This post is about the Rwandan genocide.  It is grim reading in parts and parental discretion is advised.  If you don’t want these disturbing images in your head you might want to skip this one.

The church at the small town of Nyamata, 30 kilometres south of Kigali, has pews covered in piles of the blood-stained clothes of those who were massacred here. It has a glass cabinet in the basement that a school might use to showcase their trophies.  Here it is filled with 150 human skulls, almost all with fractures or holes where the bone has been crushed.  Stacked above the skulls are femurs and hip bones.  In a decorated coffin underneath the skulls lies the body of a Rwandan women who was raped by 29 men before being impaled on a stake from her groin to her head with another running through her pregnant stomach.  She was put on display outside the church while Hutu militia systematically killed 10,000 people here.  This is not a story of long-distant medieval barbarity.  This happened in the first half of 1994 in what could almost be described as three months of collective madness if it had not been so well planned.  Calling it madness lets the perpetrators off too lightly.

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The Rwandan genocide is impossible to totally comprehend.  There are reasons but no excuses for the death of 800,000 Tutsi and moderate Hutus.  I can’t pretend to be able to totally unpick the reasons one group of Rwandans decided it was a good idea to wipe out another group, but here is some background to what happened.

While there had been clans in Rwanda in pre-colonial times, it was the Belgians who ramped up the divisions between these groups and decided that there would be three ethnic groups in Rwanda, the Tutsis who are generally taller, fair-skinned and cattle ranchers, the Hutus who are generally shorter, darker and farmers, and the Twa who are pygmies and the original inhabitants of the land.  Ethnicity was decided by such colonial methods as measuring the width of noses and calling anyone a Tutsi if they owned more than 10 cows.  Ethnicity is now given as 84% Hutu, 15% Tutsi and 1% Twa.

With this division in place the Belgians then decided to favour Tutsis with greater education and the majority of the powerful positions in society as they felt they were the superior race.  This obviously led to resentment from the Hutus.  When the Tutsis began calls for independence, as was becoming common across Africa in the first half of the 20th century, Belgium switched allegiances to the Hutu majority.  There was a struggle between these two groups as to what kind of independence should be implemented.  The Tutsis wanted a fast transition to keep the existing power structure in place which favoured them.  The Hutu majority wanted a switch to democratic elections which would obviously favour them with their much larger population.

This struggle for power seems to lie at the heart of the conflict.  From the 1950s on there were massacres on both sides.  When the Hutu government came to power in the late 50s many Tutsis left the country in fear.  The current president, Paul Kagame, grew up in a refugee camp in Uganda.  A Tutsi rebel movement called the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) developed from these exiles and threatened to invade the country in the early 90s.  In the lead-up to the genocide a peace deal was brokered between Hutus and Tutsis which would lead to Tutsis being integrated with the Hutu dominated army and a power sharing agreement. Flying back from talks to settle this agreement, the plane carrying the Hutu president as well as the president of Burundi (the small country to the south of Rwanda with a similar ethnic make-up and divisions) was shot down.  For a long time it was not clear whether this was done by Tutsi rebels or Hutu extremists unhappy with the peace deal. The week  we arrived the latest investigation into the downing of the plane, conducted by French judges (as French crewmen were also killed in the crash), concluded that the missile was fired from a base held by loyalist forces from the Hutu president’s Rwandan Armed Forces.  This was the incident that triggered the genocide.

It is clear that the genocide had been planned by the Hutu extremist leaders for some time.  They had trained a militia called the Interhamwe with the express intention of killing as many Tutsis as possible. Propaganda had been running for some time in newspapers and radio de-humanising the Tutsis by calling them cockroaches and snakes and by stoking the fear that the invading Tutsi rebels would massacre Hutus, so the Hutus should get in first and try to wipe out the Tutsis. For example, the ‘Hutu Ten Commandments‘ issued by one of the leaders provided that Hutus who married, befriended, employed or did business with Tutsis would be branded a traitor; and that the Hutus must ‘stop having mercy on the Tutsis’.  Land pressure was also a factor in one of the most densely populated countries in Africa.  Killing Tutsis meant that their land could be stolen as well.

Within hours of the plane being shot down road blocks were being set up across the country and the killing began.  Lists of names of Tutsis had been compiled and the Interhamwe went from house to house armed with machetes and clubs where they massacred men, women and children with the aim of wiping Tutsis off the face of the earth. Moderate Hutus, including the female Prime Minister Agathe Uwilingiyimana, were also killed where they might have stood in the way of the killings.

The genocide continued for three hellish months during which the country completely broke down.  The UN had a bare-bones peacekeeping force in place led by the Canadian Lt-Gen Romeo Dallaire (whose book Shake Hands with the Devil is well worth a read on this subject).  They did not have enough resources to prevent the killing and since the “black hawk down” incident in Somalia the US and UN were much more cautious about intervening in Africa.  Romeo Dallaire pleaded for extra troops and thinks that  with 5000 extra he could have saved many people, but none of the countries in the international community capable of providing the needed support did so.  Rwanda was abandoned to its fate.

