The butterfly and the crocodile

Yesterday’s butterfly is still with us. I was happy to ignore it in a dark corner behind some boxes, as ceridwen advised, but it seems determined to find photogenic resting places. One was this bronze crocodile, now nailed to the wall near our front door but once, allegedly, from Yamoussoukro in Côte d’Ivoire.

Yamoussoukro used to be an agricultural village of 15,000 people but the birth there of Félix Houphouët-Boigny in 1905 changed its fate. At independence in 1959 Houphouët-Boigny became Côte d’Ivoire’s founding president and 24 years of pomposity on, he decided to make his birthplace the new capital. As well as a six-lane highway, a marble-floored hilltop convention centre, and a cathedral bigger than St Peter’s in Rome, he built himself a grandiose palace surrounded by a vast artificial lake into which he introduced crocodiles – not native to the region.

That much is true. What I was told when this crocodile came into my hands shortly after Houphouët-Boigny died in 1993 may not be – there are many stories about his legendary reptiles. The president apparently wanted more crocodiles for his lake so he demanded that all visitors to the palace present him with one. Some years later, the lake was full so, in place of live crocodiles, visitors had to present him with a token crocodile in the form of one of these plaques, on sale at great expense at the entrance to the palace. After the palace officials had stashed the takings, the president had accepted the gift and the visitor had left, the plaques would be sent back from the palace to the entrance to be resold.

Whether this plaque was really presented to President Houphouët-Boigny in Yamoussoukro I have no way of knowing but I am fond of my crocodile, especially its boundary-disrespecting tail, and was pleased when the peacock butterfly chose it as a landing place this afternoon.

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