Cotonou-Kandi
25/IV/08
Ideally you will leave on a cool morning, 75 degrees after an all-night rainstorm has swept away the heat. Before starting the day you will wish that you could prolong the night and continue sleeping under the steady, sighing sheet of rain washing the roof. Once you leave the house with your driver (development workers need a lot of assistance for their mission of helping the poor), you will dally about the city for an hour trying to find an ATM that accepts your type of card.
After utterly failing in the ATM mission and topping off your gas in the outskirts of Cotonou, you will find yourself in Abomey-Calavi (part of an uninterrupted urban agglomeration taking up most of southern Benin), with its gravel and construction material yards, its impressive variety of wholesale stores (concrete and tin shacks with couches, tires, or toilets arrayed out front), and its university, with its lovely new wedding-cake residence halls. You will listen to one of the innumerable Christian music stations, which play what sounds like regular, run-of-the-mill drums and Fon chanting, but with an occasional exhortation of “Jezi Krist!” Get accustomed to the smell of acrid burn—motorcycles, diesel trucks, garbage. It will accompany you for most of the next 11 hours, irritating your skin and perhaps giving you a headache.
The sun will seem to want to peek out, promising a hotter day as you barely start to leave the urban agglomeration and into the exuberantly green countryside, but don't worry. He'll leave you alone for the day. It's a good thing too, because if not you would see all the beauty you're going to see today as mere hot ugliness. You would feel even uglier than what you were seeing, in the knowledge that the ugliness was coming from within you and not from without.
Along the entire route be watchful of overturned trucks and stopped buses. Most of the buses that are broken down at the roadside are the Kandi-Cotonou line you will have to take back to Cotonou in a few weeks. Don't worry about their all breaking down, don't think that you too will be one of the pissed-off or resigned passengers inside or outside the bus waiting, waiting. Besides, breakdowns happen even to the best, as you see clearly with the stopped bus that proudly says “Transport technicians in training”, with a bunch of people inside of it, neither training, transporting, or being technicians. Occasionally there will be a stopped truck. In this case it's not broken, it's just that the driver and his apprentice got tired. They have stopped the truck, signalled with branches lain on the road behind and ahead of them, and gone to sleep in the shade of the trailer.
In the Dahomeyan countryside you will see fields of humble, squat army-green pineapple plants patiently awaiting the arrival of their magnificent, showy flowers and fruit. Oil palm and teak groves, pygmy goats ambling about villages or perched absent-mindedly atop things, old men hacking weeds to leave a rust-red soil around their gangly young manioc bushes. Sometimes overturned trucks, stalled cross-country buses, wise stolid 30-foot mango trees coyly displaying their dangling, unripe wintergreen fruit. Your driver will stop at some point, beckon to a woman with an enamel basin full of pineapples atop her head. She will come up and perform a rapid-fire skinning of a pineapple, which the driver will grab with one hand by its leafy crown and set into like a turkey leg, eating even the core, which is soft in Benin's treasured pineapples. After a few bites he will toss it disdainfully into the roadside ditch, and seemingly reprimand the woman in Fon, after which she will load 15 pineapples into your truck in exchange for $1.50.
Before you know it you're in Allada, its huge, elaborate church of the Virgin on the outskirts. This will be the most prominent church you've seen in Benin. Even in the non-Muslim south the mosques are more visible with their tall, proud minarets, topped in prominence only by the cell phone towers dominating every good-sized town and village. After Allada it's wide swaths of deforested land, and then oil palm plantations. Hold your breath when you pass the slow-moving semi trucks that squeeze out billows of black exhaust like aerosol shaving cream, a thick sooty mass that sits on the road like cake frosting.
Beyond Bohicon everything is much less settled. You will notice more trees, but very spread out, not a forest. In fact, it will look like land that has been deforested, used, and then left to its own devices. Disturbed once but not maintained since. The soil will be a less deep red, more brown, as will be the houses made from mud-bricks, the corners sharp and orderly and the surfaces melty and cracking and shapeless.
