Benin

I began my travelling feeling emotionally exhausted and craving a few days’ peace. The town of Ouidah, in Western Benin, gave me no such respite. No city that has its foundations soaked in blood: its streets carved by the footprints of millions upon millions of slaves, can ever be a place where hope and joy abounds.

Upon exploring the empty streets; a lone Yovo in a Beninese world, I was met with accusatory glares rather than welcoming smiles.

There is the perception that poverty leaves Africans with an intense inner joy: the simplicity of lifestyle; lack of “worries” in a family-orientated community somehow produces contentment and fullness of life. We Westerners, with our security and technology and vaguely stable futures, are the ones missing out.

This ideology was not something that rang true in Ouidah. Life seemed bitterly hard; most jobs involved either waiting fruitlessly in empty restaurants for non-existent tourists, or selling produce at the roadside that was so cheap I had no idea how it could ever equate to the price of household bills.

I had come to Ouidah for the “Walk of No Return”: the final 4km of the slaves’ epic exile out of Africa.

At the half way point, I arrived at the mass pit for the countless thousands of dead and dying slaves who had no hope of even reaching the shoreline. After months of trudging through the unbearable heat, they would be “fortunate” enough to die in their homeland.

What I found almost as horrendous as the mindless slaughter of thousands of innocent men, women and children, was the grave itself. The only commemorative efforts were a large slab of concrete and a tacky tiled plaque. The Beninese government simply did not the money to sufficiently honour their memories. This felt like tragedy upon tragedy. Has Benin not been able to move forwards in all of this time?

I progressed to the “Tree of Forgetting” which men walked around nine times and women only seven. This was a ritual to “forget” their past African lives; to forget that they were ever considered as human beings. From this moment on they were reduced to servile beasts.

Reflecting upon all of this, I had no idea why their hearts resolutely continued to pump blood around their exhausted bodies; why each foot was determined to carve yet another small imprint on the unrelenting path before it. The past, their freedom, was now an unattainable memory, and each new day brought with it a fresh onslaught of nightmares. Yet, despite full knowledge of this, countless millions continued their desperate existence.

During my walk, a memory from my taxi ride to Ouidah resurfaced. My stunned brain had discarded it; refusing to accept it as truth. However, as the series of events bubbled resolutely to the surface, their absolute clarity forced me to readdress them.

On this particular roadside stop, (which up until now had either been for food or to tip a bottle of something that I hoped was petrol into the fuel tank), we were met by a round-faced girl. Looking at her, I nostalgically remembered my own awkward pre-teen stage; where my body stubbornly clung onto childhood, whilst at the same time propelling me at terrifying speed into a great unknown, which I could only assume was what others defined as “womanhood.”

This poor girl was trying to bridge the gap by wearing a bra that was several sizes too large, which clashed magnificently with her baby face. Bless her, her bra was also falling out of her top. Why had her mother not pointed this out? Especially at her age, I would be so embarrassed!

Her full attention was fixed on the driver. Swivelling my head from one to the other, I suddenly felt incredibly ill. There was something far too deliberate about all of this.

With a look of greedy expectancy, the driver heaved his sweaty mass out of the car, and the girl dutifully followed him. They disappeared for around ten minutes. Inside the car, there was absolute silence.

After what seemed like an age, the girl joined a group of other girls chatting at the roadside, and a hawk-like woman swooped in from nowhere to collect the cash: 3000 Francs (£3.90).

As we drove off, my driver’s jubilant mood was expressed in the energetic church service played the radio; the Virgin Mary swaying enthusiastically from the rear-view mirror.

The swamps and villages turning into a blur, I clung to two thoughts. The first, was that at least this girl was a little better off than Togolese prostitutes, where sex only costs 2000 Francs (£2.50).

My second thought; this one riddled with shame at my utter uselessness, was that I was incredibly glad that it had been that young girl at the roadside and not me. It seems absolutely ludicrous that for some freedom and consent come free with their birth certificate, yet for millions of others, those two words have no definition.

That girl’s plight had a strange parallel with my friends’ journey back from Kpalimé, a Togolese rainforest region, where we had spent the weekend. Stopping at the first checkpoint, the policeman informed their taxi driver that he wanted either one of the white girls, or some money. The driver duly paid the bribe.

As they continued, the driver explained that he did not have enough money to cover the next checkpoint’s bribe, so one of the girls would have to go with the policeman. My friends calmly objected; explaining that sex was consensual: their bodies were for the people that they loved rather than tools to get through checkpoints! The driver laughed, and said that coming to Togo involved trying new things, like motorbikes and Fufu (a local dish) so surely trying a black man was just another part of the experience!

This discussion continued up until they reached the second checkpoint, where the policeman lazily waved them through, without even blinking an eye.

By the time that I had reached the Beninese shoreline with its majestic arch covered in staggering slaves marking the Point of No Return, I was a wreck. Gazing out at the azure blue sea; void of all but tumultuous waves crashing against a fringe of golden sand embellished with coconut palms, I sat down and cried. Tears fell for the barbarism that had taken place in such a paradise: for the fact that millions of lives had been hideously lost for the sake of rolls of cotton and sacks of cane sugar.

The deepest pain; welling up from deep below my lungs, was the knowledge that slavery never died with its abolition. Despite all of the museums and history books, there are more slaves alive today than there ever has been in the course of human history: innumerably more than during the time of the Slave Trade. This brutality, which we heap upon our ancestors with cries of self-righteous outrage, exists under our very noses.

 The next day, I prayed for joy. I wanted a day that required no emotional energy. No frenetic debates over prices, no objectifying men; no unexpected challenges.

I managed to hitch a ride into town with a lovely Beninese/French family, and it made an interesting start to the day to discover their experience of bridging the two worlds, and how they thought that Benin had changed over time.

Upon being dropped off at the motorbike rank, I made an exciting discovery. Here in Ouidah, motorbike drivers wore official vests with official numbers! This might actually suggest that the drivers knew how to drive!

In Togo, the government assumes that if you are intelligent enough to blunder over to the side of the road and buy a motorbike, then you are clearly adequately equipped enough to be unleashed onto the roads.

Consequently, during my six weeks in Lomé I saw four motorbike accidents, one with a dead body on the road, and I was in the fifth. Feeling far more at ease here in Benin, we set off, zigzagging through markets and crowded streets towards my destination.

Upon arrival, I had some hassle with the ticket officer who tried to make me pay for my invisible companion; clearly solo travellers deserve to be ripped off. Fortunately, I was saved in the nick of time by three Parisians who invited me to join them. Finding ourselves a pirogue (a wooden punt), we set out across the lake.

Yesterday’s angst dissolved in the open water: a bedsheet sail propelling us along. The water was full of pelicans and cormorants and enormous pied kingfishers. Waterways had even been constructed with woven palm fronds, ensuring that boats did not trespass onto private fish farms.

Our destination was Ganvié: a bamboo-stilt town- home to around 30,000 people. There was something almost comical about seeing Beninese culture transposed into a nautical setting. There were the same roadside peddlers, but this time trade was passed from boat to boat; there were the same bustling markets, and there was even a floating Family Planning Clinic!

I found real joy in lazing through the waterways and breathing in the atmosphere. I was incredibly grateful that I was permitted to gawp in amazement at their bamboo paradise: an explorer drinking in yet another man’s world.