I recently visited a nearby village, Akpero, for no particular reason. My neighbors assured me that it was on the road, just a few miles away.
On the way I stopped at a village of the Pol, a tribe of cattle herders from Mali. This is the same place I visited and wrote about six months ago. I looked for the chief because he speaks some French. His house was easy to find. It’s the only one not made of mud. Unfortunately, his wife said, he was out. I asked her if anyone else in the village spoke French. The answer was no. That was that.
The road was great for a while, as far as African dirt roads go. Then it went to hell. I was constantly getting off my bike to extricate it from sand pits. After half an hour I was lost. No way should it have taken this long to get to Akpero. But I hadn’t passed it. I’d seen no sign of human life since leaving the Pol village.
I got to a village. It was bigger than I was expecting. And there was a paved road. I’m hallucinating, I thought. There’s no paved road anywhere near here. Expecting to reach civilization after a 15-minute ride, I hadn’t brought any water.
I rode closer. There really was a paved road, the highway that runs north-south along the eastern edge of Benin.
“What village is this?” I asked someone.
“Toui,” she said, giving me a strange look.
I’d overshot Akpero’s supposed location by six miles. I was confused. Did this place exist?
I turned around and headed back toward Kemon. While pulling my bike out of a sand pit, I looked up and saw that the road was throbbing, shrinking and expanding and spinning. Now I really was dehydrated.
A mile or two later I saw a couple thatched huts about 50 yards from the road. I went over. There were two young women. They were naked. More importantly, they had a well. It gave a liquid that was closer to thin mud than to water, but it stopped the ground from spinning before my eyes. One of them knew enough French to have this conversation:
“French?”
“American.”
“Obama!”
“Yes.”
Back on the road, I came across a man who, judging by the shotgun over his shoulder, was a hunter. I asked him how to get to Akpero. He pointed to a path leading off from the main road about 20 yards away. My neighbors later apologized profusely for neglecting to mention this part.
This new road was narrower and crappier and the sand pits resumed with a vengeance, but before long I was rolling into Akpero.
Compared to Kemon, which itself has only 3,000 people, Akpero is tiny. But at the time it felt like the Promised Land. Most of the buildings had plastered walls and corrugated iron rooves, and everyone was wearing clothes. The people, some of whom even spoke French, gave me food and water. The water was a little more translucent than what I’d had earlier.
When I left, they have me an enormous papaya. It was about as big as the largest watermelon I’ve ever seen in an American supermarket. I strapped it to the back of my bike and went back to Kemon.
“Where’d you find that?” My neighbor asked as I rolled up.
“Some people in Akpero gave it to me.”
“Well, aren’t you lucky.”
—–
The other night I heard my neighbors, one of the few families in the village with a TV, watching a movie. They rarely do this because it requires the expense of running their gasoline generator. I looked in. To my surprise, it was not a Nigerian soap opera.
“What movie is this?” I said.
“Um,” someone said, reaching for the box. “Roots.”
Thus began the most awkward evening of my life, watching Roots in a room full of West Africans.
It’s because of the slave trade that we were in this room, in this village. This family is of the Fon tribe, which comes from the coastal south of what’s now Benin. Hardly a region or a tribe in Africa was hit harder by the slave trade. Some escaped by founding Ganvié, Benin’s famous village on stilts in a lake. It was taboo for the African slave hunters to cross a body of water.
Others moved north, beyond the reach of European slave traders and the African kings who helped them in exchange for money and weapons, into what is now central Benin. They displaced the native tribes, including the Nagot, the majority tribe in my village. To this day the Nagot and Fon regularly talk shit about each other: the other tribe is notably deceptive, their women particularly loose, and so on.
I joined them for the movie just before Kunta Kinte, still in Africa, gets sent to man camp. The twenty-odd villagers packed into the room found this guy’s name incredibly fun to say. For the next two days they discussed the movie nonstop, changing its name to “the Kunta Kinte movie” and saying “Kunta Kinte” at every possible opportunity. Or rather, something approximating it. All these West Africans seemed unable to get this West African name straight. Kinta Kunte, Kunte Kinta, Kuntu Kintu, Kinti Kunti.
They found other parts of the movie less amusing.
I thought of Ouidah and Grand Popo — in their day, two of the largest slavetrading ports in West Africa. They’re lined with picturesque beaches, palm trees in the breeze and the broad belt of white sand and the dark sea, beautiful and anonymous patches of earth, the last that millions of people ever saw of their homeland.
Why did it happen? Saying “greed” isn’t good enough. “With a few exceptions people don’t want money,” says Steinbeck. ”They want luxury and they want love and they want admiration.” It happened because in search of luxury and love and admiration, some people traveled to a distant sweltering land to convey in putrid slave-ships other people whose lives they destroyed and who, in turn, hated them with a hate that never fully died. This happened for 400 years. That’s easy to say and impossible to understand.
“Do they have apartheid in your country?” the family’s father asked me in the evening after we finished the movie. Everyone was sitting on their veranda in the hot night.
“Not anymore.”
“Are there villages that are only white or only black?”
I explained about inner cities and suburbs.
“So blacks have less money than whites?”
“Generally, yes.”
No one said anything.
“But things have improved a lot. We have a black president now.”
I’m sure this sounded even more stupid in my bad accent.
History refuses to stay in the past. It reaches up through the centuries with cold and clammy hands, unwelcome and inevitable, and nothing can be said, even between neighbors and friends, to make it go away. I think of Ulysses: “History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.”
—–
Somebody stole my neighbors’ chickens. The chicken supply had been suspiciously diminishing, and then they found the smoking gun: a mousetrap.
“A mousetrap?” I said. “How do you know they aren’t trying to catch mice?”
They showed me the trap. It was baited with kernels of corn. Smooth.
Chickens, like coats, sheep, and pigs, wander freely about the village. I’m amazed that everyone can keep track of their livestock. They identify chickens by chopping off a toe; each family chops a different toe. The chickens are not proponents of this system. Because chickens have a total of six toes, and there are more than six families in the village, I’m not sure how this works.
More than once, my house has been partially destroyed by a chicken that wandered in and, finding itself trapped, with no possible escape — the door it just walked through does not count — flipped out.
On the Beninese scale of crimes, chicken theft ranks slightly below genocide. Any kind of theft does. If a man is both a murderer and a thief, they call him a thief. This makes sense for a poor society. If a person has nothing but a goat and you take away his goat, you’ve taken away everything he had. It sounds obvious but it’s profoundly different from our view of theft. If someone breaks in to your house, you feel annoyed, angry, violated — but your existence isn’t threatened. Not so for the poor villager. Taken a person’s material means of survival and taking his life are not so very different.
When Westerners react with horror to the severe punishments for theft in some poor countries — chopping off a hand, or even lynching — they’re not expressing an innately more humane view of justice. That’s wealth talking, the luxury of separating property from survival and theft from murder. The crime was inhumane; therefore the punishment should be inhumane — or at least that’s what I hear from Americans who favor punishing murder with execution. Were we this poor — and did our culture not consider poverty a crime committed by the poor against themselves — we’d probably be chopping some hands too.
As it turned out, our chicken thief was just a kid. So he was not shipped off to The Hague.
