The Beaches of Ouidah, Benin -- Paradise Lost

The coastline of Benin is largely a spread of urban junk and trash piles, heavily concentrated around the unofficial capital and moped death trap of Cotonou, an unruly mess that dwindles to reasonable levels of pollution the further distanced you are from city centers. Here in the sleepy borders of high flying city life, small fishing villages give way to a few beach resorts, and life rolls along according to the powerful sway of the Atlantic. Indefatigable kids take recess along the sandy shores, heads and clothes covered in beach from afternoons spent rolling around in the fringes of waves, sitting beside their parents who toil over handmade fishing nets, and chasing wind currents with boxy kites tailed by tattered plastic garbage bags. As if to ward you away from the dangerous riptides of the ocean, palms trees criss-cross themselves along the shore in diamond shaped patterns, coconuts dripping like clusters of ornaments from their frayed fronds. At a glance, not much really happens here; at dawn, a few fishing boats leave for the daily catch, sleepy locals doze in the shade of banana trees, moto drivers whiz back and forth along the coastal highway looking for passengers.

Our trip along the Benin coast began in Ouidah, located about 40 km west of Cotonou, in the bright blue bungalows of the shore side Jardin Brasilien Auberge de la Diaspora. After spending a month in the dry, harsh environs of Mali’s economically desperate tourist towns, our discovery of this surf-and-sand style resort, poolside bar and all, was like giving an unspoiled child their very first Christmas toy. But at our first glimpse of the ocean, having dragged our bodies from warm beds to catch the chilly sunrise, we knew that our weekend in the historical town of Ouidah, once known as Africa’s premier slave coast, would be no hula dancing, umbrella drink, boogie boarding soirée.

The morning is shrouded in dense gray fog that hides the sun until it is well on its way to the scorching monologue it will perform in the sky midday. Waves appear on the horizon like an oversight in a newly made bed, tiny wrinkles in a flat green sea that suddenly heave themselves to the sky and nosedive into violent foamy collisions with humped sand banks. As sunlight intensifies in silvery streaks on the glassy, flat surface, it uncovers small ships pulled by single square sails coasting the calm waters beyond reach of shoreline’s chaos. Today, they are pirogues, hand-trolling for red carp, sol, and barracuda, the vital life source of these small village economies. Three hundred years ago, the same view broke with dawn, but the ships bore from Brazil, the Caribbean, France to fill their ships with slaves captured by African slave traders and henchmen of Dahomian kings. The ocean, usually the love of my life and as comfortable for me to dive into as my own bed, seems unwelcoming here, as if still haunted by its past. I dive in, then charge to the surface as quickly as I had entered, gasping for breath. I'm not one for creepy kookiness, but today, when I dip my head beneath the waves, I can hear a low-pitched roar of screams. There is something strange here, something deeply sad that lingers among the dips and crests of the sea. I studied African colonialism in school and came to Ouidah feeling prepared to the relics of its past, armed with all the horrific knowledge of what had taken place in a history that still felt recent. But the ghosts of Ouidah are unpredictable and unexpected, and they fill our plans for a weekend of surf and sun with their regret, their memories, their unease.

By the time the abolition movement finally halted the slave trave that had boomed along West Africa's coast from the 17th to 19th centuries, over 1,000,000 slaves had been deported from West Africa across the Atlantic. Many were lined along the bottom of ship hulls like rows of dominoes, crammed so closely there was no room to turn over. I imagine it must have been like being locked in a bureau drawer hurtling through space with no place to escape to when bodily fluids demanded an exit. Others, perhaps the lucky ones, were held first in slave castles, forts built by Europeans along the coast of modern day Ghana and Benin, sometimes for months at a time, where disease and malnutrition helped slave dealers to "weed out" the weaker slaves.


The memory of abuse, death, exploitation, war, disease, and a massive diaspora; this is the tourist attraction of an otherwise unremarkable African fishing village. Wandering through the streets of Ouidah, we stumble into huts full of voodoo dolls, wrapped in chains and pegged through the heart. We pass public sculptures of half-naked Africans dragged in chains to anchored ships. A short walk from the Auberge de la Diaspora along the beach brings us to the Point of No Return monument, a stark white arch surrounded by frenetic, heaving sculptures. It marks the physical spot where imprisoned slaves would circle around a sacred tree three times before boarding Western ships, in order to forget everything about their past and to prepare for their new life of servitude. Taking a tour later that day of the Museum of Ouidah, stationed in an old Portuguese church, we walk through halls of photos, engravings, and narrative fabrics that retell Ouidah's stories through foriegn and African eyes. White men arrive, bringing gifts of cheap bronze and cowery shells and leave with rows of chained slaves depicted with ape-like features. Dahomian kings pillage surrounding lands with Western guns and trade war prisoners into plantation slavery in the New World. French officers in white powdered wigs smile primly as African women dressed in French corsettes whirl around them in wild dances, while half-naked women and children, chained to the royal platforms, watch from below. Young children with big, wet eyes stare at me from yellowing photos, as if to ask "how could you let this happen?" My whiteness made me guilty. This is the feeling I can't shake.

