Benin
Preacher: Reverend Andrea Abbott
We’re back! As probably all of you know, Arn and I have spent the last two and a half weeks with Marcia Burrell and a group from SUNY Oswego in Benin, a small country in West Africa. This came about because after church one Sunday, Marcia approached us and said, “I want you to come to Benin. It will change your life.” If Benin is interested in developing a tourist industry, this wouldn’t be a bad slogan. “Come to Benin and change your life.” And, unlike many advertising slogans, it just might be true.
Who could resist that offer? In addition, I have always had a desire to see a culture different from my own. I wanted a different angle on life, a new slant from which to see our shared world. My knowledge of any African country was woefully inadequate, so I went with few preconceptions. We went to a series of classes before the trip which filled in some of my ignorance but I found it hard to imagine Benin in advance.
I would like to put in a disclaimer here. If you really want to know about Benin, I refer you to Marcia who has been there many times. She set up the trip and put us in touch with our guardians, Benois and Remy, Benois who is a retired school inspector and is now involved in Beninois government, and Remy who was our guide. Benois was a sort of guardian spirit to us, making cars appear out of thin air when ours were broken down, producing food made by his wife when we were traveling, setting up meetings in schools through his many contacts and in general keeping things running. Remy was our day to day interpreter of both language and culture, a person who made Benin understandable and rich for us. So, as I said, please ask Marcia for more detailed information and real insight into Benin. Our brief journey there is only enough to give us a glimpse of Benin, enough to know how much we don’t know.
Benin is a small country located between Nigeria and Togo. It is long and thin with one foot in the Atlantic Ocean in the south and the other foot almost in the Sahara Desert area in the north. The north and south of the country are different areas from each other with different ways of life, economies, and ethnic groups. I think over thirty languages are spoken in this small area. It was a Portuguese colony until it was ceded to the French in the late 1800’s. For this reason, French is the official language, the language of the government. It is taught in the schools but many children do not go to school and those that do arrive speaking one of the many other languages and so, as one of the school inspectors explained, must try to master the other subjects in the curriculum taught in a strange language.
In the 1960’s the French simply walked out, without providing any preparation for self-government. Despite this, Benin is the only democratic country in the region. The democracy as it is practiced there has been often corrupt, often consisting of a small group of strong men who use their power for their own good not to help the country. If we are shocked at this, or feel we could teach the Beninois how to run their country, perhaps we might find we do not have as much to say as we might have hoped. If it is not textbook democracy, neither is ours and, unlike many countries in the region, so far Benin has avoided violent military coups. And so far, they have continued to keep the country intact and in some form functioning with very few resources and very little practical help from the U.S. or Europe.
We arrived late at night and, as we stepped off the plan, the first thing that hit us was the heat. It was like a physical force, a moist, hot wall pressing against us. Though I adjusted somewhat to it, it was amazing to me that people are able to move at all, let alone do the kind of intensely physical work that we saw all around us.
The second element that engulfed me was the dirt, the fine, sandy red dirt that covered everything. It was in my hair, eyes, nose, mouth. I thought we should have some kind of breathing apparatus, or maybe grow a new set of lungs, to cope with it. And yet, every morning the goods displayed in the little stalls that lined every inch of the road were clean and shiny. Most of the people were clean as well and each morning women were out, sweeping the road in front of their booths. Of course this meant that all the dirt and garbage was displaced from their shops to any common space that existed. Garbage was everywhere in these areas, piles of dirt and paper and plastic bags. The tiny goats and chickens and dogs, helped by an occasional pig, foraged through these piles, functioning as a kind of recycling department.
The stalls that sold everything, absolutely everything, were everywhere. They filled the space between more substantial buildings and the roads or they perched in vacant lots or in front of shacks made of pieces of corrugated tin, shacks about the size of our Sunday school room, so that, almost invisible behind the stalls, were the palaces of the wealthy and the hovels of the poor.
Late at night, when they were empty, the stalls looked like a random collection of sticks and palm thatch, barely able to hold the weight of an egg, but by day they held huge amounts of everything, bolts of beautifully colored cloth, beads and trinkets, household goods, cleaning supplies, fish, meat, bread, tires and even gasoline. The gasoline, which came from Nigeria, don’t ask, was sold in glass wine globes, five gallon size at least. Filling up involved pulling over to one of the stalls and watching as a cloth was put across a funnel and the fuel poured into the gas tank. Did I mention that everyone smoked?
