My first fascination, my first loyalty goes to this neighbourhood. Twenty years ago when we came back from New York on a rainy day, my brother and I stared at the silent, three-story building imagining first that the whole thing belonged to us. Ten buildings of that kind, we realised, made the neighbourhood. The small grass pound outside ours we took to be our own green pool of pleasures. Quickly enough, I discovered quite astonished that women lay their clothes on the grass in order to dry them under the sun. I remember the round light bulbs at night in the parking lots, as we enjoyed the sight of the cars. The local supermarket had appeared empty and dry to me; the cashiers were not very friendly either – that I do remember. Hence my eagerness to see the place again the day I arrived back to Abidjan after a five year absence.

Then I saw the wild hedges. Somehow, I felt betrayed.

Everybody is complaining about the heat. I thought that years abroad into temperate climates were responsible for the continual flow of sweat trickling down from the top of my head to everywhere else on my body really. But I do remember February, the no-season month, the “normal” month of the year weather wise – that is to say, the hottest month. Around the neighbourhood things at first glance look pretty much the same; it takes a few days to notice that, under its imperturbable calm – one of Riviera’s most enduring characteristics – there is a silence that is more the sound of an absence. The children have grown into men, many of them are still around at their fathers’ and mothers’ homes. Meanwhile the neighbourhood has acquired a certain strangeness, a wildness that was unknown to me back in the day. For then trees and bushes used to be trimmed, held in check; nowadays they don’t frame the path anymore. They are an uncontrolled growth looking resolutely to the sky, growing upwards, as if there was no such a thing as a path to frame any longer, as if the path had been rendered obsolete, a mere part in the bigger picture of the bush. The path is now a consequence of the bush’s gracious largesse to allow it a lease on life. Reasons can be found for this state of affairs, and they shall all come down to the one crucial fact that human beings stopped caring. Or shall we say: people decided to select their points of intervention on this already domesticated nature. There is effectively something disturbing about our hedges: they are not growing out of nature into nature, rather they are pushing off the boundaries of “aesthetics” into something that shall not be called nature anymore, for it has long lost the virginal moment of that state of bliss. It just grows.

Despite this truncated evolutionary demeanour, our plants have been put to the one use that urban life brings about at one point or another: that of fencing. It starts with the entrance door of the flat that is supposed to seal the privacy of the abode from the aléas of ‘real’ life happening out there. Many families had already begun the enclosure movement in the late 1980s and early 1990s; special mention be made of the people living on ground floors, for they are the ones who triggered the movement. They were the first ones to put their large windows and balconies behind metallic fences – and this is understandable for their houses thus far were within easy reach of anyone with enough guts to mingle with the white noisy blinds a bit and jump into the terrace; I myself had done that with the habitual bunch of casse-cous that we were, around age eight.

So the fences. Once again money spoke. For one could recognise on the spot which of the fences were the most elegant, which of them had the best quality in terms of painting, which were better screwed into the wall, and not simply stuck to the wall thanks to cement, which had the more original patterns, and so on. Like in so many instances of life in Abidjan, money invited itself in the game of fencing as the arbiter of your social image.

Fencing has another corollary, of a more universal nature this time around: the rise of fear. A feeling of public insecurity managed to insinuate itself into all-time peaceful Riviera Golf Elias. Not that it went unjustified; this was no shrilling frenzy. No; some coups d’éclat had occurred; gun shots had been heard once or twice near Anono, the Ebrié village facing the neighbourhood on its southern width; Burkinabe night watchers had dealt with a couple of would-be thieves, meting them the supreme sentence in a street corner with stones and pieces of pavement. So the fencing move could be justified. In addition, television would throw at our faces every second evening the corpse of some gangster shot down by our valiant police force; RTI (Radiodiffusion Télévision Ivoirienne) cameras would dive into the indecency of flirting with violent death by squaring down on the gunshot wounds of the unfortunate victim. Then one or two people in the attending crowd would be interviewed, and they would shower the police in blessings and congratulations. No one ever wondered a second why it was that all of a sudden toughness on crime had become the new mantra in Abidjan’s government circles of late.

So drinking from the cup of fear and emulation, Riviera Golf Elias acquiesced, and started fencing. Domesticated nature was called to the rescue, and absurdities started to surface in our lives. For instance, one couldn’t get into Anono anymore by the shortest route, because bougainvilleas and a wall and bougainvilleas galore prevented any such attempt. I remember at the time finding this new situation totally scandalous – Anono has an open-air market, which caters for our neighbourhood. Of course people grew tired of their own new findings and went on to bend the rule a little. The embodiment of that awkward moment remains Gnéba Akpalé Jacob, an honourable Member of Parliament, dweller in our neighbourhood, a dignitary of the portly kind, struggling his way into a small hole carved out of the uncontrolled growth of bougainvilleas, so that he could make it to the main road, catch a cab and go on to business as usual. Député Gnéba became the laughing stock of the neighbourhood. Still, more and more bougainvilleas, more and more ficus trees were planted.

The Fencing Revolution gave the opportunity to many a ground-floor dweller to impose their will onto certain stretches of land that warranted no claim from anybody in the cité. So what they did is that they simply extended their arms and made their own what was nobody’s. Strictly speaking, this was a case of misappropriation of public property. All the more because often these little stripes of land would be used as paths. As far as the ground-floor dwellers were concerned, this was a case of protection of their privacy: why, all these people walking past every day on these paths could invite themselves into their lives just by way of a glance. Their best ally in this act of appropriation was the Plant, the Bush. So the gardeners that had been ditched after the flats in the neighbourhood had been sold to the dwellers by the State in 1988 – privatisation – were hired anew, but this time on a private capacity, in one-to-one deals with ground-floor dwellers. The paths that cooks and nannies and plumbers and electricians and walking tailors and attiéké sellers took every day, these paths that they had carved out of the grassy patches of Riviera Golf, were swallowed into the private sphere. But rivers generally overtake bushes; they change their course, they find a new riddle to solve, and they trick nature itself to the necessity of their flowing destinies. Rivers just flow. And so do people. Very quickly new arrangements would be found with the ordinances of Riviera’s shifting architecture, and the people shall find their way to Anono again. All this in the quiet heat of a peaceful neighbourhood.