Voyages Afrique de l'Ouest: Benin #2 Ganvie, the Venice of Africa....
0Friday, 21 March 2014 by Renee
From Ouidah we headed off to Cotonou, the informal capital of Benin. The second wet season started in earnest while we were there, bucketing down and giving us a good excuse to rest up and plan where else we would go. Reluctantly we decided that we would not head as far North as we had planned - some expat friends had warned us it was a pretty difficult trek to do in the short time we had, and that rain would make it much worse, and likely that we wouldn't see anything at all. Northern Benin and Togo would have to wait for another visit.
Even in Cotonou the rain meant we didn't see as much as we would have liked, but we saw enough to believe that Cotonou is a cool place to hang out for a while. It's also an amusing place to attempt to find internet and stable enough electricity to submit a job application for a government aid agency which, unbeknownst to you, has just been touted to be abolished, but that's a whole other story (!). Cotonou has become a bit of a cultural hub, with some fantastic art galleries promoting local artists of both the traditional and contemporary variety. We spent a surreal rainy afternoon at the Fondation Zinsou art gallery, where we happened upon a great exhibition by local, Basquiat-inspired Gerard Quenum - we even ordered a coffee afterwards which wasn't instant. It was fantastic but this was not the West Africa we knew! Which of course, is precisely the point.
On the less pretty side of things, we had a strange experience at our hotel where we encountered three middle aged French woman with three Beninoise infants who I can only presume were about to be whisked away from everything they know and have come from to live in a developed country with their white saviours. Yes, in many African countries HIV/Aids in particular has meant many children grow up in without parents. But there have been so many studies that show that the vast majority of 'orphans' around the world actually have living relatives if anyone actually took the time to ask, and that with just a fraction of the money involved in facilitating adoptions or operating orphanages, those relatives could set up their own income generation to support the children. It's a complicated issue of course, but seeing it close up made it seem quite simple: gross and orientalist. Can you imagine if a wealthy Benin woman wanted to adopt a French child?
Anyway, I digress. As the skies temporarily cleared, we made our way to Ganvié , aka "the Venice of Africa", a village an hour away from Cotonou built completely on stilts. In the 1700s a village ran there on the edge of Lake Nokoué to hide from slave drivers, and Ganvié has been there ever since. It was fascinating: even small children operate canoes like extensions of their own bodies, and water for consumption has to be pumped up from a boar into jerry cans on the canoes. We stayed at Chez M which was just what we needed, and headed to bed early to the sounds of drums and village life on the water.
