Togo and Benin

This past weekend I went on an awesome adventure to Ghana's two eastern neighbors of Francophone Africa, Togo and Benin. It was a most excellent time. For those who think two countries in one weekend rather ambitious, Togo is, in the south which is where we traveled, a mere 57 kilometers across. They are small countries, but full of character and history.

I traveled with two friends who I had traveled with before when I went to the beach at Green Turtle Lodge(it is good to know who you are going with, and they are both solid travel companions; adventuresome but not foolish). We left Thursday morning catching the 8:30 bus to Aflao and the border, crossed without mishap(actually, we crossed three times because my friend Emily left her yellow fever vaccination on the Ghana side and they let us go back to get it), and were in Lome, the captial of Togo.

We had heard that Togo was nothing special, but I really liked Lome, it had more charm than Accra. One element of Lome was that its main road ran right along the beach and that at least in the touristy part of town, everything was within walking distance. I love just walking around a city, for one gets a much better feel of its that way. After checking into our hotel, we walked along the beach and then up to the market where while having much the same array as Ghana's markets, did not seem to have the same intense hustle and bustle of Ghana's markets. It might have been that we didn't understand what people said, but in Ghana, if you don't get out of the way, people run you over, while in Togo people did not seem in such a rush. Another element that sets Lome apart from say Accra is the traffic; traffic in Ghana is awful, but in Lome the preferred mode of getting around is moto-taxis(motorcyle taxis where you hop on behind the driver and hold on for dear life...) This seriously cuts down on congestion.

The taxi-motos, or zemi-johns as they are called in Benin, were one of my favorite parts of our trip. While probably not the safest mode of transportation, it is the only way to get around, and quite frankly, they are a lot of fun. Our first ride was after dinner when we took it back to our hotel, the ocean on our left, the stars above us, and the warm night air... It was rather magical...

Friday morning we headed up the the Independence Square; as far as I am aware, independence squares or monuments of sorts are a requirement to be a country in Africa... Ok, not really, but it is a symbol of their experience as individual countries but also as a collective whole. Across from the square was the congressional palace(a magnificent building but we were told not to take pictures of government buildings because the police don't like that and it is really best to avoid getting tangled up with the police) and in the back of that was the national museuem.

The musuem proved the be a lot better than I had anticipated. We had a guide who spoke English 'small small', but she did a great job of telling us with her limited English and her gestures about the history of Togo and the culture of the people. Togo was home to the Dahomey kingdom, a rival of the Ashanti and like the Ashanti quite involved in the overland slave trade, and was first colonized by the Germans, but after World War I the colony was divided between Britain(the western part of Togoland became what in Ghana is now the Volta region) and France(what is now Togo). They had the same independence leader for some thrity plus years of rule including at first a dictatorship and then after 1990 with French pressure for a multiparty system elections that were in all likelihood rigged. The president eventually left in a coffin, having died of natural causes, and today his son is the elected(fairly or not?) president.

After a picnic lunch on the beach, we caught a shared taxi(which means you cram as many people as possible in a car, generally four in the back seat and two plus the driver in the front seat) and listened to Dolly Parton all the way to the border(country music has made its way to Africa). The Benin border was as smooth as the Togo one even though I had to buy a visa there because I had run out of time back in Accra. The man might have been fishing for a bribe, but when we played dumb, he let us get them without any additional costs. There is something rather glamorous and adventuresome about walking accross borders; the whole weekend it never grew old. From the Benin border we caught another shared taxi to Cotonou.

Moto-taxis in Lome are pleasant, but in Cotonou, a larger, more industrial city, they are absolutely terrifying, especially during rush hour. Trust me. Still, they get you where you are going, and so we caught zemi-johns to our hotel after the taxi let us off, were given a room with a dysfunctional fan, and went out in search of food, going to a nice French restaurant. When we got back later to our room, it was still stifling, so we set out in search of a nearby venue of live music that was mentioned in our guidebook... my guidebook was by and large our best friend because it was much easier to point to things in the book than to attempt to pronounce their names in a way that people recognized...

The music venue, a classy bar called Les Repaires de Bacchus, was excellent. There was a band playing something other than Ghanaian highlife(I don't know exactly how to classify the music, but it definitely had a latin sound to it; Benin has a Brazillian influence because after the slave trade was abbolished, many people who had been taken to Brazil as slaves returned to Benin.) And they were singing in French, which was cool. Also, and this is not something one really sees at all in Ghana, there was a table of young women, drinking and having a good time; in Ghana the only women one sees at bars and nightclubs seem to be prostitutes... I noticed this again the next day in Ouidah, men and women sitting and drinking together...

