Benin Cultural Guide

Hello everyone,

Life here in Benin continues to go well. I've already been out at post for eight weeks, and although work is slow in getting started, it's coming around. In the meantime, I've decided to give a brief cultural guide to Benin, so you can have more of an idea of where I am, considering nobody (including myself before I found out I was coming here) knows where Benin even is. (It's in west Africa, between Togo and Nigeria!)

History: Benin is a mesh of several local kingdoms, the most important of which had their royal palaces in the city of Abomey in the south. The Kingdom of Dahomey (as it was known) conquered other kingdoms, and eventually partnered with European countries, especially the Portuguese, to begin trading slaves with America. Benin is the center of the slave coast, so that most African-American slaves came from this area, from ports in the cities of Grand Popo and Ouidah. The French colonized the kingdom of Dahomey in the nineteenth century, and in 1960 granted it independence. The country itself suffered through several coups in the 60s before settling into a communist dictatorship in 1972. In 1990, the dictator, Kerekou decided to transition the country to democracy and since then, Benin has enjoyed a relatively stable democratic government. The current president is Yayi Boni.

Geography and Weather: The south is more populated and more clustered, and a little more humid and tropical. The hills begin as soon as you get to the middle of the country, which is where my post, Ouesse, is located. In the north, it gets dryer and dustier. The summer is the rainy season, which is followed by a short dry season known as Harmattan, where the winds blow dust everywhere and it gets a little bit cooler (about 80-85 degrees). This is the season we are in now. We'll have a short rainy season in a couple of months, followed by an intense, dry season known as the "chaleur" (heat!) which I've yet to experience, but I'm sure it gets very hot. This will be from February to April. The north of Benin is also where the two national parks are located, Pendjari and W, where people can do a safari.

Religion: Benin is the birthplace of voodoo. The voodoo practiced in the Americas was brought over by Beninese slaves. There are reminders of this all over the place, but in reality it's mostly practiced only by a few people in the little villages. The south tends to be more Christian, although there is a lot of sincretism with local traditions--voodoo and other forms of animism, while the north is almost entirely Muslim, although again local traditions get mixed in.

Music: The music here tends to be more rhythmic than melodic, and the traditional music rarely even uses instruments besides drums. The women sing in high-pitched screeching voices, not very pleasant to the Western ear, but interesting nonetheless. The pop music sounds a little more Westernized, but incorporates a lot of African rhythms. One of the more well-known pop musicians is Petit Miguelito, who I was actually able to meet in person my first week in country.

Food: The main dishes are rice, beans, spaghetti, couscous, and pate (pronounced "pot"). This is a dish that is bland, somewhere between bread and mashed potatoes in consistency, and you eat it with your hands, taking a chunk and dipping it into a sauce which usually includes tomatoes and hot peppers. One of my favorite dishes here is "yam pile," basically mashed yams, often served in a peanut sauce. My village has pretty much only onions, tomatoes, and hot peppers as vegetables and oranges as fruit, but there are mangoes, and mango season is coming in April. Other places in the country have delicious bananas, pineapples, sweet potatoes, and papaya. Peanuts and cashews are also pretty plentiful here. Chicken and beef are the main meat dishes served here, but oftentimes you can find a vendor of "bushmeat." This could really be anything and oftentimes its best not to ask. I've been served the leg of a bushrat, with some of the hair still on it. Restaurants are really just a woman who made beans and rice serving it on the side of the road, and you go and ask her for a plate.

Drinks: Any village will have a couple of "buvettes," bars where you can get Coke, Sprite, and a number of local and regional beers, although none of these are very good in my opinion. La Beninoise is the cheapest, Eku, Awooyo, Flag, Castel, and Star are other beers widely available here. The local liquor is called sodabi, it's basically moonshine, produced who knows where (there's not really a national distributor), and it's strong and doesn't taste like anything except alcohol. Farther north, there's a drink called Tchoukoutu, which is basically a strong cider, also made at home. People bring big buckets of it to the market on a given day, and you pay a certain amount for a bowl. You can have it already fermented, or in the process of fermenting.

Dance: Haven't seen too much of this in real village life, but in demonstrations that they did for us during our training, it involved a lot of flapping the arms, like a chicken, and walking to a beat.

Dress: People here wear outifts made from local fabric, most often the entire outfit is made of the same fabric, which has colorful patterns and designs. It almost seems like the entire country spends the whole day in their pajamas. A lot of the fabric has really cool patterns, and you can take any that you like to a tailor and have them make anything for you-shirt, pants, whole outfit, dress, etc. Western clothes is also worn here, often bought secondhand at the market, and it's kind of funny to see what some younger people consider their "Sunday best." I sometimes see 25-year old guys at Mass on Sunday wearing tight, flowery jeans, an Avril Lavigne t-shirt, and sunglasses. Impressive.

Shopping: There's no Wal-Mart here, so you go to the local market and buy what you need to make lunch or dinner, or any other thing you might need that your market sells. In my village, if the market doesn't have something, you give money to one of the local taxi drivers, who will buy it in the nearest big city during the day and bring it back to you. The market is quite an experience in itself, with everything from dried fish to vegetables, to cuetips, to cheap flashlights. My village's butcher is in the middle of the market, and that's an interesting place, too. Doesn't inspire you to want to get meat. When you ask them where it comes from, they just say "en brousse," which means "the bush." However, every cut of meat is the same price, meaning that for $2, I can get 1 kilo of the best cut of meat, so if I'm inspired I'll wake up early, go to the butcher, get my cut of meat, and cook it for lunch.

Home Life: Men often have several wives, and a number of children also. I've even run into men who can't name all of their children on the spot. Kids go to school during the day, but are all over the town the rest of the time. Women tend to stay home, clean the house, and cook. Men work, mostly as artisans (carpenters, mechanics, tailors, masons, solderers) and some, especially in my village, out in the fields as farmers.

Recreation: It's hot here, so this involves mostly sitting under a tree and talking. Kids play soccer, and the men play soccer in the morning when it's still cool out, but during the day, you just try and stay out of the sun.

This is very brief, but hopefully it gives you a little more inside info into Benin. I'm ready to spend Thanksgiving eating pate instead of turkey, which will be interesting, but fun. My village and the people have made it very easy for me to get used to life there, and I really enjoy it. It's quiet, peaceful, and my porch, with the porch-swing I had built, is fantastic.

I hope everyone is well. I really enjoy receiving your emails, and wish I had more time to respond adequately to each one. I miss you all, and hope that if any of you have the chance to visit, please take it, because this blog post is not enough to describe this amazing country that is quickly becoming home!

Love,

Sebastian