Top Quotes: “Show Me the Magic: Travels Round Benin by Taxi” — Annie Caulfield

“Some of present-day Benin used to be the Kingdom of Danhome, until the French came and misheard the name as ‘Dahomey.’ The French then added several neighbouring states in the country they colonized and called Dahomey for decades.

Kérekou changed the name from Dahomey to announce his restart programme for the country; they would rise from the debris of colonialism and coups to be a shiny new nation, as magnificent as the Benin that used to be next door. Also, as the name Danhome/ Dahomey properly belonged only to some of the south of the country, and Kérékou came from the north — an area scattered with peoples, like his own, once at war with old Danhome/Dahomey — the name Dahomey just had to go. Kérekou tore up the old maps and declared the People’s Republic of Benin open for a new socialist future.

Kérékou’s socialism soon evolved into the sort of totalitarian, bureaucratic, corrupt, disastrously inefficient socialism that the people of Eastern Europe found so pleasing until the late 1980s. Also following the Eastern European trend, the people of Kérékou’s people’s republic got rid of him, in 1991. Possibly with some American communism-fearing assistance.”

“Colloquially pagne referred to a woman’s entire outft — dress, wraps, head tie — and pagne were obsessively accumulated. It would be a shamefully poor woman who didn’t have a collection of them squirrelled away; her pagne were her achievement, her wealth and something a mother wanted to leave her daughters. Even in the remotest villages, pagne salesmen on bicycles struggled round, their shoulders piled high with bales of deep-dyed wax cloth. The patterns were loud or subtle, anything could be on them: patterns of fashionable shoes, perhaps, or a mobile-phone print — this was very popular, as were skyscrapers, electric irons, kettles and radios. Flowers, animals and trees were rare — the preference was abstraction or abstract impressions of modern things. Like lawnmowers. Then there were travelogue prints — Sacré Cœur patterns, Saint Peters, the Statue of Liberty, Big Ben, Arc de Triomphe . .. There were special celebration prints; you could tie the Pope’s face round yourself, or Kérékou’s, or you could have a run of cloth specially made celebrating your grandfather’s seventieth birthday, or funeral, or your son’s graduation, or praising your candidate for local office. Oranges, reds and yellows seemed popular in the south; purples, blues and greens in the dry north.”

“I expected dancing, bright costumes, a bit at a party … But this was the kind of vodou shrine that brought to mind Papa Doc Duvalier, zombies, people dying of fright in the darkness… One look at it and the blood-drenched downside of vodou took hold of my imagination and froze it stone-still in the middle of the thought: Get out of here now.

All I could see around the car were angry clamouring people in burnt, blackened rag-clothes — faces twisted, sweating, hands clawing at the windows. Brueghel monsters in a dark pit. A dead shallow in a red hillside; the squalid dirt basin at the end of the world.

Behind the door-pulling damned was a smoking pyre, about ten feet high. Thick branches protruding from it were hung with the skulls of animals — jaw-bared sheep and goats. There were singed feathers everywhere, a scatter of shattered bones and a stench of boiled fat. In shabby lean-tos around the pyre, skinny women squatted over cooking pots, glowering towards me out of hollow eyes. The thumping on the windows and sides of the car intensified, faces pressed closer. I knew Isidore had made a terrible mistake. These people didn’t want me here.

‘Hurry up. Out you get.’ He grinned at me like we’d arrived at the seaside.

I hesitated.

‘Come on.’ He opened his door. Hands gripped at him.

‘Isidore, is it all right for me to be here?’ I asked, not reaching for my door handle.

‘Why not?’ He grinned again and breezed out into the grimy, pawing crowd.

As I got out I felt the strange, frenzied energy the people were giving off. Women were clutching my arms and pointing to babies at their breasts. Tiny children hugged my legs. I looked a red-eyed man in the red eyes and realized he was laughing. There was a sharp smell cutting through the heavy, fat-laden air. Several of the men brandished bottles of clear liquid. Home-brew rum. Everyone was laughing — what had looked like grimaces were grins. It was all distorted through glass and the desperation to get at me. They weren’t angry or violently crazy. They were loony drunk on the gut-rotting, eye-gouging tipple the women were stewing up in the jean-tos, a rum known as sodadi. And I was the last thing they’d expected to turn up in the pit that morning.

The spokesman, the middle-aged red-eyed man, as ragged as the crowd around him, began a short, frantic negotiation with Isidore in Fon. Isidore told me to give Red Eye some money — not too much, just a couple of pounds. In return I was handed a rough-hewn wooden stake, sharp at one end, about six inches long; Isidore was given a small bottle of red-palm oil and another smeary little bottle, full of rum.

‘This is what you need.’ Isidore beamed at me. ‘Now it begins.’ Red Eye spoke earnestly to Isidore again, glancing at me as he spoke, passing on instructions for translation.

‘Now, Annie, he says you must do exactly as he says, when he says — do you understand? He is the féticheur, or priest. The vodounon. He is very serious.’

Although I now knew I wasn’t heading for a tearing limb from limb, I was in no frame of mind to get the giggles. Inches from my face, a goat skull swung from a bent metal pole. That kept me steady.

