boulevard that runs along Cotonou's seaside edge into an empty field of sand and weeds...
Teachers and other government workers, who had anticipated that their salary cuts could be restored with French assistance, soon went out on strike. High society in Cotonou boycotted a gala charity ball thrown by Soglo's wife, who had imported two foreign orchestras for the occasion. On one of the city's several sidewalks, someone hastily scribbled the message: "It's time to change the government." Soglo blithely ignored his officers' pleas for talks to settle the general strike. The Dahoman general staff thereupon ordered the army's so-called force de frappe, which consists...
...scene from an underground movie, perhaps? Nothing like it. Guinness, Taylor and Richard Burton were merely taking a booze break from the filming of Graham Greene's psychological thriller The Comedians, which they are shooting in Cotonou, principal city in the small West African nation of Dahomey. If Guinness' bar attire (left over from a just-finished scene) seemed a little farther out than usual-well, Dahomey itself may be farther out than the location of any movie since Nanook of the North. Financial Frankness. Barred from the film's proper location of Haiti because...
...weeks of shooting, Glenville's troupe will pour $500,000 into the economy of a country whose national budget totals $10 million. In gratitude, Soglo cleared the cramped harbor of Cotonou while Glenville shot dockside scenes; he allowed Cotonou to be plastered with billboards of Duvalier, lent his own Mercedes to the Burtons for the duration, and rented them the Ivory Coast's government villa for a brisk $1,000 a month...