Women were raped by HIV+ men and kept as sex slaves.  Children were murdered in front of their parents to wipe out the future generation of Tutsis.  They were hacked to death with machetes or clubbed to death, shot or dropped into septic tanks where they were crushed with rocks or simply suffocated under the mass of bodies.  People sheltered in churches hoping for safety but were simply murdered here instead.  Some clergy collaborated in the killing with one priest ordering that his church be bulldozed with Tutsis still sheltering inside.  Bodies were dumped in the rivers and were swept downstream to Uganda in massive numbers giving the crocodiles a feast.  Two different witnesses talk about seeing babies trying to drink milk from their dead mothers.  Romeo Dallaire talks about being surrounded by dead bodies in a village and seeing a child’s body move.  He picked it up hoping the child was alive but the movement was because the body was riddled with maggots.  His impulse was to throw the child from him but he somehow regained his composure and placed the child back on the ground.  This is a fraction of the horror the people of Rwanda were subjected to.  It’s estimated that 800,000 people were killed in the most savage manner possible by their neighbours.

The killing only ended when the Tutsi RPF rebels invaded the country, driving the Hutu militia into the Congo.  It’s estimated that two million people fled the country and in one of the great ironies the UN set up refugee camps for the displaced killers and this became the face of the conflict that many in the international community focussed on.  The aid supplied in these camps was often sold by the Hutu rebels and stoked the conflict longer than necessary.  With the Tutsis in control of Rwanda they systematically hunted down many Hutu rebels in the Congo over the ensuing years.

We visited the genocide memorial in Kigali where 250,000 are buried in mass graves under anonymous concrete slabs.  Inside the memorial the leadup to the genocide is explained but it never gets to the root of how one set of Rwandans could be so brutal to another group.  Maybe that is impossible to answer. The genocide is lying just below the surface here.  It’s miraculous that the country is functioning as well as it does.  In the newspaper the fortnight we were there there was a report of a woman committing suicide after ongoing depression since the genocide.  The manager of the hairdressers that Sarah went to had his entire family murdered and is now living with his Uncle whose family was also murdered.  In theory they could both meet in the street the person who murdered their families.  They seemed to have moved on.  If you didn’t you would probably go insane.

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It was impossible for the new government to jail everyone who committed crimes during this period without crippling the country.  Leaders of the genocide are tried before the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, established by the UN Security Council in November 1994 with judges from a range of African and European countries, in Arusha, Tanzania (we hope to see it in action when we’re there).

Other perpetrators are tried before community courts (Gacaca) in the villages based on traditional justice systems. These require perpetrators to front the community, name all those who participated with them, identify where bodies were put, confront the victims’ families and serve any sentence imposed (from community service to life imprisonment).  Whether this process has been enough to heal all the wounds in the long run, only time will tell.  It’s hard to imagine that people can simply forgive and forget the atrocities but it says a lot about the character of the Rwandan people that they have rebuilt their country as well as they apparently have, in under two decades since this terrible time.

More photos from the Genocide memorials can be found in the Kigali and Nyamata sets

Lake Kivu is a common spot for people to unwind after the gorilla trek and for good reason.  The green, hilly lake foreshore is so relaxed and pretty that doing anything strenuous seems pointless.  We stayed in a presbyterian guesthouse which was ridiculously cheap with an even cheaper vegetarian dinner.  We took the money we saved from this and splurged (relatively) on lunch at the expensive lakeside hotel which had umbrellas and chairs setup on the grass.  It was fantastically serene and peaceful.

Lake Kivu is among the twenty most voluminous lakes in the world but this impressive claim is difficult to judge with the naked eye, lake depth being intangible to the shoreside observer.  In the hazy distance towards the middle of the lake is a test methane gas extraction plant which they are hoping will power a large part of the town of Gisenyi in the future.  At the moment Gisenyi is mainly wood powered which becomes suffocating during chill, windless nights when the smoke settles.

We went for a walk along the lake on our first afternoon there and ended up at the Congolese border which we didn’t realise was so close.  It’s not hard to get to the edge of Rwanda, it’s so small.  The lake foreshore is full of colourful tropical flowers and equally colourful small birds probing them.  It is so far from the mental image of Rwandan genocide as to make it seem improbable, until you start visiting the genocide memorials near Kigali.

Rwanda immediately felt more prosperous than West Africa.  Whether this is from money pouring in from international donors, good planning or good luck is hard to tell, but it feels much more modern.  For instance, in West Africa you are very unlikely to see a peleton of lyra-clad African cyclists training in the hills.  That said, along the very same roads you will see people gathered with jerry cans filling up with water trickling down the side of the cliff face.  Rwanda is a largely rural country and luckily has fertile land to plough but you don’t have to travel far off the well-built main roads to see small, poor villages and roads impassable without a 4WD.  Push bikes are more common here, piled high with goods to transport or to act as cheap taxis.