We moved nearer to the central mound — I was going to call it a pyre again but there were no embers, nothing was actually burning. On closer examination, the mound was entirely composed of greasy short wooden stakes, like the one I had in my hand.

They’d been driven into the ground, one beside the other, until they’d rotted into each other and the earth; then other layers had been pummelled on top of those, stake upon stake, to eventually create the high Guy Fawkes bonfire hillock in front of me.

I wondered if the blackened, greasy surface was from the cooking of animals on the mound; but none of the stakes were charred.. ‘It’s not burnt, Isidore said. ‘It’s the red-palm oil. In the sun it goes black. The black all around here is only from the oil.’

The red-eyed man, the vodounon, handed me a mallet and indicated that I should hammer my stake into the mound. Isidore told me I had to do this while saying aloud to the stake what I wanted from the vodou, telling it what I would give as thanks for my request being granted.

‘Promise something like a sheep or a chicken. That’s normal. It depends on your circumstances and what you want.’ I decided to go for broke; I wildly pledged a sheep and a big meaty cow if I could get half a million to buy a house in central London, preferably Bloomsbury.

The red-eyed man nodded approval, but I spoke to my stake in English so I don’t think he understood what he was approving.

Isidore handed me the bottle of palm oil. ‘Pour this on the stake and repeat what you said.’

I poured, thinking that for half a million the stake would need a good soaking.

‘Not all! Not yet!’ Isidore shrieked. ‘You need oil for other places.’ He snatched the bottle away, exchanged a look of panic relieved with the red-eyed man.

Never mind other places, I wasn’t done with my stake yet. I had to take a mouthful of rum and then spit the mouthful on to the stake, somehow managing to repeat my requests and promises at the same time. I spat fast, feeling half my teeth dissolve on contact with the rum — even the short swirl round my mouth was enough to make me feel close to the limb-failing hysteria of the onlookers.

I had to check where my feet were as we moved on, much more rum spitting and they might not be so easy to find.

I knew the metal pole with a blob on the end was meant to be a giant penis. Thrusting out of the ground in front of the stake mound, it was the next object for me to lavish with oil, rum spit and incantations. Giant, up-thrusting penises were everywhere in southern Benin. Sometimes they were attached to a carving of the squatting Legba, bringer of fertility, good fortune and occasional impish tricks when neglected. But often there’d simply be the sticky-up business end of Legba outside a front door, at a crossroads or at the edge of a field, formed from a tree branch, a lump of clay, or a thick metal rod. Not the kind of theological symbol to make you contemplate your mortality, but to come across it unexpectedly could certainly give you a bit of a turn.”

“Having politely fallen back while the ceremony was in progress, the women and children of the pit clamoured round me again. Isidore had checked en route that I had pockets full of sweets and small coins for this inevitability. But the red-eyed vodounon had to be given a more substantial tip. He also wanted the plastic South Park (don’t ask) purse I paid him from.

‘Give me that,’ he snapped. Suddenly he spoke French.

‘Give you the purse?’

‘Take the rest of your money out; it’s the purse he wants.’ Isidore smiled reassuringly at the vodounon, who seemed hypnotized by Cartman, Kenny ..

‘Give me that,’ he repeated. ‘I need that.’

Not wanting to put the damper on half a million for a three-pound knick-knack, I handed it over. The vodounon examined the round pink faces of the cartoon characters closely, then, as if deciding they disgusted him, he tossed the purse to a small boy.”

“Every road in the town was dug up at once, ready for resurfacing all at once. Anyone not driving a tank had to park up on the edge of town and walk. Walk carefully, so as not to fall down holes deep enough for a bit of a Metro system to be thrown in under the new roads. I wasn’t much bothered; illogical road excavation was such a constant of London life that central Ouidah’s open-cast quarrying approach to the job only felt like an extreme of a familiar nuisance. Isidore was outraged. He stopped by the first group of mud-splashed labourers he saw and set them straight.

‘What have you done it like this for? Why didn’t you do it one road at a time? This is ridiculous. I’ve got a white person here who has to walk in this heat. Ridiculous!’”

“”This is a genuine traditional kingdom. It is not a children’s game. We have been here hundreds of years looking after the people at grassroots level. We’re the ones they come to, not the governments. Governments change; we are always here. We know the families by name, we know the history of land ownership and the good and bad in individuals. All over Africa, you’ll find that the traditional kings remain. Even when colonialists expelled and killed traditional rulers, or when misguided governments tried to destroy us, we were always in the people’s hearts. When the situations change, you’ll always see the traditional kings return. It is better that we work in association with political governments — better for them, I mean. Then a land has continuity and the full co-operation of ordinary people. Otherwise they are lost.””

“The slave revolt in Haiti was not started by Toussaint L’Ouverture, who was a slave until the age of thirty-four; it began from several sources. Interestingly, one uprising began after a vodou ceremony to Ougon, god of war as well as of iron. Ougon spoke through a priestess and told the Haitian slaves to rise up and they would succeed. Toussaint L’Ouverture wouldn’t have been involved in this uprising; he was a Catholic and didn’t approve of vodou. However, by 1791 Toussaint, who’d joined the slave revolt as a medical officer, had become one of its leaders. He inspired and coordinated the successful revolt, becoming Governor-General of Haiti in 1796. In 1802, Napoleon Bonaparte decided to retake Haiti. He didn’t succeed but he captured Toussaint. In 1804 Haiti achieved full and final independence; Toussaint L’Ouverture had died the year before in a prison in the French Alps.”