Once in the Collines region, you will notice that the grass is shorter, less lush, but there are still lots of trees. You will pull into Dassa, with its endless roadside display shelves all stocked with identical plastic bags of gari (manioc couscous), and an occasional bucket of yellow mangoes or a big sack of charcoal. Enjoy the Cuban salsa music on the radio, look at the colorful massive church directly below the improbably knobby granite peaks and above the sweeping, misty vistas of heavily-wooded savanna. Walk by the women selling bags of skinned oranges, by a small Citroen packed in the back with four bound, bewildered baby pygmy goats and a pile of yams, and to the huge, stout woman in a colorful robe who shouts “pounded yam” while behind her two young women effectively are pounding yams with 5-foot-long poles in a large wooden mortar on the ground. She will ladle you meat of bush rat or bush sheep, peanut sauce, slimy green okra, and Beninois cheese, like dried feta and dyed scarlet by sorghum leaf sheaths. You will eat it with pounded yam and your hands. If you're foreign they'll point you to the indoor seating area, which is dark and stuffy, but has no undernourished black hens poking around underfoot. If you like this food (which you will), you're in luck, since that's what they eat in the North. Afterwards if you have to piss, just go to the outdoor passageway marked, “Enter, urinate here,” complete with stick-figure pictures of men pissing.
You will continue on your way, until Parakou, where you are greeted by a shining monument to a long-dead president. It's gilded (the monument, not the president). You will pass through the busy “International Market of Parakou”. Here even more than in the rest of Benin you will see women with tiny bald babies strapped firmly to their backs like little squishy froggy bundles. A friendly disfigured woman waves to charitable passers-by at the stoplight. There will be many banks here, none of them accepting your ATM card but one of them with an inexplicable group of five pert, perky, pretty, clean suburban-English-talking white girls. They will seem out of place in a town where long-legged Sahel sheep cluster around barren bushes in the median strips of principal streets to strip them of their last meager leaves, SUVs buzz by with 50 live baby pygmy goats tied to the roof, and Muslim women covered in colorful silk sheets zip along authoritatively on their motorcycles.
Beyond Parakou the road is less well-maintained, with lots of potholes. You will however see how neat and densely-cultivated the countryside is, with its ordered plantations of mango and cashew, the grass burned away underneath the trees. You will see the absence of grass and constantly think you are finally getting to true savanna, but then you will realize it's been intentionally burned, or you will enter a zone with lush tropical foliage despite its being the dry season.
Finally you will get to N'Dali, the village where your driver did 5th and 6th grade, and you will know you're in savanna country. On one side of the road will be yam plots prepared in hundreds of little mounds that look like those blue foam sheets old people put on recliner chairs, and on the other side of the road is thick bush. You will notice a shirtless man plastering his house, and shirtless women working in the fields. The fields of erect cotton stubble in blood-brown soil are interrupted now only by the occasional tree or 6 foot termite mound, and long-horn zebu cattle stride along ahead of their young Gando herder boys. Your driver will know they are Gando because they are very black. If not, they would be Peuls, who still refer to the Gando as a slave people.
Before you know it, you will almost be at Kandi. Of course you'll be nervous to start five weeks of research in terra incognita, but that's what you've come for. Just think of yourself as Indiana Jones embarking on an adventure, and you'll get inspired as you hear your own theme music in your head.
Hard Kandi
We were close to Kandi by 7-ish. As night fell we pulled into Sagasso, the village of the main farmer, Yobo, who was my link to the Participatory Plant Breeding group. My driver Norbert pointed out Yobo's house to me, and we immediately pulled up. He got out and asked in Bariba where Yobo was to a group of guys sitting under a mango tree. I got out too, and a fellow who spoke a bit of French and had a weird nutmeg-colored powder on his upper lip greeted me and asked if I wanted to try some tobacco. “This is Bariba country! This is how we do!” and all his friends laughed in confirmation. I said that was fair, but that I needed to ease into things, which met with more approving chuckles. Next arrived the delegation of kids to regard the new visitor, a mix of fear and marvel in their eyes. My tobacco-snuffing friend introduced them to me, and they took turns shaking hands with me (two rounds, just to make sure the first time wasn't a weird hallucination).
Yobo soon pulled up, and after a warm greeting to me, he and Norbert launched into rapid negotiations in Bariba on an affair of which I was unclear. As I followed them into Yobo's compound, I saw that Norbert wanted to buy a large 120kg sack of corn to bring back to his wife, who sells basic foodstuffs in the outskirts of Cotonou. I was bewildered, unsure of what was happening, and no one kept me updated in a language I could understand. Eventually though the three of us returned to the car, squeezed into the front seat, and went to check out my lodging.
