Dantokpa squeezes vendors, thousands of shoppers, hawkers and stalls and kiosks with just about every item under the sun into twenty-thousand square metres. The fetish section is the most interesting. There’s a section with herbs, tree barks and plants used to make medicine; and a section that sells talismans and animal remains. The scene is the same in all the shops I visit or peek into: The skulls of many species in the animal kingdom, dried vultures, owls, vipers, cobras and pythons. The snakes are bound with rubber bands.
At a shop called Doctor Séïbou and Son’s pharmacy, Séïbou tries to sell me a love potion. For 30 000 francs, he’ll mix herbs that I must rub onto my hands, then whisper my date’s name three times to make him fall in love with me. There’s no problem that he can’t fix. With the right potion and animal parts, bad luck turns into good fortune, dead-end relationships make it down the aisle, struggling businesses prosper and wombs become fertile. He charges me 5 000 francs to browse.
From Cotonou, I trek for three hours in a minibus to Abomey. Red dust covers every building and surface, and the reception at my hotel. I find the proprietor half naked but for the large towel wrapped under his big stomach. His tongue sticks out of his mouth as he reads the contents of a blue file.
‘My children call me Da – that’s what you’ll call me, my daughter.’ The reception is made of a random collection of items. There are yellow ceramic lemons, a polished silver flask next to a crunched up, used bottle of mineral water, a dusty vase and a dessert baking tray. A dislodged door leans against the wall on one side of the room. The space across the room has a hammock hanging on a steel frame and a torn brown leather chair, three drums and life-sized puppets in floppy hats. He charges me what I can afford, and wiggles his bum around the chair to get up and lead me to my room. It’s as dim as the reception.
On my way to Houndjroto market to look for tomatoes, cucumber, avocado and boiled eggs – my daily diet – I walk into a funeral procession of mostly women humming and twisting their bodies as they walk in front of a coffin. Four of them hold framed photos of an old man.
Abomey is dotted with small huts where I find dry milky liquid and blood, feathers and egg shells left as offerings to the effigies of voodoo gods; another reminder of the beauty of places that can be modern without losing their roots, in this case the prominence of voodoo as the national religion and way of life.
We turn the reception at Da’s hotel into a dance studio for my class. Da becomes the drummer while the teacher he finds for me shows me how to wind my body in a voodoo dance. For our next routine, I march on the spot three times with a knobkerrie in my right hand. I move forward three paces and back, and repeat.
The dance of the Mino, ‘my mother’ in Fon, is the only connection I can have with the female army whose ruthlessness earned them a reputation as the most powerful army in the Kingdom of Dahomey. When Benin was the Kingdom of Dahomey, it was ruled by a succession of twelve kings who live up to their father’s principle that ‘the kingdom shall always be made greater’. Wars were waged and enemies conquered and sold as slaves. Every conquest was followed by sacrificing forty captives whose blood would be mixed with palm oil and alcohol for libations at the palace.
Of all the kings, Gezo is the most fearsome. His power comes from surrounding himself with the army of women known to amputate their breasts if they stood in the way of their speed and aim on the battlefield. Their war-cry, my guide says, was ‘let the men raise the kids’.
The royal palace is all that remains of this world. Only the wings that belonged to Gezo and his son Glele are still there. Sometimes, when a sign says ‘no cameras’, it means none are allowed unless you want to talk about a fee. At the royal palace, there are no exceptions to the rule; not even for a fee. I can only take pictures of the compound.
Canons gifted by a European slave-trade partner are mounted in front of one of the buildings. The walls that fence the compound and the outsides of the palace have sculpted figurines of lions painted in gold, a green chameleon holding a machete, a sculpted bronze dog and other important symbols. There’s no knobkerrie in my hand when I get to Gezo’s throne. Still, I march on the spot and walk back and forth in three paces until I reach it. The throne sits on the skulls of four of his greatest enemies – delivered to the king by the Mino. Today being Monday, and traditionally still a market day, women are not allowed at the royal tombs.