“Forgetting that the small battles fought between African peoples — the Yoruba and the Fon, for instance — turned into bloodbath wars as the Europeans armed and encouraged disputes to ensure the constant supply of prisoners of war to be sold on to the slave ships. The Yoruba kings and the kings of Dahomey had to feel that it was their enemies they were selling, because they knew they were selling human beings; the Europeans, however, didn’t feel that this was what they were buying.

The kings of Dahomey had slaves of their own; they didn’t understand that in the Americas a slave was not a servant, a soldier, a mistress or someone who could work hard, become a court official and trusted friend. The slaves of African kings were sometimes free to go home after a few years of useful servitude, and their children were not automatically made slaves.”

“The original inhabitants of Allada, the Tofinu, had been quelled by the arrival of the panther-sprung family from Tado. But it took the Dahomey kings several centuries to make them get out and stay out.

The Tofinu then did an extraordinary thing: they fled a few miles down the road and built a new civilization entirely on water. They’d learnt something about Dahomian kings — that they had a religious taboo forbidding them to cross water to do battle. Centuries later the Tofinu still lived in their stilt dwellings in the middle of gigantic lakes and considered themselves never really defeated by the marauding panther family.”

“Isidore pointed at the reason for village nervousness of officialdom — huge boats, the size and style of garbage barges, secreted in channels behind houses, half-covered in branches. These were smugglers’ boats. In the dead of night they chugged out from their coves behind the stilt houses and crossed miles of inland water networks into Nigeria, coming back laden with fake Nike trainers, televisions, fridges, mopeds, stereos … but mostly petrol. Petrol was officially twice the price in Benin. Illicit trade was so rife it was virtually uncontrollable.

Sometimes police boats would swoop along the waterways but the smugglers knew the byways better — and the police weren’t going to start shooting at a sixty-foot hull full of petrol.”

“All along the roadsides of Cotonou were rickety wooden stalls selling wine bottles full of smugglers’ petrol, glinting in the hot sun. Often, pieces of rag were stuffed in the necks to seal the bottles, so the roadsides looked like extensive markets for firebombers — Molotov cocktails off the peg.

A wine bottle held enough to top up one of Cotonou’s swarm of mopeds. The larger amounts needed for cars were in big bottle — garden jars underneath the stalls. Some funnels, a piece of plastic tubing and you had a petrol station.

The petrol stalls were a terrifying sight, always being just skimmed by speeding mopeds, missed by inches by thundering juggernauts. People with cigarettes in their mouths funnelled petrol, attendants lit their food fires close enough to cook while minding the stall … I kept thinking about that childhood summer amusement of setting fire to dry undergrowth with a piece of broken glass. One good refraction and half of Cotonou would barbecue.

There were official petrol stations but hardly anyone used them, except for foreigners and people driving company vehicles who weren’t paying for the petrol themselves. If there was no unofficial petrol the country would have ground to a standstill in a matter of weeks.”

“En route to Plan B, I had to visit the bank in Bohicon, a thriving commercial town outside Abomey. Bohicon had begun as a ribbon development of traders on the main road to Abomey and eventually became significant in its own right. It was easier to build modern facilities, like banks and railway stations, here, where half the land wasn’t the semi-sacred site of the ancient palaces and where there weren’t a lot of backhanders to be paid to living minor royals.

I had to wait for ages in the bank. So did an elderly man next to me. He scowled, sweated, a vein in his temple throbbed. After fifteen minutes, he jumped to his feet, bellowing: ‘I’m an old man, I can’t waste the time I’ve got left in here!’

The outburst helped him queue jump. Non-bellowing clients like me left the bank after an hour in the frustrated mood Beninois banks always provoked.”

“This wasn’t ‘it’. ‘It’ was a rectangular hole at the back of the excavation, door-shaped, not natural. ‘It’ was a house underground.

The teenager put his bucket aside and led us into the excavation.

‘Last month they find it. They were dig to build a house for a minister and suddenly the machine falls in a hole. They continue dig with spades and realize it had fallen through the roof for one room. They climb down and find more rooms, bowls and pipes inside where the people lived. They say some scientists are coming. They will pump out this rain and look in the house. For now the water is useful for me. Come, look inside.’

The door opened into a vast chamber below ground. Isidore flashed a torch. Halfway down there was water, but the dry portion was square cut — definitely a made room, not a cave.

‘They go down by ladders then hide the doors with mud and bushes. No one finds them.’

Isidore smiled wryly at the teenager. ‘Ah, those Fon of Abomey.’

‘Yes, yes.’ The teenager nodded.

‘They made this, the Abomey Fon?’ I was trying to concentrate despite cow fears.

“No, no.’ Isidore made a patient-schoolmaster face. ‘People made them to hide from the Dahomians of Abomey. Hide from being slaves. A few houses like this have been found. Perhaps this family succeeded. If the underground houses were discovered, the soldiers would make fires at the entrance with peppers and dry leaves so the people begged to come out.’”