Saturday morning we set out early, found a patisierre where we had espresso and croussants for breakfast, and then caught a shared taxi to Abomey-Calavi which is the embarkation point for tours of Ganvie. Ganvie is one of the biggest stilt villages in West Africa(and possibly the world?) where people literally build their houses over the water on stilts. To visit ones neighbors, one would have to take a boat. People take their boats to go to market(and I heard there was even a floating market) and of course to fish, the communities main industry. It was really very remarkable, and I got some good pictures of the houses.

From Ganvie, we wanted to go to Ouidah, a much smaller city than Cotonou and one with a lot of history. We were told by a taxi driver who spoke English(English speakers were always much help and a relief in our travel attempts) that to take a taxi would take forever, and so we really ought to take a zemi-john to a place called circle and get a taxi from there. It was a terrifying ride to say the least. The drivers are crazy, and in their defense, they really know what they are doing and how to avoid the traffic all around them. Still, after that, we were not too keen to ride a zemi-john again for awhile.

Ouidah was charming. We were able to walk the length of it easily from our hotel on the outskirts. When we arrived we went to the museum which had a good exhibit of Benin's history and culture. In Benin, the big kingdom had beent he Abomey kingdom, and they like their contemporaries had been very involved in the overland slave trade. At one point, the king of Abomey started making female soldiers because he had sold so many of his people into slavery. The kings did not invent the slave trade, but they certainly profited from it... From Benin slaves were mostly taken to Brazil, Cuba and Haiti, taking their voodoo with them, and after the abolition of slavery in 1848 by the French(after four centuries) many families came back to Benin from Brazil, our guides family included.

From the museum, our guide led us down the Route des Esclaves, a 4km walk that the slaves were led down from the Portugese fort which housed the museum to the point of no return and the boats that took them out to the waiting ships, the middle passage, and slavery in the new world...

The guide told us some about the local practice of voodoo, a practice which has become a syncretism of voodoo and Roman Catholicism. The cathedral in the heart of Ouidah stands directly accross from the Voodoo temple of the Serpents, and according to the guide this poses no problems. The deities of the voodoo have each become associated with a Catholic saint, the most powerful deity, the Sea Goddess, becoming associated with the Virgin Mary. Ouidah is home to an annual voodoo festival each January, and in general, Togo and Benin are the birthplace of the practice. I have some serious reservations about voodoo, but it was good to hear what the guide had to say and I kept my reservations to myself. One thing he said, and I don't know if this still holds true or moreso historically, was that people thought you could summon smallpox upon your enemies, and when bad things happen to you, it is associated with voodoo. The worst thing the sorcery of bad voodoo can do is kill a person... but what of when bad things happen, and innocent people are blamed? Like I said, I have some serious reservations...

Sunday morning we visited what was probably my favorite museum of our trip, the Casa de Brazil in Ouidah. Its exhibit deals with the many roles of women in African society. There was a poem at the beginning of the exhibit which listed off the different roles a woman performed, ending with the question, what don't you do? It is so true too, and you see it wherever you go, women work so hard, much harder I would say than the men... The exhibit also looked at different ways women were moving forward in Africa today, gaining more rights and freedoms, and how they were working in their communities with their resources to make their lives and taht of their families better.

After that museum, we caught a shared taxi to the border, crossed again without mishap or hassle, and caught another shared taxi to Lome. In Lome at the restaurant we stopped at for lunch we ran into a group of students from ISEP because ISEP had led a trip to many of the same places(we had largely stolen their itinerary but had also decided travelling independently would be more of an adventure and less expensive). Apparently we looked very hot and tired carrying our backpacks, but they seemed full of energy; perhaps the price of travelling solo, but I never once wished I had gone with them on their airconditioned bus... there is a lot to be said for walking accross borders...

After lunch we crossed our final border, back into Ghana, and it was amazing to be able to communicate again. The language barrier was by and far the biggest challenge of the weekend. Often we would talk in English, the taxi driver would talk in French and eventually we would somehow come to an understanding, haggle a price, and hope that the driver would in fact take us to where we wanted to go. It always worked, but it took a lot of patience and a lot of trust... And the tro-tro ride home after cramped shared taxis was a luxury. It was fun to go away, but it was lovely coming back to Ghana, a place that has truly begun to feel like home, and as we drove back to Accra and watched the sunset over the country, I could not help but think that I would truly miss Ghana when the time comes to go home...