From Abomey, I travel just over one hundred and nineteen kilometres to Ouidah on a road lined with people taking cover from the sun under stalls with brittle palm-leaf roofs to sell green pineapples and mangoes arranged neatly in metal dishes, with bamboo baskets next to them on the ground. Some stalls and tables have bottles with petrol. I love Benin because voodoo is as public as the minarets of a mosque or church clock towers. And just like people of other religions have mass celebrations, so too do Mahu’s children. The biggest of these gatherings is the Voodoo Festival, held in Ouidah in January, when the devout parade around town in ceremonial dresses, offering animal sacrifices to Mahu, who is a feminine spirit. God is a woman in Voodoo.
Ouidah is subdued in November and its main attraction is the Temple of Pythons, set across the road from the grey Basilica of Ouidah.
My plan is precise: Tick through the list of things to do and head to Lomé.
I leave my bags in the hut at the temple’s entrance, my skin already recoiling just looking at the red-painted letters that read Temple des Pythons, with a snake under the words. My guide plays on my fear of snakes, saying they let the pythons roam around town. My eyes flit around the yard.
A statue of a woman with a bare chest stands in the compound. There are huts, some with bare walls and red ceramic roofs, while others have paintings of people with tribal marks on their faces. In one of the paintings, a man in a white boubou stands in a blue frame. His round skull cap matches the indigo toga with yellow flowers wrapped over his boubou.
The pillars at the entrance of the building have paintings of pythons. In another hut, four snakes are carved into the door, two of them almost touching their tongues as they look at each other.
‘Are you ready?’ my guide asks, standing outside one of the huts. I make travelling decisions around the probability of seeing snakes. Rumours of snake sightings stop me from going to mythical places I want to visit, like Lake Fundudzi in Venda.
I have been mulling over visiting Ouidah, petrified by the thought of coming face to face with pythons, for more than a year. Standing outside the hut, sweat pours down my face while the guide cajoles me to be brave. I follow him inside. Long and short pythons with bodies that are as thick as wrists padded with fat coil around each other and stretch out side by side next to the wall. Others lie on the steps. A particularly long one is wrapped around the neck of a cement bust of a man. He asks me to pick the one I want to put on my shoulders. Forget getting over an emotion I find irrational, I’m not putting a reptile known to swallow animals twice my size on my shoulders unless I’ve had gallons of vodka first – to hell with getting over my biggest fear.
A short zémidjan ride later, I’m outside a black and white building with the words Kpasse’s Sacred Forest written in red. I pick my guide Remi based on his perfect English and his authorship of a slim, black and white book about the forest. The path leading up to the throne has a statue of a panther on one side and a figure with the backside of a frog and the front legs and face of a baboon on the other. There are statues of some of the gods who act as intermediaries between Mahu and her people. The horned human figure sitting on a stool is Legba, the gatekeeper of towns. The huge erect penis between his legs symbolises fertility. Shango, the god of rains, thunder and justice, has metal stick legs and a round body, and a red rod in one hand.
And so goes my afternoon, surrounded by trees and deities that fight chicken pox; a king’s messenger with two faces, one at the back of his head; and a new bare-chested female Voodoo initiate in a white wrap. The forest stretches out over hectares of land, but to go beyond the pink buil
ding, you have to be initiated. Aidohwedo, the horned god of continuity, bites his tail with a mouth of sharp teeth next to the entrance. King Kpasse is the founder of Ouidah. Legend has it that instead of dying, the king turned into an Iroko tree. The king’s court is the ruins of a house with walls that are covered in algae. King Kpasse is covered with rough bark and a string of dry palm leaves around the trunk. Next to him is a mouldy substance with the dry remains of a chalky offering.
‘If you make a wish it will come true,’ Remi says. I wrap my arms around him and wish for Africa.
We move on to metal figurines of more gods. One is a flattened-out zinc basin that looks like a dress. It’s Ogou, the god of iron. The man with two heads sticking out of his regular one is the god of children born with deformities, Tohossou. There’s also Tchacatou, a Voodoo doll, with nails on his body. From here, I go to the beach front to look for a hotel, past a swamp that has derelict grey houses on dry land, and thin palm trees behind them. The street has life-sized statues of more Voodoo gods.