“”A woman like that, from a simple background, how could she understand? You can see she was simple, just wanting to talk about silly things instead of the artefacts.’

Isidore loved a good artefact. I tended to think they were just there, whereas a nice little chat could be a universe.”

“‘The train is cheap,’ Isidore said when the hullabaloo was over and I was sitting back at the table like an adult. ‘There’s this one and another that runs north to south. But there are a lot of accidents. And the seats are wood. You’re better off in the car.’

‘But it would be fun to see what it was like, for a short journey at least.’

‘You don’t have trains in England?’

‘Not like that.’

‘Hmmm.’ Isidore began a conversation with our friendly waitress, Natasha, about last month’s train accident. Four dead. Twelve maimed. One woman had her leg torn right off at the hip.

I got the message.”

“The chickens teasing was because of the pickiness of his passenger, who found it hard to search out any meat on the average Beninois chicken. Beninois chickens led a hard life, running around underfoot and living on scraps. A well-rested chicken, artificially reared to meaty tenderness, was a rare thing and known as ‘poulet cher’, expensive chicken. The scrawny average chicken was poulet bicyclette, bicycle chicken, having the sinews of a Tour de France champion. You might as well suck on some chicken-tasting elastic and sticks — but it was cheap.

Estelle said she could have found us poulet cher if we’d warned her, but the menu only offered one that had endured a hard-pedalling life. She did have some eggs that hadn’t suffered too much.”

“Togo’s gun-toting government troops had taken against someone in her street, pushing him around, provoking a riot, followed by the shooting of every male over ten, dead in the road. Her husband had been on his own doorstep. How could she stay in her house? She took her children and came to relatives in Benin.”

“Porto Novo was still the official seat of the government, although the President, most businesses, and the majority of the urban population lived in Cotonou. It was the port part of Porto Novo that had gone wrong — silted up and not deep enough for modern commercial shipping. Cotonou was deeper. And flatter, better for the international airport, so the foreign embassies were there, and the flashy foreign hotels like the Sheraton and Novotel. Yet sleepy dowager Porto Novo, crusted with faded finery, still managed to keep its name in official gazetteers as the capital.”

“While we tried to judge the Strange Headgear Contest, Isidore told me that two years previously the Benin government had attempted to introduce a compulsory motorbike-helmet law — a sensible move, considering the millions of rickety Vespas teeming round the potholed roads. But women’s outrage at having their expensive hairdos ruined and their headwraps crushed thwarted all attempts to enforce the law.”

“There were nine brothers and four sisters — the sort of situation that arose when a man had three wives. Having indulged himself in the three wives, Isidore’s father was now suffering the long-term effects — his compound was leaping, crawling and skipping with grandchildren, who all had some kind of noise to make.

‘My father’s an old man, he wants to sleep, he wants to talk calmly with his friends but all the time, yow-yow-yow from the kids.’”

“I noticed something odd about some of the men dancing and dapping round the drums — they were women. Burly women in men’s clothes and hats, dancing with male vigour and grinning at me. They danced in synch with each other, like teenage girls do once they’ve practised for hours at home. They were not at all like the baby-holding or dressed-up man-catching girls around the perimeter. I tried to get a photograph of a particularly self-possessed woman in male attire. When she realized what I was doing, she grabbed her friend and they came right up to the table to dance for me.

According to Isidore, in the gelede women had licence to act the fool, blow whistles, wave flags, sing loudly and wear men’s clothes for fun. One of the functions of gelede was to keep the balance of male and female energy in the community, to harmonize this, preventing conflict between the sexes. Sometimes men, particularly the younger ones, put on items of women’s clothing to satirize women, to remind women of what proper behaviour should be. Women dressing as men was more unusual but served the same purpose. It was the spirit of misrule let loose so order and balance could return.

There was another thought I had. The men-dressed women were definitely quite winky and flirty with me; was this part of their role play? Or was it their secret? I did extensive research, showing the photos and discussing it with one gay woman-friend in London. She said: ‘Well, don’t quote me but in my expert opinion I’d say you were right. Why wouldn’t there be lesbians? They just let the men think it was a way some women liked to have a lark.’

The gelede was an old, old system of keeping harmony in the community, so why wouldn’t there be ways to harmonize the less conventional citizens, allowing a space for them?”

“As we pulled up at the aunt’s roadside home, there was one member of the family who didn’t laugh too much in the joy of Christ at the sight of me. A plump toddler boy was horrified the instant my yellow head appeared — he let out a siren wail of alarm and ran behind a tree. From this safe position he kept staring at me and screaming objections to my presence. Aunt thought it was just a question of getting him used to me, and tried putting the boy in my arms — he fought like his life depended on it, kicking and biting at aunt, punching me, yelling. Embarrassed, aunt put him down and the child fled back to his tree, sobbing with rage. As apologizing aunt and uncle made me take a seat on a log bench, the child re-emerged brandishing a long stick, then ran at me and whacked me across the face with it. There was mortified pandemonium. The struggling child was separated from his weapon and chased into the house, where he stood in the doorway, glaring at me and letting fly occasional screams of fury. Angry with everyone — couldn’t they see there was a wrong-looking thing in the compound and he’d only been trying to save them?

He’d left me with a stinging red welt across my face that lasted a good couple of days. I told distressed aunt it really didn’t hurt at all.

