WHATCHYA GHANA DO?

After our overnight stay in the Venice of Africa, we piled onto a moto, then squished into an overloaded trotro for an unprecedentedly long time, about 8 hours, to get from Ganvie, just north of Cotonou, to Abomey, in the centre of Benin.  Cotonou and Abomey are two major centres that, like Accra to Kumasi in Ghana, you would imagine to be linked by at least a half decent road to faciliate movement of goods and services, but also like Accra to Kumasi,  are actually linked by a road which is inexplicably terrible at best and barely even exists at its worst.  Except, it turns out, not that inexplicable: as a tour guide explained to us, the majority of people in Abomey tend not to vote for the southern-based political party who holds power, thus they are punished by having to deal with a truly abysmal road.  I don't usually get motion sickness, except on this road, where the pot holes were so deep and frequent that I felt like I was being thrashed about in a washing machine.   

The upside of the bad roads was that at some parts the road was much too narrow for two lanes of traffic, so we actually had to stop and get out to wait for about two hours while the massive road trains coming down from Niger and Burkina Faso passed.  We bought a fresh baguette off a market woman's head, a goat kebab off a bbq (you could tell that one was fresh from the goat's head sitting at the base of the bbq) and had the best sandwich we had eaten all year.

Eventually, we did make it to Abomey without our vehicle becoming one of the many casualties strewn on the side of the road.  Abomey was the capital of the Dahomey Kingdom and stands as a living muesuem of that time which was the site of various wars including against the French.  On the backs of motos with guides who we later discovered had definitely ripped us off, we soaked up the ancient feeling of the town, including the Route of Kings which takes you past various king's palaces, and walked through the world heritage site of the historical mueseum housed in the palaces of King Ghezo and Glele.  We were struck at how similar it was to the Forbidden City in China, almost an identical, West African version.  It was also a fairly brutal place in its day, some of the palaces were made of the sediment of sacred rivers and the crushed bones of 40 enemies, and one of the kings did some Tonia Toddman-style renovations to his throne, replacing the feet with the skulls of four enemies. The tour guide relished in telling us "these are the skulls of conquered enemy soldiers - they were Nigerians".  Seriously, are there any West Africans who don't hate Nigerians?

Despite being located right next door to the oil superpower of Nigeria, this is what you can expect of a petrol station in Benin: a stand full of shake-your-own two stroke fuel, made up of bootleg petrol smuggled in from Nigeria. How this doesn't result in catastrophe more often is beyond me, but I guess you make do with what you can right?

But what was the real highlight for us was our trip to the Voodoo temple, where we met with the Voodoo Priest who explained to us a lot about the various aspects of belief and tradition within voodoo.  Quite a few people from home have asked what it was like seeing voodoo and traditional beliefs.  There is a great conversation in Chinua Achebe's classic Things Fall Apart (which if you haven't read it, you must, it is an amazing illustration of West Africa) between a missionary and villager that highlights how various religions aren't so different after all.  The missionary says: "You carve a piece of wood...and you call it a god.  But it is still a piece of wood." 'Yes," said Akunna. "It is indeed a piece of wood,  The tree from which it came was made by Chukwu (the supreme god), as indeed all minor gods were.  But He made them for His messengers so that we could approach Him through them..."

When the tour of the voodoo temple came to the end, we were asked if we would like to do a small voodoo ceremony, say for love, health, maybe prosperity?  Having been around for a while at this point, we double checked that this was free, and then had a quick discussion about what we should have a ceremony for.  The topic of what on earth we would do when my assignment ended in Ghana had become a constant topic of conversation, so as a sort-of-joke-sort-of-desperation, we asked if we could do a ceremony for good jobs.  Oh yes, they replied, that's an important ceremony, we can do that.  A flurry of activity, some money required to buy some gin and palm oil, and possibly also one of the chickens running around and we were in the process of setting up our ceremony...

After the chicken and oil procurement had taken place, other elements, including large wooden fetishes were trotted out into a circle.  Everything was all set up and then came the clincher, our tour guide translated, this is a very important ceremony he said, so actually, it's going to cost about CFA20,000 for each person.  That's about $AUS40, and needless to say an awful lot of money in these parts.  We were furious, but not at all suprised.  We explained we didn't have that kind of money, not on us or elsewhere, and that we should have been told before all of the work was done to set it up.  To get a good job is very important, and involves several fetishes, so the ceremony is expensive. Well, we couldn't afford good jobs then, we complained.  We were told that the ceremonies initially suggested are much more simple, that's why they are free.  Well then, we'll just ask for prosperity then - that's basically the same thing, right?

So off the good-job fetishes marched back into the storage, and out came the new prosperity ones.  Luckily, the change of plan also meant a chicken's life would be saved.  Phew. Finally, we were on....