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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).
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