When we arrived in Kinigi, the town used as a base for the gorilla treks, we went for a walk and immediately attracted a crowd of kids who decided to walk with us.  One guy looked like Arnold from Different Strokes with a No. 1 haircut.  His deep voice boomed out his small frame as he asked quite perceptive questions about our homeland.  His English was great for his age.  Rwanda has made English one of the official languages and there is a big push to learn it, illustrated by the eagerness of the kids to have a chat.  The countryside we were walking through, along an excellent Chinese-built tarmac road, could have been in regional Victoria if not for the huge volcanic mountains on the horizon.  Most of the land is devoted to farming.  The fields even stretch to the top of the steep hills in a parody of the flat English countryside it most resembles.  Lying on the grass in the sun with insects buzzing around you could mistake it for a warm English spring day.

Word must have leaked that there were English speakers wandering along the road because we were exuberantly greeted on the way back to the hotel by a young guy who claimed to be the best English speaker in the village.  We got the same questions again: What is your name? Where are you going? Where are you from? Are you married? Do you have children? Talk soon drifted into how the kids needed an English dictionary to better perfect their speaking and could we spare any money for this.  It wasn’t clear whether this was a scam or not but by the fifth time we were asked it seemed clear.  Still, they were pleasant about it and asked interesting questions so it was hard to get annoyed about it.  In the end it just got frustrating to not be able to go for a walk without attracting a crowd of people asking the same questions over and over again.

The hotel organised a group of dancers, drummers and singers, just local kids by the look of it but dressed in the traditional dance outfit, a flowing straw headdress that looks like a lions mane and bells jangling on their ankles.  The dancers leapt around with abandon but one little kid kept doing a freaky laugh with eyes opened wide.  They dragged me into a dance, which is an impressive achievement in itself, and seemed to genuinely enjoy what they were doing.  Either that or they are very good actors.

I was hit with a slight fever after the gorilla trek so took it easy for a day while Sarah fetched food for me, bless her.  Sarah managed to pack in a full day without me, going to see the golden monkeys in the morning and a pygmy village in the afternoon.  The golden monkeys are not some kind of statue made from precious metal, they are a colourful breed of monkey who, judging by the footage, do very little other than sit in a bamboo grove and eat shoots.  The leader is judged on weight and in this case is a fat bastard who proves that the tensile strength of bamboo is very high.

The pygmy village is inhabited by the minority Twa, although in Rwanda today people are very keen not to mention ethnic divisions and refer to themselves as Rwandan if asked with they are Hutu or Tutsi.  Despite everyone being Rwandan the Twa, who make up about 1% of the population, get a rough deal.  Their land was taken for the national park or large farms and they get paid a pittance to work on either of them.  They live in dirt floor shacks and only recently got new corrugated iron roofs. In fact half the country seems to have a gleaming new roof twinkling in the sunshine.  Whether this is to replace houses burned down during the genocide, I don’t know.  The Twa are just thankful not to have to dodge leaks when it rains and say that rain on their new iron roof sounds like music.

Although only 40 kilometres away from Jerusalem, Bethlehem is in another world.  Behind the Israeli built wall it is in Palestinian Territories.  Crossing over it feels like you’re back in Jordan.  Rubbish is strewn in empty lots and the difference in wealth between here and Israel is palpable.  Israel has divided the West Bank, of which this is part, into several separate territories that Palestinians have to go through numerous check points to visit.  It feels like a divide and conquer tactic that along with the massive wall being built will surely just further drive a wedge between these communities.  It’s such an odd thing to do as well because Jerusalem is so mixed already that this artificial divide feels even more out of place.

We took a half day tour to Bethlehem partly to see the Palestinian Territories, although this is the least troubled area, and partly just on the draw of Bethlehem, especially with it being so close to Christmas. We saw the cave where lived the shepherds who follow the star to the stable Jesus was born.  It’s hard to vouch for accuracy but it was a perfectly comfortable looking cave with skylight and sleeping area.

The Church of the Nativity is where Jesus is supposed to have been born but this is really a guess.  Regardless, people line up here as well to touch the original rock from the cave Jesus was born in.  There is a fake manger which gets a fair bit of touching attention as well.  The Church has been the beneficiary of a wooden roof donated by the British King Edward IV and byzantine era mosaics on the floor which are revealed through trap doors in the floor that was laid over the top.  A couple of Popes have held Christmas mass in the courtyard outside and in honour of their visit a new floor was laid in one of the newer chapels (although the old floor, traces of which remain, looks better).

On, then, to the Church of the Milk Grotto which is a site for all the lactating mothers out there. It’s a nice, light-filled underground church with milky white chalky walls.  Tasting the wall is supposed to boost your fertility.  Sarah stuck a finger in as directed as sucked down the chalky residue so we’ll see how that goes (hopefully being a believer isn’t some kind of pre-requisite.