Isidore wasn’t quite so solicitous about my wellbeing.

‘Ah, he’s never seen a yovo,’ he laughed. ‘He doesn’t know what you are. You’re like a monster. Like a bad dream.’

‘Thanks. My face does hurt, you know.’

‘Yes.’ Isidore, the proud uncle, smiled as he looked at my injury.

‘He’s a very fine boy, a strong boy to have done all that damage at his age.’

I told him that if he’d like to test the health and strength of any other nephews on my face I’d be more than happy to oblige.”

“Oh, these bush taxis load up too much. I hope they pay double for that sheep. Bush taxis is a terrible job. If you don’t overload, you don’t make enough money to survive. If the police set up a road block and catch you overloaded they’ll fine you, or want a bribe. There’s more road blocks now because they’re also fining the drivers for drinking. Good, really — they have an inestimable number of accidents, inestimable!”

“It could have been worse. I could have been in Burkina Faso and opened a pot of baked bats. Isidore said that when you cut open a bat’s stomach you’d find a baby bat inside. If you cut open the baby bat’s stomach, it had a baby inside. I don’t know how long the Russian-doll-with-bats business went on before you managed to get to the core of your dinner, but it wouldn’t be one I’d be trying. Even if Isidore did recommend it as an excellent dish for preventing witchcraft.”

“I saw the tala somba, the famous high castles the Somba people lived in. The tata somba had been built the same way for at least five hundred years, turreted fortresses that looked oddly like northern-French châteaux. Odder still, the greener swathes of the tree-littered countryside were reminiscent of parts of Normandy.

The tata somba had only one small entrance on the ground floor, for livestock. There was a middle level for storage and the people lived on the top, getting home via wooden ladders that could be pulled up quickly in case of trouble. They slept in the round turrets, cooked and communed on the central flat roof.

They’d built the houses this way because their fertile hunting grounds were frequently invaded. When they retreated to the top of their castles they could repel invaders with arrows, spears or boiling water. In slave-raiding times the high castles came into their own. The robust Somba made excellent slaves, but catching them was hardly worth the hassle. Because another smart thing the Somba did was not to live in communities. There was only one family per castle. Another family’s castle would never be closer than soo yards away — reputedly the distance an arrow could be shot. It would be a world of trouble, even with guns, to capture a Somba castle — and then you’d get only one family. You’d have to do the whole thing over again to get another single family out of their fortress. All this and you were travelling through mountains then, not the weather-and time-crushed sandstone hills of today.”

“It was inferno hot. I was throwing mineral water down my neck and sweating it out like a very efficient water-using machine, so by now I’d two empty water bottles at my feet — useful containers for someone.

I told Isidore to slow down as we approached a tree clump indicating a stream under the road. A woman and a girl were sitting on a low wall, with bowls on their knees, taking time to chat before collecting water. Suddenly the girl noticed the car slowing down; she screamed, threw her bowl in the air and ran into the stream below. The older woman turned to say something to her, then glanced back at the car. She saw me, flung her bowl in the air and ran into the stream, and on, grabbing the girl by the elbow, urging her to run. They ran way, way across the bush until they were far behind us.”

“A group of women selling shiny red peppers nudged each other and giggled about me.

‘Madame Pantalon! Buy some peppers!’ one of them shouted.

They all screamed with laughter, all shouting, ‘Mrs Trousers, Mrs Trousers, buy peppers!’

‘A woman in trousers is funny to them,’ Isidore said, frowning at the rib-clutching, hysterical women.

‘Mrs Trousers, come back here and show us your trousers!’ they yelled as I retreated into used clothing and stationery.

I thought that if for some reason I ever decided to open a brothel, Madame Pantalon would be an ideal name. Saucy but with a hint of well-travelled sophistication, exactly how I would want my brothel to be.”

“Mopeds and scooters needed no licence, no MOT, no road tax or insurance. They could be bought cheap in Nigeria or secondhand for 30 franc. These unregulated and often ancient conveyances were designed to carry two people; in Benin they frequently carried families of five, with shopping. They were the main source of Cotonou’s heavy pollution problem and involved in an estimated minimum of seven gut spilling accidents a day, three fatalities a week. The most dangerous were the fast-weaving zemi-jan drivers.

These were moped taxis, driven by wild young men in numbered, coloured shirts — different colours in different towns, yellow and green for Cotonou. Driving dangerously was a matter of necessity — they had to work fast to get enough of their low fares to make a living.

Zemi-jan was Fon for ‘take me quick’ — which they did, if they didn’t kill you. Dicing with peril was a matter of pride; it was a laddish job with much wearing of baseball caps and sunglasses, especially at night. They were not always sober and needed to work such long hours their judgment could doze right off on them.”

“This was the usual clientele, middle-class Africans and dodgy French. The Africans behaved in normal ways to indicate people on holiday or business trips; the French sat around drinking and muttering things to each other and seldom went out. They always seemed to be waiting for something.

‘Oh, you know, import-export,’ Isidore said when I asked what they did. Cars mainly. They sell secondhand cars that come into the port. Often the ships are late, or more often the cars are delayed in customs.