But history is always in the eye of the beholder and as I walk through the museum, I sense bitterness, blame, and censorship from every angle. Europe is the bad guy in this museum's story: it was Pope Nicholas V who authorized slavery in the name of the church in 1452; it was the Portuguese who needed strong manual laborers for their sugar cane fields; and it was the White Man who fanned the flames of tribal warfare to increase the supply of prisoners who would later satisfy the booming demand for slaves. So sure are many locals of this story that some have gone so far as to turn Ouidah into a kind of martyr, a poignant explanation of the beginning the great rape of mother Africa that continues to this day through modern economic exploitation. But it brings me some sort of sick comfort to know that in all actuality, Africa was not simply the victim. Dahomian kings who ruled the land around modern day Benin each pledged to leave his heir with more land and wealth, justifying endless, merciless wars throughout the West African region. This went so far that entire villages, which can still be seen today, were built on stilts over lakes to protect its inhabitants from the kings, whose religious edicts forbade them from entering water. The old empires of Africa, the kingdoms of Songhai, Ashanti and Mali; these all knew slavery long before the Europeans arrived. At times, nearly 1/3 of their populations were enslaved. So Africa was no peaceful, tropical paradise before the White Man came. Violence ensued then just as forcefully and brutally, in the name of territorial conquests, to protect trade routes, and to glorify empires.

But together, these images I'm seeing, this place, its energy and its quiet fishermen so proud of the history that brings them a source of extra income each year; its like I'm understanding West African colonialism and slavery all again for the first time. And then I see the world history of subjugation spread out before me like a long carpet slowly unrolling into an infinite horizon. I see the legacy of racism. I see the devastation of civilizations and the nauseating justifications of "progress" and all of its unjust consequences. I see the portal to America's civil war, to Jim Crow, to the broken ghettos of black America, to Nazi Germany and to civilian casualties in Iraq. And I feel utterly and inexplicably responsible for it all. My life is so distant from the ghosts of Ouidah. It's comfortable and easy. And here I'm standing, trying to stay composed as most Westerners feel subconciously obligated to do when tough emotions arise, and I wonder if our Beninese tour guide thinks my expressionless face is callous. Inside I feel torn apart, but I can't show it, not to this man. It would feel shallow. How could I ever understand what he, by right of heritage, must relive every single day?

After our museum visit, we enter a boutique near the Point of No Return that sells masks and 100+ year old voodoo figurines . We discuss Ouidah's history with a local artisan, Marcelle, our conversation veering to what I have learned from my studies back in America. As I recount the living replicas of Dahomian villages exhibited in Paris in the late 19th century, where African women and children were placed at their cooking pots, behind fences, in front of which elite French ladies could observe them like zoo animals, Marcelle grows quieter, tenser, his face sullen. When I finish, he takes a long look at me and, as if to confirm my earlier suspicions, he asks most directly, "and how does this make you feel? Was this a good or a bad thing?" I stare at him in shock and flap about for the right words before finally lowering my head and mumbling, "of course, it's horrible. It made me cry a lot when I was studying it in school." He looks relieved and I feel ashamed. Somehow, this Beninese man thought it was equally likely that I condoned rather than condemned African colonialism. I want to scream to him that I feel his pain, that my experience today will wash me with depression for at least a week, that I wish I could change things, and that not all white men are created equal. There is good even in the worst of us and bad in the best of us -- this knows no limitations according to the color of one's skin. But he is African, and he toils over mask carvings all day in the hot sun. And tomorrow, I will pack my things and head for a sunnier beach resort, one not so mired in pain, one that doesn't relive every single day the history I wish I could forget. I'll drink pineapple juice and rum and read a book about the Lost Boys in Sudan who fled from rebel armies, many captured to become boy soldiers, others eaten by lions. This book will also make me cry. But I will do nothing.

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