Heading back into Israel our tour bus was mounted by armed Israeli soldiers.  Our Arab driver claims that they slighted him but ignoring him and telling him to mind his own business when he told them that we were Americans.  The exchange was a microcosm of the problems the area faces with power unevenly distributed and prejudice rife.

Bethlehem photos are here

Got a bit excited with the gorillas and forgot this post before we arrived in Rwanda:

When doing research for these travels I came across a blog describing Cotonou as the worst city they had ever visited.  We can think of many worse places (Accra for a start, and Sarah doesn’t have good things to say about Guatamala City).  Perhaps our standards had been successfully lowered.  I’m sure coming to Cotonou directly after London would have provoked a similar culture shock bad impression.  As it was we took it easy, had a couple of good meals of Chinese and Moroccan, no mean feat in West Africa, and generally found it an easy going place.  True, you can list the attractions of the city on one hand and we didn’t even bother looking at the beach but it came at the right time to relax a little before our overnight flight to Kigali.

One of the attractions was the Foundation Zinzou gallery, a surprisingly modern space which was showing a series of photos of traditional Beninese hunters from the north of the country.  There were about thirty photos taken by a Belgian photographer, the hunter crouched down in front of the jungle with his antique gun and talismans.  The photos had the hunters in colour with their amazing traditional fabrics and the jungle background in black and white which really made them leap out.  Our guide knew the name and age of each of the hunters, some of whom he claimed were over 90.  They didn’t look anywhere near this age which our guide put down to all the healthy plants they were eating but I point down to the slim chances they actually know what year they were born in.

We took a bush taxi 45 minutes up the road to the smaller capital city of Porto Novo, lured by the description in Lonely Planet of leafy streets and colonial architecture.  I guess in Africa colonial architecture can be from the 1950s and not all that special.  Porto Novo didn’t have anything remarkable about it in the slightest but we at least discovered an Internet cafe that was functioning after the recent nationwide net shutdown.  That was really the highlight of the journey.

We stayed at Le Chant D’Ouiseu in Cotonou, accommodation attached to a nunnery in a big four-storey block with high walls around the inner courtyard to keep the riff-raff out.  Religious hotels are spartan but clean and well run and luckily do not require a religious test before giving you a room.  It was pleasant to wake up on Sunday morning with the sound of church singing drifting up from beneath us.

The quiet time in Cotonou was to prepare ourselves for the horrors of an overnight flight in Africa. Sarah had been bricking it about this flight practically since we planned the trip, and not without reason.  Africa doesn’t have the best air safety record and looking at the state of everything else in the country doesn’t inspire confidence.  On the road to the airport there was a van with “Air maintenance” for one of the local airlines stencilled on the side.  It had a flat tyre two days in a row.

Cotonou airport was even less confidence inspiring.  It is one of the smaller airports I have been in and the technology dated from the 70s.  There were no flight information boards, just a guard who told us to line up and wait before we could even get into the terminal.  We waited for about an hour then were waved through to the security check which was a cursory manual check of our bags.  I suspect that the x-ray scanner was broken.

Our flight path was Cotonou to Nairobi via Ouagadougou then a change of planes before flying Nairobi to Kigali via Burundi.  If this sounds like a tiring overnight flight you are right on the money.  It’s a very African way to organise a flight schedule, picking up people in round trips to fill the plane up.  I guess we should have been grateful that there was a flight with Kenya Airways at all but it didn’t feel like a blessing at the time.  Thankfully the service was good, the planes are modern and the flights went smoothly.  It was quite cool coming into Ouagadougou and seeing the burning off fires across the landscape.  We made it through the rest of the travels in our zombified state with no complaints and found ourselves in the hilly and pleasantly temperate capital of Rwanda, Kigali.

We passed from farmland into the jungle and walked up a steep hill.  In no time we found the gorilla group.  This is not down to luck.  There are trackers hired to keep an eye on the location of the gorillas who sleep in a different place each night.  These trackers hike into the jungle at 5am, follow the gorillas all day, and only leave at 6pm when they’ve seen where the gorillas are bedding down for the night.  It sounds like a gruelling day.  That said we were lucky to be assigned such a close group.  Other people we talked to had a six hour day walking up an almost vertical incline.  It’s just luck of the draw which group you are assigned to.