‘Secondhand’ was a generous description of the cars flogged off in Benin, with every cassette player, seatbelt, windscreen wiper and possible extra removed. And how many cars did the country need? Some of the Frenchmen were so low down the profit pole, they made a living driving the cars to sell in inland states like Mali and Niger. The sort of job a young person might do for fun — but these middle-aged men? You just knew they’d done something terrible back home. These were the men the Foreign Legion wouldn’t have.”

“One time, they’d been an expanding, powerful Moslem empire, spreading across West Africa. As the empire broke up, they’d kept shifting because of waves of retaliation. There were still waves of persecution of them, in Guinea, Senegal, Sierra Leone … When countries became unhappy and unstable, the slightly different, rootless people were very pogrom prone.

l asked our guide, Ali, if the Fulani always lived separately.

‘It’s easier that way. People like the Dendi are always making a fuss, suspecting us of stealing and accusing Peul animals of trampling their maize and so on. It’s easier to keep away. Our children mix at school, as adults we have Dendi, Fon, Bariba friends, but when we live in their communities, we fall out. It’s no fault on either side, really. But we are different and we don’t want to blend.’

They looked different and they weren’t really connected to the place they lived. They were connected to other Fulani, all over West Africa. They had patterns of movement that didn’t recognize national boundaries. If there was a drought in Mali or Burkina, those Fulani would come into Benin or Nigeria with their cattle and then go back when there was news of rain, so they didn’t overgraze their neighbours. Frontiers did cause problems but sometimes exceptions were made for the Fulani, or they bribed their Way through.”

“When someone in our culture numbers their children they don’t mention children who’ve died. We say how many are alive, that’s it. Maybe if you’ve known someone for a long time they might mention there was another child that died.

Isidore thought this was cold. He said if a woman carried a baby into the world she remembered it, even if it died.”

“When I got home it would take me weeks to get used to London’s streets again. I thought it was the weather, the complication of European life — but it was the absence of children from our lives. Our carefully counted indoor children didn’t breathe life and fun into every street, weren’t under every tree in every village. To have order and possessions, and because we were terrified of our children coming to any harm, we’d suffocated their presence in our lives.”

“Hmm. I spotted some Peul women with cheese at the roadside. It was expensive but I persuaded Isidore it would be my present to the children. The cheese was fastened to the windscreen wipers in plastic bags. This was the correct way to travel with it — the soft cheese stayed fresh, didn’t smell out the car, and developed a protective crust.”

“Where the vodounon and gri-gri man were one person, there was the priest and doctor in one. Both used traditional forms of divination to find out what ailed you, if there wasn’t an immediately apparent physical cause. Some concentrated more on their religious calling, some more on their ability to heal — a matter of preference, acquired knowledge and aptitude.

Vodou was not Devil worship, witchcraft or about sticking pins in dolls.

In Haiti, Papa Doc deliberately made vodou sinister, using it as part of his system of fear to control people. Doll sticking was a witchcraft, practised in one Afro-American community of New Orleans. Somehow, Hollywood horror writers got hold of the relatively obscure practice, and suddenly that was all we knew about vodou. In fact, vodou was the antidote to doll sticking — if someone stuck a pin in your doll, you would go to the vodou priest to have the spiritual power to be safe from the curse and to the gri-gri man to be physically protected and healed.

Gri-gri, magic, could be good or bad. Vodou priests and healers needed to know the dark side of the supernatural to save their people from it — just as Catholic priests would need to know the type of thing their devil was likely to be capable of. If a vodou priest or a gri-gri man used his powers to do harm, he’d crossed over and become a witch, excommunicated himself from the forces of good.”

“‘I wouldn’t bother with her,’ was the unambivalent warning noise he made about Josephine, the priestess, but I was too caught up with the idea that this was a woman — how could she be all bad? I imagined a wise old lady, a refreshing change from Isidore’s male priests and their fears of female draining.

Josephine had a sign up on the main road though Dassa Zoumé, just past the Virgin’s shrine. It advertised her as a vodou priestess and traditional healer, with a medicine show-list of ailments she could cure. But in large, top-of-the-bill writing was advertised: PROTECTIONS FROM WITCHCRAFT AND CURES FOR MADNESS.

The priestess was an adept of the Atinagli cult, a rural divinity with a reputation for wildness in the ceremonies that Isidore pronounced ‘unnecessary.’ Her highly painted compound was full of young men — all bleary or overexcited, the effects of sodadi and kola nuts respectively. Shaven-headed Josephine was young, mid-twenties, dressed in a simple pagne and wearing very few ornaments; only a leather-bound gri-gri talisman on one arm. She had a plumpness that made her seem mumsy, until she started eyeing me up and down like she might fight me.

What did I want? If I wanted her photograph it cost 10 franc. She looked like she’d be handier in a brawl than me so I was very polite, said I was simply interested in talking to her about her temple. She looked bored, shrugged and led us into the temple, taking a bowl of something to drink with her and putting a kola nut in her mouth.”

“The walls were covered in red paint-dots and blue handprints. There were flags and cloth drapes, and the focal point, by the back wall on a raised stone platform, was three indistinct carvings, about four foot high, covered in oil and feathers. There was disconcerting smeary debris all around the floor.

