Culture in Benin

In 2022 a white lorry rounded a corner in the city of Cotonou, Benin, and was greeted with a cheering crowd. Through the sea of waving hands, you could just read the message on the side of the van. It said, ‘Restitution des tresors royaux de Benin’. The lorry contained 26 works of sculpture and cultural artefacts which, after 130 years of absence, had just been returned to Benin by France. French soldiers stole the art after invading the Kingdom of Dahomey in 1892.

The treasure trove included statues of kings, the thrones of King Ghezo and King Gegle, wood and metal doors from King Glele’s palace, and the copper and silver portable altar of King Behanzin. Whilst nine of the works had been on display in Paris, 17 had been languishing in storage.

For the 66 days they were displayed, free to visit, in Cotonou Palace, 200,000 people came to see them, 90 percent of them from Benin. “I’ve seen people in tears,” said Azu Nwagbogu – founder and director of the African artists’ foundation in Lagos, in an interview for France24. “Benin is one of the smallest countries on the continent and it’s leading the charge, it’s put on an incredible exhibition.”

The charge is this: an endeavour to return African art – the majority of which is still held outside of the continent – back to where it belongs.

Benin’s modest but interesting museums currently open to visitors include the Ouidah Museum of History, which gets around 30,000 visitors a year and is part of the ‘slave route’ you can follow through the city. The nearby Zinsou Foundation of African Art houses modern art. Porto-Novo, the capital, has the ethnographic Museum, and the Musee Honme – this is the site of the palace of King Toffa.

These places don’t just give visitors an insight into modern Beninese culture, but also hosts international art. The free Zinsou Foundation has two locations in the country, and has past exhibitions have included American artist Keith Haring in 2016, and Tunisian artist Aicha Snoussi, in 2021.

The Alexandre Senou Adande ethnographic Museum in Porto-Novo holds around 1,280 objects in a small colonial-era mansion in the center of the city. Once a year for World Museums Day, the museum’s famous masks are taken from their display and worn by a Gelede performance group, for a show that attracts a big crowd in the city. It’s hard to imagine the British Museum, which holds eight million objects, devoting the same regular attention to the 441 artefacts and photographs it currently holds from the Republic of Benin, many of which are not on display at all in its galleries.

Yet, in other ways, Benin’s contemporary culture scene is emerging, rather than well-established. There aren’t many places where you’ll find creatives tapping away at laptops in gallery cafes. Whilst Benin is investing in museums, it’s been reported that there is only one commercial cinema in the whole of Benin. It’s in Cotonou, and it’s often showing films from Nollywood – Nigeria’s main film-making hub.

In 2022, the cinema sold out of tickets to the Hollywood film The Woman King. This film told the story of the real-life Agojie, the female warriors who protected the kingdom of Dahomey in the 1800s, and was a rare representation of Beninese culture in American film.

Whilst the plot of The Woman King takes place during the Atlantic slave trade, it might be surprising for visitors to learn that schools in West Africa barely cover slavery, even as many other parts of the world work to address and acknowledge their role.

Cultural tours of Benin are often organised so that they deliberately visit areas that follow very traditional ways of life. Travelers might stumble upon circumcision ceremonies, long, public funeral processions with mourners garbed in black and red, and visceral rituals featuring animal sacrifice at fetishes. In the side streets of cities like Abomey, voodoo temples abound.

Visitors who come for Ouidah’s annual Voodoo Festival are often overwhelmed by the spontaneous acts of celebration and festivity that crop up across the city. Practitioners fall into trances, in which they convulse and grimace, unrousable, even by fire. There are fire eaters, dancers, and drummers. Increasingly, visitors come from all over the world to watch.

The culture is not here to shock tourists; it is not here for tourists at all. Yet more and more tourists visit, and visit for the shock value. Good cultural tourism should not ‘other’ cultures in this way. It should be, instead, about finding connection. An increasingly large subset of tourists is also visiting the homeland of their ancestors, and do just that.

“I was excited to be in Togo and Benin where animism and vodoun are widely practised,” said Marguerite, who went on our Ghana, Togo and Benin vacation “Despite my Catholic upbringing, I felt a thin thread of connection, a curiosity about the religion of my ancestors.”

The Taneka villages, which are scattered in the mountainous terrain of north-west Benin, each have their own king – and visitors can be granted an audience. “My husband and I were thrilled that he wanted us to encourage more visitors from Jamaica,” says Marguerite.

Not every Taneka village welcomes visitors. Tourists are usually taken to a particular village that has agreed to host them, called Taneka Koko.

Every Taneka village has a king, and every Taneka village has a fetish priest. These are spiritual leaders who act as intermediaries between the living and the spirit worlds. There is an area of the village where those initiated into the religion live. The fetish priest and village healers might be found, wearing coverings of goat or monkey skin, smoking long pipes made from horn. They are believed to be phenomenally powerful.

“We consult extensively with local tribal elders to ensure that our presence here is very much welcomed,” explains our Benin culture travel partner, Native eye, “We feel that it is very important to be seen as guests here rather than outsiders come to merely look.” A great deal of thought goes into how to show the culture of the country in a way that demystifies its traditions without being reductive. Respect is paramount. Rather than tourists and Beninese people being caught in a standoff either side of a camera, our partners work hard to create a host and guest dynamic.

A good cultural vacation in Benin should strive to break the paradigms of photographer and subject, observer and observed. “Recognise that the culture of the people you visit has as much validity as yours,” says Marguerite.

Coming as a guest – as Marguerite did – gets you closer to understanding the culture, simply because you are living it. “The experience was intense because we were so close to the local people and their day-to-day activities,” says Marguerite.

Responsible tour operators are working hard to make sure cultural exchange is enjoyable for everyone and goes beyond just money changing hands. “Our philosophy is to have a limited amount of trips – usually between one and three a year for each of our itineraries,” – that’s the ethos our partner, Undiscovered Destinations. “By limiting our presence in areas where local culture can be quite fragile,” they write, “we hope to avoid as much as possible the phenomenon whereby an area changes in character due to repeated and prolonged exposure to tourism”.

Cities, on the other hand, are well set up and would welcome additional visitors, as too would Benin’s upcoming galleries – at least for now. Benin wants to increase its number of cultural visitors and show them what contemporary Beninese culture can look like. In the future, perhaps, visitors will not need to tread so carefully to preserve a ‘vanishing’ culture, but will instead be seduced by a cultural tour de force.

And you won’t have to travel to Benin to get a taste. In 2024, Azu Nwagbogu will curate Benin’s debut entry into the Venice Biennale. It’s the first time the country has had a pavilion at the world-renowned art exhibition in the show’s illustrious 129-year history. Just as Benin restores its treasures, it sends art out again – the makings of a new cultural powerhouse, indeed.