We came upon a female gorilla sitting on the path, just like that.  Soon another female joined her and they had a play fight about two metres in front of us.  During the briefing they say you should keep seven metres from the gorillas but that goes out the window when the gorillas start moving around.  We were just hustled out of the way by Francois when appropriate, and he made friendly gorilla sounds the whole time (meaning ‘I’m here, it’s ok’).  The No. 1 silverback came along to check us out soon after the females.  His name is Charles and he is 24 years old.  He is a big bastard and very intimidating.  It was rare to see them on a path like this, out in the open.  Usually they are sitting amongst the shrubbery eating their vegan diet.  Charles was accompanied by  a couple of his wives (he has four in total) and some of his children.  Natalia, a Ukrainian girl in our group, was crouching on the path in front of Charles for a photo, encouraged to do so by the guides. As the gorillas came towards us along the path, we all backed away instinctively, but Francois and Patrick told Natalia to stay there, ‘no problem’. She was facing away from the gorillas with only our anxious faces to tell her what was going on. The guides continued to make gorilla-calming sounds, the photo was snapped, and then we all backed off down the slope. We were perched in steep jungle when Charles started beating his chest and staring us down like a boxer about to start a fight.  This was a very different experience from the zoo.  We were about two metres from a wild silverback in territorial mode.  If he charges you, running is a bad idea – you are supposed to hold your ground, crouch down, and not look at him.  This is probably easier said than done.  Luckily for us he didn’t charge and having established his dominance he wandered off down the slope.  In his wake one of his wives and kids thumped the ground in imitation.

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Meanwhile one of the trackers spotted the No. 2 silverback.  This poor bastard is so insignificant in the scheme of things that I don’t even know his name.  He is sixteen and the understudy to Charles. Eventually he will break off from this group and start his own, but in the meantime he has to grab some ‘jiggy-jiggy’, as Francois referred to it, with the females in his group whenever he gets a chance.  This is a highly risky business.  If the No. 1 silverback finds out about it they will have a fight, and the No. 1 silverback is much bigger.  There was visible evidence of No. 2 silverback’s dalliances.  He had a scar on his neck as the result of a fight and looked down in the dumps.  He picked at a few leaves, hugged himself with his big arms, picked his scab and ate it, yawned widely with a big black tongue and big black teeth.

We learned that a new wife had joined this group recently but had not gotten off to a good start.  She tried to grab another female’s baby and in the resulting tug-of-war the lower half of the baby’s leg got ripped off (if I’m interpreting the guides sign language correctly – perhaps it was just really badly dislocated.) The baby is still limping.  Luckily for the gorillas they have a vet on standby who comes along and treats their maladies, just one of the benefits of having rich tourists come along for an hour a day to stare at you.

For our next hour we followed either the No. 1 or No. 2 silverback as they wandered through the undergrowth, getting incredibly close to them.  The babies headed way off down the hill pulling down trees.  The silverback made a mating call at one point, a low grunting which made his flanks shiver. None of his wives were in the mood and who can blame them with all these people standing around looking at them?  I can replicate the gorilla grunt quite well but I didn’t try it up there, not wanting to antagonise a 220kg animal who was already giving me the evil eye as if I was personally wrecking his prospects for romance that morning.

The gorillas are habituated to humans which means that they don’t run when they hear us coming. They stare back at us with curious eyes and I guess for an hour a day they get to stare at another species themselves.  For us humans it’s an amazing experience to be that close to a wild animal who could literally tear you limb from limb and yet most of the time is quiet and contemplative, chewing on a leaf or having a play fight.  That they are brushing past you to get where they are going is an incredible feeling and the experience is sure to stay with us for a long time yet.

The gorilla trek seems addictive and if not for the US$500 per person price tag I’m sure many people would be repeating it a lot more.  One of the guys at the guest house we stayed at had done the trek 49 times over seven years.  The trek also seems to attract the high end of town.  At dinner we had two surgeons from Canada, two doctors from Florida and a Lufthansa first officer.  Lowly budget travellers like ourselves do it once and cut the daily budget for the rest of our trip.  Still, it was worth seeing such a rare animal in such a unique way – it is something that will stay with us forever. Definitely recommended.

Across West Africa there are couples wearing matching outfits, all with colours as bright as bright can be. You can see bolts of cloth for sale all over the place, so once a fabric has been purchased it must be used to tailor outfits for the whole family.  You will see Mum, Dad and five kids all dressed in the same fabric.  Ladies will fashion elaborate headdresses from the same material.  It looks snazzy so don’t be surprised if Sarah and I turn up for your next function in colourful matching clothes.

Abomey is 100km north of the coast but with the state of the road it takes over two hours to make the trip through dusty, sparsely wooded terrain.  Abomey is famous for being the seat of the Dahomey empire, a large African tribe that encompassed most of modern Benin.  In fact, Benin was only named so in 1972 and many feel that the country should have retained its colonial name of Dahomey instead.  The name Benin comes from the Bight of Benin which was named after a Nigerian empire.

We arrived at midday and headed straight out for a guided tour which, through some miscommunication, took us to some holes 8km from town that we hadn’t been that keen to see.  It’s often hard to communicate when you’re on the back of a scooter and have roughly no idea where you are going.  The description of the tourist site is holes that the Dahomey warriors used to hide in.  It didin’t quite grab our imagination and the first part of the tour, looking down into extremely large holes was not all that thrilling.  They only found this site recently when machinery being used to construct a road in the area collapsed into a huge hole.  After a bit of poking around they figured out that the holes had some archaeological significance.