Josephine sat on a carved stool, telling us to sit on a wooden bench opposite her. Some of the young men and a cowed-looking older man came and crouched at one side of the gloomy room.

Josephine’s face was very striking, high cheekbones and kohl-rimmed eyes. She used her eyes a lot, widening them and rolling them in a way I’d have advised her not to if she didn’t want to look like some dreadful Hollywood stereotype of a vodou priestess. But she felt it worked for her.

Although a few minutes’ acquaintance with Josephine made me feel she wasn’t too stable, I was curious about her advertised cures for madness. What forms of madness did she treat?

‘All of them — didn’t you see my sign, can’t you read? All forms.’ She answered questions like a boxer about to go into the ring, psyching herself to punch something at any minute. As she drank out of her bowl, I expected her to spit and get towelled down by the boys. But they just crouched, looking awkward.

The eye-popping and pugnacious Josephine might not have been the ideal place to seek ancient psychiatric secrets, but I persisted with what I’d decided to find out from her.

I asked if she knew the causes of madness.

‘I know all the causes. Sometimes the brain gets overheated, sometimes circumstances cause it, sometimes it’s other people. Other people by their behaviour, or by witchcraft.’

What did she think of modern methods of curing madness, of trying to cure it with a pill?

‘In your hospitals? They can’t cure the madness we have here. Some things they can do but they don’t understand the traditional Africa. Even things they learn to cure in schools, I know how to cure better than them. I could give you so many examples … But these doctors in the hospitals, they should study with someone like me.’

There was no chance of questions now; she was on a self-aggrandizing roll.

‘I can give you many, many examples. Serious physical illness, too. Once they had a child in the hospital at Parakou who came from here. They were going to operate on him. I was consulted by the family. I said, “Bring the child to me, don’t let them operate.” By the time the hospital doctors came here to argue with me, l’d cured the child. They went away looking stupid. They don’t know what things are caused by witchcraft. I know how to track down all kinds of witchcraft. I’m the strongest in this area for catching witches — ask anyone.’

She barked an order at one of the men. He came back with a large, handsomely framed colour photograph.

‘Look,’ she said. ‘That’s a photograph of the spirit with a witch!’

It was a picture of Josephine in an outfit, looking ferocious, with some poor old woman by the scruff of the neck.

Josephine, in her spirit form, had white paint on her cheeks, a leather band round her head, necklaces, bandoliers of bullets, beads and cowries, a raffia skirt, plenty more leather and beads round her ankles and wrists and she was brandishing a painted cudgel. She looked amazing. She looked as if she’d had this perfectly focused photo staged, as an advert for her trade.

I’d imagined witch catching was a more fast and frenzied moment, no time to get everybody so exactly posed for a shot. But even if it wasn’t an authentic action picture it still made me shudder.

This bullying young girl could be out there like an Abigail, accusing anyone who’d crossed her.

I asked what the witch in the photograph had done. Made a child sick. What had happened to her? The spirit had driven her away from the village.

Josephine widened her eyes and narrowed them at me. “You understand that’s not me in the photographs. It’s the spirit with a witch.” I said I understood.

‘I’m the most powerful priest and healer in this whole district — ask anyone. The men in my family always did this, including my father, but I’ve surpassed them. I’m far more powerful than all the priests in my family. My own father is scared of me now — ask anyone. Here’s my uncle, ask him if my father’s scared of me or not.’ She pointed to the older man. He just looked worried.

Then, bored with bragging, she said, ‘If you wait fifteen minutes I can go and bring out the spirit for you. You can take a photograph for fifty pounds. If you pay a hundred pounds I’ll let you make a cassette of me saying incantations. But you can’t resell them or I’ll know, even if you’re far across the world, I’ll know and you’ll be sorry you did it.’

I declined the offer. There was a very loud argument with Isidore in Fon. She was demanding 80 francs for her time anyway.

‘Give her two pounds. Let’s go.’

I did as he said, taking his cue to move fast as she came out after me, balling up the notes, throwing them on the ground and screaming.

‘Two pounds? I’m the most powerful in this whole district. Don’t think I can’t send something after you. I wouldn’t get in a car with her if I were you! What I send after her will follow her on her whole journey!’

The young men had followed her out and stood around looking confused. The old man bent down and picked up the money.”

“The last of the Amazons had died in the 1940s. There was still a well-maintained Amazon temple at Abomey where women of the royal household came to do ceremonies, learn the war dances and remember the spirits of these women warriors.

An early-twentieth-century French legionnaire who fought against the Amazons reported that they were crack shots and terrifying. If they ran out of ammunition they’d use their fists, their feet, their teeth . .. He reported that they chanted and screamed while they fought and always stank of alcohol.

There were even more hysterical reports about the Amazons, usually from the English. Talk of lesbian orgies, filed teeth and self-performed abortions to keep in fighting fettle. They also became completely confused with the Amazons of ancient Greece, chroniclers claiming the Dahomey women warriors cut off one of their breasts. They didn’t.

The first female warriors were used by King Akgba in the late seventeenth century. He had extended wars with the Yoruba, the Nago, the Mahi . .. There was a chronic shortage of manpower. He needed everyone who wasn’t pregnant to be fighting. It wasn’t such a great leap of imagination to put women into combat. Women worked in the fields, hunted, did building work — there wasn’t much physical labour they didn’t do. It was only with the arrival of the Europeans that the Dahomey kings realized it was in any way unusual to have female soldiers.

