Leadership Quote by Félix Houphouët-Boigny

Peace isn’t the default setting of a country; it’s the thing you have to keep rebuilding even when no one’s clapping. Houphouet-Boigny’s line lands like a quiet rebuke to the fantasy that peace is a treaty, a victory, a photo-op. Calling it a "continuous, mostly silent acquisition" strips it of romance and returns it to administration: patience, restraint, compromise, and the unglamorous habit of not escalating. The phrasing matters. "Exhortations" suggests that peace depends on persuasion and pressure, on leaders repeatedly making the case for calm when anger and grievance are easier political fuel. "Acquisition" is an interestingly transactional word for something we like to treat as moral; it implies peace is earned, accumulated, and therefore fragile - a thing that can be squandered.

The subtext is presidential and protective. Houphouet-Boigny governed Ivory Coast through decolonization’s aftershocks and the Cold War’s proxy temptations, cultivating an image of stability and growth in a region often caricatured by outsiders as destined for turmoil. In that context, "mostly silent" reads as both pride and warning: the best proof of peace is boring normality - roads built, markets open, disputes settled without spectacle - yet that very boredom makes it easy to take peace for granted until it’s gone.

There’s also a subtle discipline embedded here. Peace needs "exhortations" because it competes with revenge, ideology, and the political payoff of conflict. Houphouet-Boigny frames peace not as a posture but as a practice: a daily accumulation of small decisions that rarely make headlines, and only become visible when they fail.