The tour picked up when we entered the one reconstructed hole which you climb down into on a wooden ladder.  It is pitch black and stuffy inside while the guide explains that warriors used to hide in here and wait for enemies to stumble in. No doubt they got a nasty surprise if they did.  Originally there was no ladder so once inside enemy soldiers would have great difficulty getting out.  The only way out was to climb on someone’s shoulders to reach the first step out.  Once the guide switches the light on you can see that the room is well engineered, carved out of solid rock, with three rooms lower down and off the main entrance rooms.  One is for storing rain water and the other two are bedrooms that also act as water overflow if there is a downpour.  There are 56 of these holes in the area with thousands more in the region.  It is attributed as one of the reasons the Dahomey empire become so successful and dominant.  The entrance was also circled by thorny bushes for extra protection.

We meant to do a tour of some of the reconstructed palaces in the area but when we got back on the scooters we noticed that one of them had a very flat rear tyre.  This being Africa there was a roadside tyre place about 20 metres up the road but it took a good hour or so to get fixed and sucked the wind out of our afternoon.  No matter, we got to the museum the next morning, housed in one of the old Dahomey palaces.

The palace is constructed of mud with a corrugated iron roof, formerly made of straw.  This makes it sound like a shack but the palaces are on a huge scale.  They have numerous courtyards and feel a little bit Asian in layout.  Eunuchs manned the first entrance to the palace, inside which is a large inner courtyard.  Beyond this is another inner courtyard where the King received visitors, and further in still are the living quarters where his wives lived and the King slept.  Each time there was a new King they built a new palace next to the old King’s digs.  Outside each palace is planted a special tree with a long lifespan to grow along with the new King.  They are still there today grandly guarding the entrance.

The Dahomey had a brutal side as well.  One of the thrones is mounted on the skulls of enemy warriors.  Before going to battle the warriors would sacrifice an animal for good fortune but they would have to make a promise to bring back the heads of a certain number of warriors which they nominated themselves.  If they fell short of this target they would be killed.  I would be lowballing that estimate for sure – under promise and over-deliver.  The Dahomey also had fierce female warriors which fascinated the French colonialists who called them the Dahomey Amazons.

We were allowed to go into the tomb of one of the Kings.  It had a very low metal roof which forced you to bow as you entered but inside were just two small circular rooms.  When the King died all of his wives were killed as well.  As the King had as many as 50 wives this was especially gruesome.  The wives had their own tomb in which they were drugged before being buried alive.  The King also has a spirit house where they keep an old bed for his spirit to rest on when it returns from the afterlife.  They have an animal sacrifice here every year and they stack the buffalo bones up outside.

Our quick to trip to Abomey at an end we hopped on a couple of moto-taxis and were heading to the bush taxi station when we were flagged down by a car heading to Cotonou.  We hopped in and started driving around town looking for a couple more passengers to fill the car up.  We noticed a mosque with a mobile phone tower built on top of a minaret.  Perhaps it is specially designed to receive Allah’s text messages.

We filled the car up relatively quickly but Sarah was stuck in the middle of the back seat next to a Nigerian man who dealt in engine parts.  He gave a very detailed opinion on marriage and relationships which became incredibly boring.  About halfway through the journey his droning was broken up by another passenger being squeezed into the back so now we had physical pain as a substitute.  The road was bad.  It took over two hours to travel 110 kilometres.  At least the bush taxi driver dropped us at our hotel door (for an extra tip of course).

Apart from huge jugs of petrol used as advertisements for drivers dodging potholes West Africa also features many pictorial signs advertising the nature of a business.  This is necessitated by the 40% literacy rate in the area.  This is also why showing a Beninese taxi driver a map of where you want to go is near to useless.  The signs that catch the eye are for the barbers, painted wooden boards showing the before and after effect of the barbers services, arrows indicating the before and after shot.

We headed north from Ouidah via bush taxi and then moto-taxi (scooter) to the town of Possotome on the shores of Lake Aheme.  The hotel had a very attractive stilt restaurant sitting over the water but the matching meal of muddy fish and burning spicy mound of paste did not match the surroundings. The lake itself is another shallow and muddy one which seem unfortunately common in this part of Africa.  The locals are aware of the problem and are trying to correct the rapid retreat of the lake shores by planting trees and mangroves next to the water, the idea being that the lake is in retreat because of all the sand falling into it.

We took a tour here about the local plants and the medicinal properties they have.  Our guide was an entertaining guy who acted out the way the plants stopped you having diarrhoea or eased constipation, together with sounds effects.  Most of the plants seemed to be used for this purpose, either that or treating malaria and fevers.  I guess these are the most common complaints around here. The fruit of one tree, when rubbed on the breast, caused enlargement, although whoever used it had to be careful not to go overboard.  Apparently a local man used it on his own appendage but cannot get a wife now because he overdid the treatment.  We stopped at a local ladies house which acted like a plant zoo for the guides.  She had a plant that appeased the god of thunder and stopped their house being struck be lightning, a plant which stopped snakes entering the house and aloe vera which we all know and love.  We also bought a mosquito bite treatment from her, a block of unknown substance which you wet and rub on the bite (it works pretty well) and some caramalised groundnuts which were super tasty.

