Cotton and the Gando

January 13 – 14

Day #17 – Started: Parakou                         Ended: Nikki                                       Distance Covered: 103 km

Day #18 – Started: Nikki                               Ended: Peonga                                  Distance Covered: 66 km

Highlights

• Cotton processing factory
• Entering Bariba territory
• Gando villages

Click on the images below to enlarge

Much of the land north of

Parakou and used for grazing.

These kids followed their brothers

to the fields to help watch after

their cattle.

The majority of houses in villages

throughout Benin are constructed

in this manner with mud.  The

larger stones are used to

reinforce the walls.

Semis are loaded to the brim with

cotton this time of year.

Since leaving Parakou, I’ve began to head north through the Borgou and Alibori Departments of Benin.  I’m now travelling alone, and although the past two days of biking have been a bit lonesome, I’ve noticed that I’ve become a lot more approachable to others.  When biking as a group, our team had plenty of interactions with people in villages and towns we passed by, but now it seems like there’s absolutely no hesitation for people to come over and ask me what I’m up to.  This has helped me to have some great conversations and see some interesting things along the way.

For instance, shortly after leaving the city of Parakou, I passed by a large factory that had a long line of semis filled to the brim with cotton.  I got off my bike and asked one of the drivers if he would mind me taking a photo of his truck.  Not only did he accept, but he asked me if I wanted to take a whole tour of the cotton processing plant – which didn’t even seem like an option to me, as the premises were walled in and watched by a group of guards; it definitely looked like a private enterprise in which tours were not often conducted.

Turns out it was a private enterprise in which tours are not often conducted.  But nonetheless, this driver introduced me to one of the plant administrators, and after I explained a bit of the bike trip to him he promptly escorted me through the whole plant.

I wasn't allowed to take pictures within the plant,

but my guide turned out to be the head of the shipping

yard - so he actually encouraged me to take this one. 

Each of those bags contains 500 lbs of cotton fibers!

The tour was really interesting – within the plant there are a series of tubes in which cotton is sucked through the plant (like those tubes at the drive-in lanes at the bank) and then passed through machines which remove the seeds from the cotton fibers.  The cotton and seeds are both packaged into separate sacks, and sent to industries that will transform them.  The cotton is sold to companies both within and without of Benin, and the cotton seeds are sent to Beninese vegetable oil processing plants in Bohicon. Apparently many western countries prefer buying cotton coming from countries in which it is picked by hand – such as Benin – as it often contains fewer impurities than cotton picked by machines.

This sign reads, "Gandia. Place of

justice before colonization.

Kassakperegui - the surpreme

judge".  Apparently this is where

the Bariba king of Perere used to

behead criminals.  It's a pretty grim

idea, but the place just looked like

a overgrown field to me now.

After leaving the cotton plant, I started encountering more and more people that spoke languages I had hardly ever heard before: Bariba and Fulani.  Both of these ethnicities are very prominent in the north-eastern regions of Benin, and both traditionally consist of cattle herders.  The main difference between the two, though, is that the Bariba are essentially sedentary, whereas the Fulani are semi-nomadic.  Nowadays this causes some interesting social/political disputes as land claims have become more official, and sometimes rifts happen between the two ethnicities.

During one of my nights in route, I got the chance to stay in a village with a very interesting combination of both of these two groups; a Gando village.  I knew close to nothing about this ethnicity before arriving, but the volunteer I stayed with did a great job of explaining a part of its history to me.  Traditionally, the Fulani are on one of the lowest rungs of the social cast system in this area of Benin, and the Bariba appear to be on a much higher one.  In general, the Bariba and Fulani would not mix, but occasionally a Bariba family would give birth to a child that had certain characteristics deemed unlucky (I believe one of which was two teeth pointing in different directions), and the parents would either kill the child or give it to the Fulani.  The Fulani would then raise the child, and he would work alongside them.  Once he became old enough, his biological family would sometimes give him land as a way of still caring for him.  Due to these circumstances, the child would not truly belong to either ethnicity, though he would interact with both.  Eventually, this happened enough to make entire neighborhoods of these neither-Fulani-nor-Bariba individuals, and with time they became the Gando.

This history is just a small example of one of the many different groups within Benin. Even though the country is pretty small (roughly the size of Pennsylvania), the variety of different ethnicities and languages is quite enormous.