Our final group trip of the semester was to Benin, a coastal country near Ghana. On the first of April, we left Cape Coast for Accra, where we stayed the night before leaving a four o'clock in the morning for Benin. We began our journey by driving east out of Accra into the Volta Region, across bright green marsh grasses lined by palm trees.
We stopped around seven o'clock at a resort in a border town called Denu to eat breakfast. Then we got back on the bus for a border crossing adventure!
Leaving Ghana was not very difficult. We were asked to get off the bus and wait inside an air conditioned room on leather chairs to have our photos taken, but for some reason they only wanted to take photos of two of the people in our group, so we weren't there for long. Getting into Togo was a different story. We pulled in to a hot and smelly parking lot next to the beach while our leader took our visas to officials in a crowded shed. About an hour later, we found out that our visas had been approved for the next day. The border police said we would have to turn around and go back to Ghana. Luckily, our leader was able to bribe them to change our visas so that we could cross that day, but we still sat there in the bus for at least another hour and a half while this negotiation took place. It was pretty bad, but on the bright side, I got to try some cracker snacks that tasted like butter, a taste that I've been missing all semester.
Once in Togo and out of the border town, we passed by a huge factory with a chute running out towards the beach and some giant tanks with the Shell logo painted on. Next, we drove through some towns where the homes were made from gray bricks. Then suddenly, we could see the ocean, which looks different from the ocean in Ghana. In Ghana, the ocean is dark and blue, but here, it was clear and a beautiful shade of green. We stopped at a restaurant on the inner curve of a lagoon for some soda. There were some cute animals there - alligators in a cage and a monkey, who either wanted to attack me or be my best friend, I'm not sure which.
Getting over the border into Benin was not a problem. Unlike the Ghana-Togo border where people hawking ice cream, crackers, watches, and bedsheets could speak English, they now were speaking French only. All of the signs were in French, too. Unlike Ghana, which was colonized by the British, Benin was colonized by the French, who left behind clear remnants of their culture, including the language and the food.
Around three o'clock, we stopped in a town called Ouidah and ate a delicious lunch. The food in Ghana is great, but it's a lot of the same thing with slight variations on a theme. In Ouidah, I happily ate salad for the first time in months. Finally, we embarked on the last leg of our journey to the commercial capital, Cotonou, and arrived that evening.
In Cotonou, everyone was on a motorcycle, (that's what the streaks are in the picture above). I had noticed this in Northern Ghana, too, and it struck me as strange at first. I hadn't realized it before, but when I see someone on a motorcycle, I assume that they ride it to maintain a certain image or identity. But in Northern Ghana and Benin, I saw all kinds of people riding motorcycles, including Muslim women wearing the hijab, as well as some dangerous-looking seating arrangements - one kid sitting in front of the driver with two more sandwiched between driver and the mother in back. Here, motorcycles are simply a convenient mode of transportation. And in Benin, people use motorcycles as taxis, usually paying the equivalent of about fifty cents to get from one place to another.
The next day, we attended lectures and rested. But that evening after another great meal, my friend and I took a mototaxi to an Easter carnival nearby. I burned my leg on the muffler getting off, but it was a fun ride! First, we watched about fifty
Béninois carnies line dancing, wearing rainbow clown wigs and other silly attire. Then, we rode the ferris wheel, pirate ship, and bumper cars, and Tasses du Thé (Tea Cups), which made some pretty awful metal groaning sounds as the platform tilted. It was so much fun! Here is a few from the top of the ferris wheel:
The next day, we visited Ganvier, a town built on the water. All the houses are built on stilts, and people get from place to place by boat. Ganvier was established by an ethnic group that used their superior skills on the water to escape another group that was involved in the trans-Atlantic slave trade by making raiding towns to kidnap people. On our tour, we saw homes, the market, a few tourist hotels, and the primary school.