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We were accosted walking along the hot road by a young man who wanted us to meet him later for a tour of his ice factory.  This offer didn’t appeal hugely but Sarah agreed to it for some reason.  After our plant tour we were really too hot to hang around in town any more and then afternoon slipped into dinner and I advised Sarah to brush the guy off.  We asked the hotel to organise a taxi to take us to our next destination the following day and who should turn up at our dinner table to arbitrate this negotiation but the ice factory manager.  Sarah quickly blamed me for the missed meeting and the young fellow settled down (after organising the taxi) to tell us all about the NGO he was starting and would we be interested in spreading the word – he was offering free membership in return.  To be fair he didn’t give us the hard sell, just asked for our email address so that he could send us more information.  Then he booked us in for a quick tour of the ice factory the following morning.

So that’s how we found ourselves touring a small factory at 9am the following morning.  It was not currently operational but was well built.  There was a cool room for storing the ice and a dock for the fishermen to pull up in their boat and collect ice for their fish which could then be shipped off to Europe.  As long as the fish stock in the lake doesn’t continue to fall it could be a successful venture.  We didn’t ask who the owner was but if it’s like a lot of the hotels we stayed in there would be a European involved.

This post might distress animal lovers.  I’ll italicise sections you might want to skip if a graphic description of animal sacrifice would disturb you.

The Voodoo festival at Ouidah, Benin was something we highlighted fairly early on in our travel planning as a unique event that we would like to see.  We had only a vague idea of what happens there but it just sounded intriguing.  It slotted in nicely with our planned itinerary although there was some shuffling to make sure we landed in Benin at the right time.  We arrived in Ghana three days earlier than our mammoth spreadsheet dictated which pleased our sense of planning and order.  Right on cue we arrived in Ouidah a couple of days before the festival was due to start.  Arriving in a bush taxi we were beset by taxi drivers offering to drive us to our hotel, once they collectively worked out where it was.  We agreed a price and went to walk over to the car only to find our drivers standing beside a couple of moto-taxi scooters.  We had broken our scooter virginity in Togo but now we had two big packs with us.  We prevaricated initially but were talked into it when the drivers just hoisted our large packs in between their handlebars to demonstrate how secure it was.  Luckily with us on the back as well they couldn’t get much above running pace anyway, but turning a corner on a road made of sand with that kind of weight on board was a tense experience.

In the meantime we had some Voodoo warm-up activities.  Voodoo, despite the negative connotations associated with it, is much like other organised religions, a superstition revolving around statues, appeasing the gods and warding off evil spirits.  Unlike other major religions Voodoo has not modernised and put a nice face on their beliefs.  It is still raw and for that reason comes across as more earthy than other religions.  I would argue it has done a lot less damage in Africa than the catholic church with its stance on condoms.  The pope recently visited Benin. He seems to be a fan of Voodoo having visited the home of Voodoo in Ouidah as well as Cuba with all their related Afro-Cuban religion.  The locals have no problem with people being Christian as well as using Voodoo.  They are seen as separate but not incompatible beliefs.  I think the catholic church is desperate to hang in to anyone who is a believer so probably indulge Voodoo practices on the sly.  70% of the country have Voodoo or Animist beliefs so they can’t ostracise all those people without loosing a large part of their flock (on a side-note apparently in Papua New Guinea the church faithful are called swine instead of a flock, pigs been much more important than sheep over there).

Our first taste of Ouidah Voodoo was the python temple.  This was not nearly as scary as it sounds. There is a walled-off compound you pay to enter, then the guide brings out a relatively small python and wraps it around your neck.  Sarah was our guinea pig, although luckily not guinea pig sized, and very bravely stood with the python exploring up and down her body while I captured it on camera..  I politely refused to have one around my neck now that it had woken up.  I’m quite happy to stroke a snake (no euphemism intended) but don’t feel the need to put my head in the hangman’s noose.  Forty of the pythons live in a smaller room where they laze around during the day rather than writhing over each other as in the movies.  To be fair it was blisteringly hot, as hot and humid as we had experienced on the trip so far.  The snakes liven up at night when they are let loose in the compound to hunt.  The pythons are worshipped as a god but we didn’t get too much detail on this as our guide only spoke French.  In Togo the Chief’s son at Koutammakou mocked this saying in disbelieving tones “In Benin they have a temple where they worship snakes, and they don’t even eat them!”