There were Super marche’ but they were few and most of the everyday buying and selling in Benin took place in the stalls along the sides of the road or in the densely packed markets. Most of the stalls were run by women with their children by them, women dressed as most women in Benin were dressed, in the colorful cloth dresses and head wraps that made every place a vibrant garden.
On the morning of the next day, we crossed over one intersection filled with mopeds and cars and people that seemed bent on a race to destruction, horns tooting, people yelling, all aiming for the same small space. By some miraculous intervention, we crossed that intersection and went through a gate and entered the Garden of Eden. We came to Songhai.
Songhai, the place where we had come to learn about permaculture. The place where we came to learn a different way to live on the earth. Here the streets were leveled and laid out in grids. Green trees and plants were everywhere and a hushed and ordered calm settled over us.
Songhai was begun from the vision of one man, a priest originally from Benin who was educated as a microbiologist who, after years of teaching in the U.S., decided to return to Africa and begin farming according to permaculture principles. The basis of permaculture is that nothing is wasted; everything is recycled and so the system achieves balance. And so it does. Over a period of days we were taken to every part of the farm, from the chicken and quail coops to the trees that provide nuts and palm oil, from the foundry in which machines and their parts are fabricated to the methane gas bottling area which turns much of the waste into energy to run the system. Throughout, we crossed over concrete channels that funneled all water used into beds of water hyacinth which purified it so it could be returned to the drip irrigation system which kept Songhai a green oasis in the dry season. And everywhere we saw young people working, digging, weeding, chipping waste into much to further retain water. We dodged wheelbarrows of this or that being energetically wheeled from one place to another carrying waste from one area to be put to good use in another area. The wheelbarrow drivers wore the uniform of the trainees, youth from all over Benin and from other countries as well, often sponsored by their villages to come and learn these techniques and to return home to farm this way themselves. The priest who had begun the project had always seen Songhai as a place for education, a place to give purpose and meaning to young lives, to give Africa a new way, a way that came from within Africa, not from outside.
This was the essence of permaculture, the understanding that what is taken out must be restored. It is an understanding that taking alone, never giving back, is the way to disaster. And how fitting that this should be happening in an African country, since Africa has been the victim of Europeans and Americans taking and never giving back for hundreds of years. Africa has furnished the raw materials of industry. Africa’s metals and cotton and lumber fueled the industrial revolution and the need for those materials fueled colonialism, fueled the taking out and never giving back that is the essence of extractive industry. And, when the raw materials were used up or came at too high a price, the colonialists left.
The greatest example of an extractive industry, of an industry that took and never gave back, was, of course, slavery. Benin was a big supplier of slaves for the U.S. and the Caribbean. We were taken to see the Gate of No Return, a monument that stands at the edge of the Atlantic, a monument to the two million or so people who were taken in chains to the waiting slave ships, never to see their homes again. Indeed, as we know, death took many before they left Africa and many more on the slave ships. They were taken and how could there be any return, any giving back of human lives? What could slave owning governments have given in return for the youth of this place, snatched away? What could we, and all the other countries who benefitted from the labor forced from these people possibly give in return? And so the scales remain unbalanced. We remain in debt.
But our debts were not mentioned. When we visited the schools, when we brought the supplies you so generously donated, we were overwhelmed by the hospitality shown us. Children and teachers came to one school on Saturday to meet us, to tell us of their hopes and dreams, to dance and sing for us. Our supplies were most welcome; every pen and pencil and piece of chalk would be used. There were no computers in the classrooms, no whiteboards or learning stations. There were crowded classrooms and eager children with their hands in the air asking to be called on. Lessons were written on the blackboard and memorized, workbooks shared with those who didn’t have them, paper used to its last inch. Teachers had their student’s attention to a degree that our educators might well envy. But what will happen to these eager children, I wondered, when school is done? What kind of future awaits them? And what of the many children we saw in the streets during the day, many working at construction sites or in the market, doing the jobs of adults, helping feed their families. What will their lives be like? What anger is built into them, so aware of the limits of their lives at such a young age?
