Background
Mathieu Ekra was born on February 27, 1917, at Bonoua, near Abidjan.
Mathieu Ekra was born on February 27, 1917, at Bonoua, near Abidjan.
He went to primary school at Grand Basam and Bingerville, before graduating from the William Ponty School in Senegal. He is also a graduate of the French National Overseas College in Paris.
From 1938 until 1947 he worked for the French Civil Service in West Africa, became a leader of the Ivory Coast Railwaymen’s Trade Union in 1944 and helped found the Rassemblement Démocratique Africain in Bamako, in 1946. He set up an RDA branch in Kankan, Guinea, becoming branch secretary in 1948 and was also elected to the steering committee of its Political Bureau. He was arrested the following year and sentenced to three years of preventive detention. Released, he was taken back by the French Administration and appointed Chief Accountant at the Institut Français d’Afrique Noire (1953-4). He became departmental head at the Social Affairs Bureau (1955-6), attached to the Cabinet of the French Overseas Ministry and to the Cabinet of the French High Commissioner in the Ivory Coast (1959).
In 1960 he had returned from New York to become Minister of Public Service and Information from January 1961 until February 1963, when he was appointed roving ambassador. Back to the cabinet following the March 11, 1965, reshuffle, when he became Minister of Information, he was appointed Minister of State on January 5, 1970, and Minister of State for Tourism on June 9, 1971.
In 1960 he took part in the first Ivorian delegation to the United Nations and was one of the joint authors who composed the Ivory Coast national anthem.