Ouidah sadly also has a strong history in the slave trade.  Much like the Cape Coast in Ghana Europeans traded with the local kingdom here for slaves, usually Africans from other tribes captured by the Dahomey empire in war.  To supply more and more slaves the Dahomey empire simply had more and more wars with their neighbours to capture people.  This trade lasted for 400 years.  We went for a stroll one late afternoon down to a memorial for the slaves and were quickly pounced on by three young local men who wanted to act as tourist guides.  A much better deal than simply being mugged. They took us around a few of the statues that have been erected in commemoration to the dead slaves and those that returned.  Then they asked if we wanted to see a Voodoo ceremony that was starting now.  Why not?

We went through a doorway to a dirt-floored outdoor verandah with a tin roof, a small courtyard attached to a couple of small rooms made from grey-coloured bricks.  Assembled here were a group of young men with drums.  In the room were some old men and a group of women.  Ominously there was a goat tied to a pole.  Libations were poured of some local gin of which Sarah and I partook.  It was a decent drop.  Then the drumming began in fits and starts while they searched for the rhythm they wanted.  It was a complex beat which sounded random at times but settled on a rhythm which gave a trance-like air to the proceedings.  

The goat was taken inside to have leaves stuffed in its mouth.  Two men then brought it out.  One of the men held its hind legs while the second man gripped its head with one hand, knife held in the other. Even though the small goat had its mouth clamped shut sounds like muffled screams still escaped.  The killing was totally botched.  The knife was nowhere near sharp enough, more like a steak knife that one equipped for the task of killing an animal.  The man sawed into the goats throat like you would cut a tough piece of steak.  The goat struggled as blood dripped out of its neck into a waiting bowl.  Soon it struggled less and was abandoned on the ground but it was obviously not dead.  It twitched a few more times, making movements as though it was running in its sleep.  The old woman who had manned the bowl wiped her bloody fingers on the goats fur.  Meanwhile a chicken had been killed and was placed under the front legs of the prostrate goat.  The man who had cut the goat’s throat wiped the blade clean on it as well.  One man tried to break the goats neck by twisting it around but this didn’t seem to kill it either. Eventually one of the old men sitting with the drummers got fed up with the ineptitude and signalled for the goat to be taken away and killed properly.  It was then tossed back out into the courtyard dust where the old woman picked it up by the head and draped it over her shoulders.  With her goat cape in place she led the procession of dancing women around the courtyard.  The blood from the goat had been poured into something near the drummers, presumably the fetish statue in whose honour the sacrifice had been made.  The drumming continued along with the chanting and dancing of the women.  It was an intense experience for Sarah and I, especially as it had been unexpected.  It was upsetting to see an animal suffering like that but as meat eaters it would be hypocritical to criticise the sacrifice itself.  Sarah might be more inclined to become vegetarian when we get back to Sydney.  I just think that if you’re going to kill an animal, at least do it properly to cause the least suffering possible.

The three lads giving the tour were pretty reasonable about the price so we wandered off back the hotel feeling like we had experienced as authentic a Voodoo ceremony as we were likely to see. Our hotel in Ouidah cost $12 a night and wasn’t terrible, although the bed was a bit short and we were located directly above the wood-fired outdoor kitchen.  Ear plugs, travel pillows and travel sheets make almost anywhere bearable.

After all that the Voodoo festival itself was a bit of a let-down.  It’s a nationwide celebration but we were down at the beach on the seaward side of the ‘point of no return’, a memorial for the slaves.  It was stinking hot in the shade but thankfully there were free plastic chairs to sit on under open air tarpaulins.  There was special VIP seating possibly for the president (we weren’t sure what he looked like at this stage) as well as Angelique Kidjo who gave speeches in three different languages to little response from the crowd.  We were seated by pure chance in the section that was holding Voodoo royalty, a lot of sharply dressed guys in white suits and snappy hats.  There was a huge speaker stack playing music and lots of little groups with drums which combined to form a mish-mash cacophony most of the time.  It was a long way from what we pictured, a small amateurish and slightly scary festival.  This was just dull most of the time.  Once the speeches had finished the day got more interesting as all the small voodoo groups informally started drumming and dancing in their own styles.  It was illuminating to me as it proved you can dance to drum and bass music.

It was here that I came as close I as have ever come to getting my pocket picked.  We had been warned by the hotel owner that there would be pickpockets around so all the important stuff was in my money belt.  Still, I didn’t want to have my wallet nicked on principle.  As we were walking through a stream of people behind one of the tents two guys behind me and to my right jostled me into a guy coming the other way.  I felt his hand reach into my left pocket so I twisted my left shoulder into him and jammed my own hand into my pocket.  He shuffled past and as I looked back he was busy slapping dust of himself with a bandana.  We later heard that a woman at our hotel had lost her camera to a pickpocket.

It was really too hot to stick around all afternoon so we beat a retreat to our hotel, had a shower and lay under the fan.  Voodoo did not win any converts with us but it felt a million miles away from Australia so the essence of travel beat strongly through it.

Photos and videos are here (there are a couple that might disturb animal lovers if you look too closely, and I’m not talking about the snake)

Photos locked and loaded for Ghana and Togo.