4. Luxury resorts

On Sunday, a group of colleagues drive me to Assinie, a beach town about an hour from Abidjan. The waves and the undertow make it extremely dangerous to swim but the sand is pristine, accented by sparkling, washed-up jellyfish. The beach is impossibly long, sparsely populated, both ends disappearing into wave mist.

A five minute walk from where we settle down is an abandoned Val-Tour luxury resort; further down, a deserted Club Med. I find two seaside restaurants blackened from fire, a large pool now filled with green water and debris. Wooden posts on concrete bases mark former showers, the plumbing stripped from the walls. The room numbers are eerily untouched. A colourful sign advertises massages that last took place five years ago.

It is not difficult to imagine what this area must have looked like when the resorts were operational, hundreds of fresh tourists arriving every day, music playing, children splashing in the water, waiters serving elaborate drinks to wealthy vacationers. My mother laments how tourism has destroyed her native town, but things have moved in the opposite direction here, the sand now empty and silent. A beach vendor tells me that the resorts employed 600 people each when they were operational. Those people have now returned to their former lives, many working in the fishing industry. The village collectively owns a handful of fishing boats; these are their primary source of food and income.

We observe one such boat, a long, worn-out affair, approach the shore. Once in shallow water, several men disembark. With difficulty, they guide the ship towards the sand, the waves constantly shifting it out of place. When the boat reaches the shore, the men are joined by several others and the tedious but visually breathtaking process of folding the fishing net begins. The end of the net is pulled out of the boat and a revolving line of men, equally spaced, each draping the net over his shoulder, carry the it off the boat and up the beach, where it is folded onto the ground. This process continues for the better part of an hour, hundreds of metres of net pulled from the inside of the boat; I am reminded of a magic trick. Once the net is folded, the ship is brought onto the beach, again manually. Two wooden tracks are placed alongside the boat and a large metal pipe is crossed over them. Together, the men pull the ship with a rope so that it rolls a few feet over the metal pipe. Everything comes to a standstill as another pipe is brought in and the process is repeated.

By the time the boat is brought completely out of the water, the crowd has swelled to more than fifty men, women and children. Two hours have passed since the boat neared the shore, but it takes only minutes for the catch of the day to be laid out in piles on the beach. Quick bartering occurs, although the fish is free for village residents. Women rinse the fish and carry it off in pails on their heads. Within the hour, the area is empty.

The drive home is oddly stereotypical: we stop to buy coconuts; it is sundown and roadside vendors are gathering their wares; two men are drumming while children dance.