We stopped in two places in Ganvier, both of which were tourist-oriented shops selling jewelry, clothing, knives, chairs, paintings, sculptures, keychains. I like to shop and a lot of the items these places were selling appealed to me. I've noticed - both in Benin and in Ghana - that tourist stores sell merchandise that appeals to the foreign shopper's image of what is authentic African artwork and artifacts. When I went to a wood carving village near Kumasi a few weeks ago, I bought some things that I thought were beautiful. But, after noticing that I felt sort of disappointed when I saw the same exact items being sold in Benin, I think that I made my purchases partly based on a sense that the things I bought were of more value because of their authenticity. I find this idea of authenticity interesting in light of never having seen these types of items sold in a place where Ghanaians and
Béninois shop. For instance, at the Central Market in Kumasi and the even larger Dantokpa Market in Cotonou, I didn't see any of these sort of art pieces and artifacts. Even clothing is not sold in the same way. At Central Market, the clothing being sold included piles upon piles of second-hand clothing from the US and Europe and soccer jerseys and shorts. There were places selling cloth, too, which one would buy and then take to a seamstress to have something custom-made. The places that sell pre-made clothes are typically marketing to tourists.
The next day, we visited Ouidah, the town where we had our first lunch in Benin, about an hour from Cotonou. Like Cape Coast and Elmina in Ghana, Ouidah is a coastal town that was heavily involved in the trans-Atlantic slave trade. It's also renowned for widespread practice of Vodun by people who live there. We stopped in two sites relevant to the practice of Vodun - the Sacred Forest and the Temple of Pythons, both of which are popular among tourists. Our guide at the Temple (on my right) explained that people worship pythons, and then he put one on each of our necks.
Our visit to Ouidah also included a tour of the Portuguese slave castle and the slave route, which led captives to the beach, where they would be loaded onto ships destined for the Americas. The route included two trees, planted in a joint effort of the European merchants and the chief of Ouidah. The merchants and local accomplices required captives to walk around the first tree in an effort to make them forget their culture and disorient them from their homeland, and then around the second tree so that their souls would return to their homeland instead of haunting the slave owners in the Americas. To me, these trees indicate that the merchants and local accomplices wanted to alleviate a sense of guilt. Maybe they thought that if people forgot where they came from, then taking them away was not as abhorrent an act. Or maybe they believed that the tree for forgetting would prevent revolts and attempts at escape (which it didn't). I wonder how those in captivity responded to being marched around the trees and if it held any meaning for them.
After walking by these trees, our guide brought us to a mass grave, where people who looked sick or otherwise unfit for the voyage were buried alive.
Our tour of Ouidah ended at the beach, where a memorial "Door of No Return," has been constructed in remembrance of those who were taken away. We spent about an hour on the beach, which the waves litter to this very day with the clay pipe ends of the Portuguese and Dutch.
The final day of our trip to Benin was self-structured. I spent part of the afternoon on my own in downtown Cotonou, near Dantokpa Market. I spent some time at an internet cafe, which became frustrating pretty quickly because the Q and the A are switched on French language typewriters and my pinkie wasn't up to the task of dealing with that. For lunch, I went to a chop bar, where I tried a different kind of fufu - one that's made from yams. It wasn't as sticky or tasty as the kind that's made from plantains and cassava, which is most common in Ghana. It came with spicy soup and an assortment meat, including what I think was cow intestine, although they told me it was horse. It looked like a hairy octopus. I also met a friendly divorcée who owns a motorcycle store and wanted to be my friend. He bought me a couple of Cokes and showed me around Dantokpa, which is absolutely massive. That evening, my friends and I took a couple of mototaxis to Festival des Glaces, an excellent gelato shop near the hostel. That concluded the fun part of our trip to Benin. We left at four o'clock the next morning for Cape Coast and spent an uneventful fifteen hours on the bus.
The trip to Benin marked the end of the African Diaspora Seminar. During this final month of the program, we are each independently pursuing a self-designed research project with the help of an advisor from one of the universities. I will be researching music education in Ghanaian universities, comparing curriculum and teaching methods for indigenous music and instruments with curriculum for non-indigenous/Western music and instruments. I will be conducting my research during visits to the universities that have music departments, which are in Accra, Cape Coast, and Winneba.
By this point, I am comfortable here in Ghana, but there are things and people I miss in the US, and I am beginning to looking forward to coming back.