Being an Amazon was more like joining an order of nuns. They had very strict rules of behaviour and male soldiers weren’t allowed to touch them. They had male commanders and by the time of Gehanzin there were many who preferred wearing European-style military uniform to the kind of outfit Josephine wore. They trained exactly the same way as the men and hard drinking before a battle was widespread among both sexes at the time of Gbehanzin, when it was becoming obvious all was lost. He’d have lost a lot sooner without the Amazons.

The Amazons of Dahomey were one of the few female combat armies that were fact, not legend.”

“I could tell when we reached the Fon quarter. Children scooting out yelling ‘Yovo!’ As we parked up, nearby children started a hand-clapping game, singing the yovo chant: ‘Yovo, yovo, bonsoir, comment a va, ça va très bien, merci, yovo yovo, bonsoir…’ and on, indefinitely, to an ‘eenie meanie mine mo’-type tune. I’d heard it often and something about the way children sang it made it seem to rhyme. Isidore said it had been around for years — children had sung it, clapped and skipped to it when he was a child, when there might not be a yovo sighted for weeks on end.”

“I know you’re pleased with it all, but really, the King is a big liar. First, he told the people he paid for the feast. As I predicted, poor food and local beer — so he kept half the money.

Second, from the start he told the elders, then the people, and he even told the Mayor, that he had contacted you and brought you here. That you were a rich person who was going to build a maternity hospital for the people. This is what the Mayor asked me about. Don’t worry, the Mayor didn’t blame you — the King has lied like this before.”

Having a very poor-quality character, the maternity hospital wasn’t my first worry.

‘So … I’m not a queen?’

‘You are a queen, you have your certificate, your hat and your beads. You are a queen,’ Isidore said in the patronizing tone of voice I deserved.

Too many minutes later I realized what I should have asked first.

‘What happens in a year and the people notice there’s no maternity hospital?’

‘When the people start to ask, the King will spread a rumour about what a typical white you are, full of promises and letting everyone down. It’s easy to blame a white, people know what they’re like.’

And so the new queen folded away her ceremonial pane, her beads, her crown and her certificate, put them in her suitcase and knew she would probably not be going to the royal ball at Dassa Zoumé again.”

“We fixed the King of Dassa by writing to the local paper about why there would be no point printing a story about the new maternity hospital.”

“The market was full of children who didn’t know if I was a girl or a boy, big fish or fowl. There were women shouting things like,

‘Look at that, I’ve never seen one in real life!

The people in the Mono village were so unaccustomed to yovos they not only couldn’t determine my sex, they also couldn’t determine my age, by a very long chalk.

A family resting under a tree — father, mother and several children — were obviously talking about me. Isidore translated. The children were asking if I was a boy or girl. The mother said: ‘That’s a girl.’ The father considered a moment and said: ‘Yes, a girl, a very young girl, probably only about ten years old.’

The mother scoffed: ‘Don’t be ridiculous, how can she be only ten and be that tall?’

Father put her in her place. ‘Listen, they grow very tall, you’d be amazed — even at ten they can be that tall.’ As I looked back the whole family were watching me, amazed.

They were several yards away but it was still a pleasing mistake to hear about when you’re over thirty-five.”

“I was always meeting people seething with talent, pursuing creative dreams despite getting stuck in a limbo of poverty and lack of opportunity. They did their thing anyway, just for the infinite pleasure Claude’s father believed in.

There was a twenty-year-old called Philippe, living in a village outside Cotonou, who’d left school at fourteen to work as an apprentice in an electrical repair shop and now ran a community radio station from bathroom-sized premises at the back of the village hall. The day I came by, they’d been an hour late getting on the air because a chicken had jumped in the transmitter and knocked it off the roof.

Philippe ran the whole thing with his mate, MC Dassa, and anyone else who was around for roof-climbing, transmitter-rewiring assistance. The small studio was equipped with all the necessary, made from whatever worked. The headphones were two ear-size half-gourds, with a strip of bamboo arched between them. The microphone stand was wood, as was the control panel and its switches, wired up to an assortment of old speakers.”

“A lanky Barba zookeeper welcomed us.

‘Oh good,’ he said. ‘Children is what we are here for.’

He currently had a clientele that were definitely not children.

In a big enclosure were five baby chimpanzees, all called Michael.

With them were the four mysterious Frenchmen, who all looked like they had just that morning escaped from a high-security jail.

The Frenchmen were larking about with the Michaels, showing them somersaults, karate moves, dances. The animals copied them with uncanny accuracy. Training them to courier cocaine would possibly be the next step.

‘Ah, the Frenchmen are here playing with the Michaels all day,’ the guide said. ‘They never go out. Straight after breakfast, they come here. They love to see our Michaels.’

They didn’t like to see me so much. Their gambolling with the Michaels was halted, they scowled and muttered among themselves.

I tried to look as much like a top CIA girl after drug barons as I could with a Michael pulling at my hair and another one clamping itself to my back.

We all had a good go of the Michaels then the Bariba moved us on. The Frenchmen stopped muttering and went back to their animal training.”