High Tide in Tucson_ Essays From Now or Never - Barbara Kingsolver [76]
The second question—where?—is hardly easier to answer. The Republic of Benin, whose name prior to 1975 was Dahomey, passes almost unnoticed on a map: a slim knife of a country between Togo and Nigeria, it is roughly as large and populous as Tennessee. But its narrow borders contain a world of different nations. The climate changes along a north-south gradient from arid savannah down to humid coastal palm plantations, and like most African countries, the modern boundaries reflect colonial decisions that have nothing to do with ethnic unity. Within Benin, and overflowing its borders on all sides, are people who speak Fon, Mina, Yoruba, and other completely unrelated languages. In the northeastern drylands, Islamic influence is strong among the pastoral Fulani. They have little in common with their Somba neighbors, who build castlelike family compounds in the northwest, or the Fon farmers of the south, or the Aiza fishing people who travel by canoe and live in villages of stick houses on stilts over the coastal lagoons.
And so it was that when I asked, in a Cotonou restaurant, for a mashed-yam staple of the north called igname pilé, the waiter grinned broadly and said, “You’ll have to come home with me, then. These people down here in the south don’t know how to cook.”
Southerners are likely to be just as contemptuous of their northern neighbors, who wear startling scars and tattoos on their faces as tribal identifiers. “I would never dream of marrying a woman with tattoos,” a Cotonou University student told me, and another young man insisted, when he learned I was going north, that the food in the markets up there is unclean. Members of different tribes, even when they move into the cities, tend to segregate themselves. When the Marxist government led by Ahmed Kerekou—a northerner—was overthrown in 1990, it was on regional grounds as much as ideological ones. Many northerners remain loyal to Kerekou.
In the past, these people had even less in the way of common interest: the Dahomey Kingdom dominated the region for centuries with its army, and amassed stunning wealth by selling the men and women of neighboring tribes into slavery.
Now these tribes, as different as stone, paper, and knife, are crowded into a single national domicile and expected to behave like family; to speak French, agree upon a president, and consider themselves “Beninois.” It’s a nice theory. The truth is far more interesting.
The 540-kilometer drive to Natitingou is a long, long day. As our bush taxi headed north from Cotonou, commerce gave way to countryside: deep fields of high grass, then forests defoliated from drought, then hillocks of rounded boulders. Termite nests poked up everywhere like gigantic sandcastles. The air hung thick with red dust. It was February, season of the harmattan—a hazy heat wave on a languid extended visit from the Sahara. No rain had fallen for four months, and none was expected until late March. Fat-trunked, flat-topped baobab trees punctuated the landscape with comic relief. The car startled a grouse from the roadside brush; the driver swerved, hit it, ran back to collect it. Later we would deliver it to his mother.
Whenever we stopped in a village, which happened often, we were mobbed by children selling bananas. I got out when I could, to walk among the thatch-roofed mud houses, and was greeted by cries of Yovo! Yovo!—“white person.” I was the first they’d seen all day, maybe all year, and for kids it’s a thrilling game. Adults simply say, “Bonjour, Yovo.” I managed to force a smile, though I felt my pale skin fairly glowing.
“Well, what would you say to an African you saw in America?” a young woman asked, when I complained about this later.
I told her I would not, under