The next morning on my way out of town, I walk on the soft sand that looks golden in the sun, amid whitewashed huts with thatched roofs, palm trees around them and along the beach, to a cement arrow engraved with the words ‘Visit the Door of No Return’. I’m the only person at the peach-coloured monument with white pillars. The part at the top has four rows of slaves with chains on their backs. Some pillars are detailed with symbols: A mermaid, Aidohwedo, the god of continuity and wealth, a vase, a palm tree, what looks like a crab and a dog and a man dancing in a ceremonial skirt with a skull and crossbones etched on his bare chest. Cowrie shells are cemented on the others. Without emotional historians to recount the horrors of the Transatlantic slave trade, I can reflect on one of the greatest crimes against Africans’ humanity without feeling like a sham. I struggle to mourn slavery because, to paraphrase Lucky Dube in ‘Victims’, we’re still licking wounds from brutality and humiliation. Africans are still in ball and chains; enslaved by racism, sexism, poverty, violence and bad politics. I will not cry about the past, no matter how gruesome, when the present is just as ghastly. I will not put on a performance of sorrow and despair.
Later that evening in downtown Lomé, I club hop until I end up at a packed nightclub with a playlist that features the standard favourites of P-Square, D’Banj, Flavour N’abania and other Nigerian hiplife stars setting fire to dance floors across the region. I spend a day in Togo’s easygoing capital; going to the main market and fetish market, the museum and the beach. As far as destinations go, Lomé is like Ouagadougou. It’s great but it doesn’t excite me.
When I return to Ghana, I take the long way from Accra to Kumasi, down the coast through Busua and Dixcove, before getting a bus to visit Kristle, my friend from my Abidjan days. I mark the end of my stay in the region of my obsession and the city that inspires me to travel Africa with a visit to Koforidua on a Wednesday, so that when the town rises the next morning, I too join the people who meet to trade beads in a weekly market that’s been around since 1928.
In West Africa, beads are as ornamental as they are ceremonial; given as heirlooms, presents to mark the coming of age and for special and regular occasions. The bead market brings together merchants from around Ghana and other parts of West Africa. The sheer variety of wares at the market in Koforidua is astounding; some look like spikes, others like discs and shells. There are oval and rectangular beads and wooden beads carved like traditional masks. The variety of textures, shapes and colours is endless; some are from Ghana, others from Mauritania, Mali and Nigeria. Maasai beads from East Africa have also found their way here. At one stall, when I ask about how much large brass bangles cost, the seller says I could never afford them. They date back to the days of the Songhai and Ghana empires, and have been in his family for just as long; passed down from generation to generation. He’s here to exhibit them. Ultimately, this is what I love about West Africa: The region upholds its traditions, and the old and sacred don’t die so the contemporary can live.
I leave Accra for Johannesburg on 20 November 2009. In Afrika My Music, Es’kia Mphahlele writes that Ghana and Nigeria gave him Africa. I used to wonder what he meant but now I understand. Being here has given me a relationship with my blackness, the continent and myself that I still don’t have in South Africa. In West Africa, who I am as a black African is not questioned. It doesn’t shrink to fit into whiteness and Western ideals, and it never has to fight to be legitimate. My skin colour and heritage don’t make me lesser until I prove myself worthy.
I don’t know when I will come back, only that it will not be soon. To keep the most important year and five months of my life alive, I’ll wear ankara and keep a collection of pagne. When an occasion calls for my best dress, I will swoop into a room in a grand boubou with yards of cloth layered over my head. To my traditional plate of ting, samp and ledombolo, I will add attieke and jollof rice, and when the hibiscus flowers in a supersize blue plastic bag I buy at Makola market run out and I can no longer make bissap juice, I will turn fresh ginger, mint sprigs, a touch of lemon juice, sugar and a hint of vanilla essence into nyamaku. I’ll pepper conversations with ‘Inshallah’ and express bewilderment by saying ‘wallahi’. I’ll say ‘Alhamdulillah’ – all praise be to God – instead of ‘bless you’ when someone sneezes. This way, my experiences in the region of my childhood obsession and adulthood affirmation will never fade with time.