Haiti was one place where many slaves from this area went and Haitian culture and indigenous religions reflect this. We went to see a voudoun ceremony, an expression of the voudoun religion as well and we visited the Sacred Grove and other places in which the religion is still alive and practiced. Our guide, Remy, was emphatic that we know the difference between the Hollywood version of voudon, voodoo, from the real religion which, he stressed was a way of understanding our relationship to the forces of nature. Or, as we say, the interdependent web of all existence. At the heart of the voudoun religion is the idea of sacrifice, the literal sacrifice of an animal as a symbol of the returning to the earth, of replenishment, a visible, physical sign that understand we cannot always be takers, never giving back.
For those who may be a little squeamish about such a sacrifice, perhaps we should remember our roots in the Hebrew scriptures with its exhortation to sacrifice, literal sacrifice, of animals as a necessary return to God, or our roots in Christianity which has at its heart, as well, the necessity of the perfect sacrifice. Whether it’s a lamb or one called The Lamb, there is the idea of return, of giving back, of life as a cycle which is broken at our peril.
The image of the snake with its tail in its mouth is a symbol for knowledge in Voudoun and it reminded me of the early symbol of the Unitarian church, one still used in the old churches of Hungary and Roumania, the symbol of the globe crowned with a dove and circled by a snake with its tail in its mouth. That is to refer to Matthew 10:16, “Behold, I am sending you out as sheep in the midst of wolves, so be wise as serpents and innocent as doves.”
We have not been wise. We are not innocent. We have forgotten that we cannot forever take and never give back. The system at Songhai, the closed system that says for everything taken out there must be a return, is in fact the system of the earth in miniature. We are a closed system, though we often forget that.
When we were in Benin, there were days I longed for some luxury item or some comfort or another. But we were there. There was no getting away, no quick escape to Wegman’s or Walmart for something more palatable or softer or easier. In the same way, we are on this planet. There is no quick jump to Alpha Centuri if we run out of water or food or bandwidth. We are a closed system. What we take out must be put back. We are learning this. There is Songhai, which is not perfect but is a model of what can be done. There are other ventures by other names, NGO’s whose mission is to see how giving back of resources, of people just might be best accomplished.
This is a short and very inadequate review of our days in Benin. There is much more to be said about what we saw and learned but what I took with me is the concept that governs Songhai. What is taken out must be replenished. We cannot be forever takers, of resources, of lives.
Behind each meeting, I felt there were desires and longings on both sides. On our hosts part those desires were for development, for better lives for the people of their country, for us to end the cycle of poverty and neglect. In all our meetings, with our mentors and guides, with teachers, with community people, especially with Benois, there was a call for allies in the quest to help the children of Benin grow up in a more hopeful world. Tell our story, they said, don’t forget us.
From Remy, our constant companion, we learned of other systems of thinking, other systems of knowledge. He wanted us to know the fullness of his spiritual life, the fullness of another wisdom. His hope was for an understanding that transcends the simple giving of things, that transcends charity and patronage, a partnership of equals.
And what on our side? What were our desires and hopes from these meetings. It is usually assumed that we are there to help in some way, to share resources, knowledge, to help the people of Benin from poverty into a western way of life. But I don’t think that is why we get on planes and fly to distant lands. I think there is in us the same kind of longing that is in the Beninois, a longing for something better, for something different than our own way of life. When we have taken and not given back we have created a world with its own set of problems, the emptiness of a life spent as passive, insatiable consumers , the scourge of alienation and addiction, the feeling that there is something missing at the center of our busy lives. Amid the waste of our developed life, the waste of resources, the waste of people’s potential, we seek a different way. And I think that is why we go to different places, searching for a different wisdom, perhaps an older wisdom as well as an emerging wisdom, a wisdom that shows us a way out of our current misuse of the earth and of each other, an earth covered with our waste and garbage; a society that throws people away as it throws away other resources. We seek a wisdom that brings all people into a circle of meaning and purpose. We seek a wisdom that shows us there is a way for us all to live in harmony with the land and with each other.
That is the dream, for all of us, Beninois or American, the deep dream of everyone, that somehow in these meetings, in these exchanges, we will find the way back to the Garden, the way to a world made whole with all her people one.