A pirogue
near Ganvié
Lake Nokoué
Benin
Dear o,
For the first time in Africa I wish I were
a child growing up here. I imagine
getting up in the middle of the night, sneaking past my parents and brothers
and sisters. I crawl down through the
secret trapdoor next to the black rubber-covered shower stall, drop into the
dark water, and swim between the stilts to my friend across the canal, who
waits at the usual spot with the red face painted onto the bamboo. In his older brother’s dugout canoe we got
out to catch fish jumping from the farmed reeds into the moonlight.
This is Ganvié, the town on stilts. It was built several kilometres out on the
lake by the Tofinu people in the 1600s, to avoid the Dahomey slave traders who
were prohibited by belief from going onto the water. The town – as well as its people, their
customs, their livelihoods, and to some extent their isolation – has lasted the
centuries. Most of the bamboo houses and
shops we pass by are relatively new. I
can’t imagine the oldest constructed part of Ganvié is older than a century,
solely because of the longevity of wood sunk in water. But in the centre of the floating city is an
artificial raised-earth section with a large, well-kept mosque, sturdy houses
and businesses, and plenty of farming.
Beyond this human-made island are a few other goat-pens and gardens,
secured from the water by a wood floor and a layer of soil. The canals are busy with market traders,
food-sellers, cargo holds, and fishermen (mostly boys, some as young as six
with a dugout boat and cast net of their own).
The rows and rows of houses are connected by catwalks, ropes, thin beams
and, of course, secret passageways. A
woman was just sharing a joke with her two friends on a ‘porch’ (dock) with
their feet in the water, their laughter carried by the water throughout this
echoing, labyrinthine civilisation. I’ve
heard that in Mongolia a child learns to ride a horse before learning to
walk. I wouldn’t be surprised if the
girls and boys here take their first steps between the gunwales of a pirogue, with a paddle in hand.
I’ve been to Venice, and I don’t think
anyone else who has could visit Ganvié without making the comparison. People get around by boat. Stuff is carried by boat. Tourists come to ride in a boat. But the travel-and-compare game is quickly
ineffective in Ganvié, and it becomes a bore
not long after one moves from the idea of a place to the place
itself. Venice is made of stone, marble,
brick and tiles. It is cobbled,
signposted and totally accessible on foot (once you’re on the island). There are statues, monuments, chapels,
cathedrals, museums, palaces, city squares, gardens, towers and tourist
information centres, not to mention all the hotels, restaurants, shops,
galleries and – yes – actual homes.
Venice is huge, cosmopolitan, modern (behind the Renaissance mask), and
far older than Ganvié.
Perhaps, hundreds of years ago, Venice was
not unlike Ganvié; at some point it must have been an unassuming collection of
people out on the water trying to make a livelihood and a life. But today, the ethos of Venice is totally
different: it is all about permanence.
The people of Venice, or more accurately the people who want to preserve
Venice, are unconcerned with crops and families, goats and traditions. They are fighting a war with the sea, a
struggle that goes back centuries to hold back the tides and the storms and
natural cycles of our world. 21st-century
climate change threatens Venice all the more, but the Doges as well as the historical preservation societies have all
known what it means for the oceans to rise.
And this is what makes Venice so fascinating: it is not just an island
battling the swamp. It is all humanity
battling time. It is our desperate
desire, in our own lives and in the lifetimes of our civilisations, to make a
mark, be remembered, and with any measure of impossible luck, last
forever. In Venice, as elsewhere, we
lace our roots with steel and emboss our branches with gold. The tree’s future will grow longer, yes, but
it cannot be immortal. Though we’ll try,
by the gods, we’ll try.
There is no such arrogance in Ganvié. Maybe in every boy or girl is the dream to be
different, be special, and live on through the millenia; but nobody here acts
like it. Nobody builds like it. Nobody talks like it. When in the middle of the night I cup and
kick the water, silent as a fish, on the way to my friend’s brother’s canoe,
I’ll think of it as the most significant thing that’s ever been done. Our jokes will be the funniest ever told, our
laughs the hardest on the belly there ever was, and the moonlight monster who
almost ate half our canoe (see the tooth marks?) the biggest, meanest, most
aggressive creature the world has ever seen.
Ganvié won’t be a 16th-century world, an older world, a
tourists’ world, an expensive world, or even my parents’ world – it will be
mine, made by my hands and feet and eyes in every moment I live. And there are treasures underneath the stilt
houses; the very fact that they are buried makes them treasure. I won’t worship the wood on which I
sleep. If I ever do sleep.
The unspoken irony of my letter is not lost
on me. For a healthy, well-traveled,
privileged westerner to say he wished he could have grown up an African, in an
African village, on a foundation of precarious African bamboo. Not only that, but a westerner with an
interest verging on belief in architecture, history and, well, permanence. Because the same boy I wish I could be would
probably trade wishes with me, does this make me ignorant for the dream?
Africa has the fastest-growing population
on earth, as the twin result of improving birth rates and longer lives – but
infant mortality is still abhorrently high, and most lives are still tragically
short. A typical boy who grows up in
Ganvié can expect to do what he learned to do long before puberty: fish. He can hope to avoid or at least survive
disease which to this day plagues his continent: malaria, AIDS, sleeping
sickness, yellow fever, typhoid, hepatitis, even polio. He can aim to keep his health, to feed
himself and his family, find and feed a good wife, raise and feed good
children, and earn the respect of his community. If education, or politics, or travel – or
archicture, history and permanence – enter into his sphere of desires, then
these will not so much change him into an educated, politically-minded traveler
with an interest in history, but rather more likely into the town dreamer. The absent-minded fisherman. The quiet one who always wanted to learn to
read properly, and the one who as a boy knew more words for the pale foreigners
than merely, ‘donnez-moi l’argent’. If the boy skips town, he’ll likely end up in
the big city of Cotonou, making bricks, selling peanuts, or
if he’s lucky and smart, driving a taxi.
In much of Africa, Ganvié being
no different, who you are is who you were born to be. Do I still wish to swim in the reeds and
splash from below my older sister in her sleep?
Yes.
That’s the gift of imagination. I
don’t have to turn back time to live a little in Ganvié and Venice. It’s something we all have. I can see it in the eyes of the little boy in
his canoe, who sits and looks at me between the stilts, floating beside the red
face painted into the bamboo.
Yours,
QM
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| Ganvié |
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| Ganvié |
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| Ganvié mosque |
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| Ganvié |
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| Ganvié |
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| Ganvié market |
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| Ganvié boy fisherman |
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| Ganvié |
