2023-07-01 17:31:07
This is the official end of a historic couple in Ivorian politics. Fifty years of companionship made up of militancy, imprisonment, and the exercise of power. Laurent Gbagbo and Simone Ehivet Gbagbo were married in 1989, they officially divorced thirty-four years later, on June 29. A pronounced break “to the exclusive wrongs of Mr. Laurent Gbagbo, for characterized and notorious adultery, abandonment of the marital home and serious insults against Mrs. Simone”indicates a press release from the latter’s lawyer, Ange Rodrigue Dadjé. ” He will come back [à l’ancien président] who wanted so much to divorce, to give up appealing the said divorce decision, so that his wish finally becomes reality”, he adds, scathingly. The divorce of the Gbagbos in Côte d’Ivoire is more than an ordinary family affair.
Upon his return to Abidjan in June 2021 after 10 years of absence, Laurent Gbagbo, freshly acquitted of charges of crimes against humanity by the International Criminal Court (ICC), had made the formalization of this divorce procedure his first public act. The images at the airport of Simone, pushed back like a stranger, had surprised her supporters and comrades. Everyone knew that the love had long since dissipated, that the husband had rebuilt his life with a former journalist, Nady Bamba, but the exposure of the break was brutal. This divorce, far from a tabloid anecdote, is as intimate as it is political.
Political partnership
The Gbagbos have long formed a formidable tandem, both admired and feared. Brilliant scholar, very early politicized, Simone Ehivet is a professor, engaged in trade unionism since the 1970s, her fight for the multiparty system earned her several times imprisoned in the Ivory Coast of President Félix Houphouët-Boigny. His political destiny accelerated with the meeting in 1973 of Laurent Gbagbo. Four years his senior, he is already seasoned in Marxist militancy and comes out of a military internment camp.
The two lovers take part in clandestine revolutionary cells. Then founded together in 1982, the emblematic party of the Ivorian left, the Ivorian Popular Front (FPI). She is the linchpin, responsible for mobilizing the bases of the party. The two fighting companions have two daughters, twins, whom Simone Ehivet raises alone when Laurent Gbagbo goes into exile in France.
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The couple married just after their return to Abidjan, in January 1989. “A wedding at 15,000 francs”, with half a dozen guests, has a habit of telling Laurent Gbagbo to his close friends. The Gbagbo live together in Cocody Riviera, a district of Abidjan, act together, campaign together, and are even imprisoned together at the Maison d’Arrêt et de Correction d’Abidjan. “It was a very close couple, testifies a longtime friend of the couple. But she is not just a Madame Gbagbo, a First Lady who would do in glamor and representation. He is a pillar of Ivorian politics, solid, popular, with a very strong personality, grip and convictions. » Under his influence, the Catholic Laurent Gbagbo embraced evangelism, of which Simone Gbagbo became a fervent follower. She was also Vice-President of the National Assembly from 1995 to 2000, Member of Parliament for Abobo from 1996 to 2004.
But behind the scenes, from the 1990s, long before Laurent came to power, the couple was no more than a front for a political partnership. Laurent Gbagbo has had a relationship with journalist Nadiana “Nady” Bamba since 1997, with whom he married in 2001 according to customary Malinké and Muslim rites. They have a son the following year.
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« Give me fer »
Simone Gbagbo does not say a word publicly. His priority is elsewhere. From 2000 to 2011, written Young Africa in 2012, “there is not a single chief who reigns in Côte d’Ivoire, but two”. The duo complements each other: his lines of humor, conciliation. To her, the hard line, without concession, open hostility to France, to the opposition and to the rebels. She’s called “La Dame de Fer”. Sometimes worse. His aide-de-camp, Anselme Seka Yapo, was sentenced to life in 2016 for the 2002 assassination of former President Robert Guéï and his family. She was suspected by French justice of having played a role in the disappearance of French-Canadian journalist Guy-André Kieffer in 2004.
After refusing to concede defeat in 2010 against Alassane Ouattara, the couple was arrested in the bunker of the presidential residence after twelve days of fighting in Abidjan in April 2011. Sentenced in 2015 to 20 years in prison for “breach of security of the State”, Simone Gbagbo benefited in 2018 from an amnesty law, in the name of “national reconciliation”. She awaits the return of her husband, acquitted after being tried for crimes against humanity before the ICC. But he settled with Nady Bamba in Belgium as soon as he was released in 2019. The Gbagbos also took different political trajectories. They had to abandon the label of the FPI in the hands of Pascal Affi N’Guessan to each found their own party: the Party of African Peoples – Côte d’Ivoire (PPA-CI) for him, the Movement of Capable Generations for her. .
What’s the point of such a late divorce? Laurent Gbagbo has not expanded on his motivations since the icy 2021 press release in which he denounced “the repeated refusal of Dame Simone Ehivet to agree to an amicable separation, moreover a means of settlement appropriate to their personal and political reciprocal statutes”. Observers see it as the will of Nady Bamba, who follows him like his shadow, or the desire to dissociate his name from Simone Ehivet Gbagbo. Only the quest for power seems to be able to bind them again.
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