When we got there I was a bit skeptical that we were actually in Kandi. Kandi was a fair-sized city, and this place was an unlit compound in the middle of nowhere. We stepped out of the car as night was falling, and Yobo introduced me proudly to the guesthouse of the Union of Cotton Producers of Kandi. Norbert remarked to me on the sly that the rows of jerrycans out front indicated a lack of running water. The guesthouse had a dark entrance lobby, filled with stark wooden benches, vacant except for a young shirtless man looking over some papers in the failing light. A skinny, rat-looking guy took us to my room, a spare number with concrete everything. It did have its own bathroom though, and Norbert asked if the shower worked. “No, you have to use a bucket that we fill outside and bring to the room.” And the power, “It's been out for awhile. It should come back sometime.” Not promising.
We drove back to Yobo's village after leaving my stuff in the room. He and Norbert caught up eagerly, while I stayed silent, waiting for a good opportunity to voice my concerns without seeming ungrateful to Yobo for having booked me the place. I'm not a picky guy with lodging and personal comfort, but I had three criteria for wherever I was going to stay during my research in Kandi. I needed reliable electric power every night to type up my day's findings on my computer. I needed a room with window screens to keep me from getting malaria. These two things were justifiable for my work—I can't do my work without my computer, or if I'm dying from malaria. The third criteria was pure vanity: I wanted running water, just because. I had no work reason to justify it, though I'm sure there's some UN convention that says I've got a right to it. Anyway, this place was shooting 0 for 3.
So we dropped off Yobo, finished the corn bag transaction, and then Norbert and I drove back to Kandi, talking in conspiratorial tones about how to proceed. I felt enough confidence with him to tell him my problems with the residence, and he agreed. We were going to see his big brother (one of 40 siblings peppered in important posts throughout Benin), the commander of the military camp at Kandi. He would surely know of other lodging options. But on the way we noticed that nowhere had power in the city. It was all blacked out. As we drove over roads that were less intentionally-constructed conveyances than an unplanned, neglected area between rows of houses, in the pitch-black 95-degree night, I felt overwhelmed. What the hell was I doing there? How was I going to do research in this place? Had Norbert really not known it was going to be like this, or was he just lying before when he had told me about Kandi's infrastructure? He assured me it wasn't always like this.
We found his brother's house after much confused asking (Kandi is majority Dendi-speaking, so there are huge swaths of the city where Bariba is not understood, despite Kandi's being 5km from the language's heartland). Despite my state of mental distress, I did notice how amazing the sky looked in the unlit night. It was littered with stars, stars I didn't know at all. I was truly removed from all my references. Even heaven is different in Kandi.
His brother reassured me, in part with his wise plan for searching for a hotel tomorrow, and in part for the TV, fridge, and other appliances in his house that attested to a regular supply of electricity. He told us that the city was without power since last night, after a generator caught on fire at the power plant. And at this time of year, the end of the dry season, water was scarce, only available to those who lived in lower parts of the city and hence closer to the aquifer. Not promising, but at least an assurance that my hotel was no worse than any other at the moment in terms of power or water.
After that Norbert and I returned to our scheming and then headed to a maquis restaurant, where two insouciant waitresses served us bitter pineapple juice and too much rice. Norbert was harassing one of the waitresses, and then she “offered” the other to me, and afterwards when I joked to Norbert that it was too bad that both he and I were spoken for (he with a wife and six kids), he said, “Hey, it's no problem. You hit it with a condom and it doesn't matter.” He was amused that I thought it did actually matter.
Yobo called us because he was in town (he had come on his motorcycle), and he soon joined us at the table. He broached the topic of changing my lodging, which was nice since I didn't have to appear ungrateful. My place was expensive and mediocre, and he recommended a number of alternatives, like my staying with his family in the village, or renting a house from him that he has in downtown Kandi. Also a few other hotels that were better quality for less money. All these seemed like good options to me, and so as Norbert and I returned to my lodging for the night, I was in a better mood, not so overwhelmed. And when we arrived, the power was back! So now I'm here typing in my room, while Norbert watches a dubbed bad Brazilian soap opera in the lobby. I've got an overhead fan going, and I'm going to take a nice cool shower before bed.
Maybe I'll be able to survive Kandi after all.
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