XII
VAGABOND
May 2010
I TRAVEL BECAUSE IT’S ONLY when I’m on the road that I get to recreate myself in every moment of my existence. Take the morning of 1 May 2010. I’m at the mall with my mom, aunt and sister when I decide that there has got be a better way to spend R1 200 than on a winter coat. Two days later, I’m in a Greyhound to Maputo for R220. I arrive just after midnight and go on a joyride in a cab looking for a place to stay. Fatima’s is fully booked. The Base has a bed in a dormitory I share with young European travellers who all walk in from a night out giggling at their clumsy dance moves and futile attempts at remembering the Marrabenta hits they’re now hooked on.
I hit the dirty streets of central Maputo in the morning, walking aimlessly until I find a street with shops that sell African-print cloth and tailors that sit on the pavement across the shop sewing curtains. I enjoy Maputo for its colonial buildings still dominating a city that has cranes that hang permanently in the sky. The Saturday morning crowd of shoppers and hawkers hustle for space with battered chapas and tuk tuks. Boys walk the city streets selling coconuts. Like West Africa’s streets, Maputo’s turn into a full shopping spree that happens at red traffic lights, parrots included. I used to think travelling is expensive. The time I spend in Namibia, Zimbabwe and Malawi in the beginning of 2010 proves me wrong. I’ve blown more money on clothes I never wear and wild parties that only end with massive hangovers. I could afford to travel all along. I just didn’t prioritise it.
The senselessness of never travelling before backpacking in West Africa deepens at the pungent fish market. Walking from stall to stall looking for lunch, I’m awed by the variety of options: Crabs, prawns, squid, tuna, yellow fish, lobsters with claws that are still moving. It’s all kept fresh in buckets filled with water and blocks of ice. And, unlike back home, where eating well is not a human right, the fish here is dirt cheap. It’s cooked and served a few metres from where it’s caught. I’m in Maputo with one mission – pick a random place on the map as long as it’s coastal and off the beaten track. My pencil lands on Quelimane, one thousand five hundred and sixty-five kilometres away.
Like other trips out of Maputo, mine starts at Junta bus station, which connects the city to other provinces in Mozambique. Touts run over, shouting destinations around the country: Xai Xai, Tete, Napumla, Vilankulo, Beira and many other places that Junta connects Maputo to. I arrive at 4.30am and find the bus empty. I move from one hard, stained seat to the next until I find a two-seater with even cushioning. The bus becomes chaotic as it fills up: A man plays Marra
benta from a boom box, a mom and her toddler scream at the top of their voices. The volume is louder than a shebeen on New Years’ Eve. It’s 5am; this is going to be a long trip.
The man who sits next to me proves my fear founded when he opens his mouth. Paulo’s teeth are covered in thick, yellowish goo. He smells like morning breath and spits when he talks. It lands on my face. I hang my head outside the window. This makes him think I’m uncomfortable, so he gets up to find the pagne he rolls into a pillow for me. His armpits smell like a pit toilet. ‘Much better,’ he says. His spit lands in my eye. He doesn’t stop talking and, at times, he wakes me up so I don’t miss seeing the places and people we drive past. I’m happy to see him leave the bus in Xai Xai.
I arrive in Quilemane expecting a town with air that smells like the sea and avenues lined with palm tress. I find dusty streets with potholes. The street the bus station is on smells like used cooking oil and fried eggs. It’s already dark, and the dust that hangs in the air shines through the street lights. I check into a pensao run by two old, grumpy Portuguese men who refuse to give a discount.
Mornings in Quilemane are dreamy. The air is cool, and the vibe chilled. I treat myself to a cappuccino in one of the restaurants and watch life on the streets go by, with boys following people around to beg for money. The traffic on this side for now is the occasional Land Cruiser. In the afternoon, I jump on a bicycle to the market, where I walk between old women selling tomatoes and okra on plastic plates. I’m looking for a chapa to take me to Zalala beach. I get into a roofless chapa, take a seat on a bench welded to the floor at the back, and make room for yet more people and their shopping until there is no space to move my feet when I get cramps.
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