Gandalf Around The World: Porto Novo, Benin

2019-08-03/05: Porto Novo. Songhai Center, more than an agricultural training center. Honmé museum, former king palace.

Saturday August 03:
The arrival in Porto-Novo is quite chaotic but overall goes quite well and we arrive at 4.30pm at our destination the Songhai Center.
The caretaker advises us to go and settle in the parking lot in front of the hotel, 250 m further on, we will be more peaceful there.

Our location at the Songhai Center

Unfortunately there is no guided tour tomorrow Sunday and the last Saturday tour ends soon. We will have to wait Monday morning.
Once installed in the parking lot, we return to the entrance, passing the large hut that serves as a church and the restaurant to the shop where the centre's products are offered for sale.

The Songhai center shop.

Sunday August 04: Honmé museum.
The Honmé museum is the former royal palace of the kings of Porto-Novo which was turned into a museum in 1988 after several years abandoned after the death of the last king in 1976 and due to a problem of succession. Today two kings are still fighting for the throne, descendants of two different branches of the dynasty founded by the first king Tè Agbanlin.

We pay 2 × 2000 CFA at the small reception building which also serves as curios shop. François will guide us into the palace. He does his job well and will even allow us to take pictures indoors, where it is expressly prohibited, "because you are really very nice". Understood and don't worry François ! You will get your little extra at the end of the visit!

Francois, our guide.

The site covers 2.5 ha but only 1.5 ha are open to the public. The buildings were built around various impluvium courtyards including the court of the queens, the court of the king and the court of the queen mother. The queen mother is the second most important character in the kingdom, she is chosen by an oracle among the paternal aunts of the king. She is the one who manages the entire administration of the palace. She is also the one who chooses among the king's 112 wives, the two who will live in the palace for three weeks before returning to the women's residence outside the city and being replaced by the following two.

The King's yard

Although officially christian (François shows us the tombs decorated with crosses of Toffa and his father) it is the voodoo and animist rites that were practiced in the palace. This is demonstrated by the small garden with a kind of temple where the king made his offerings, a cupboard where he used to come every morning to make incantations (for example to hunt an epidemic in a village in his kingdom with a holly broom) or this stone bench at the entrance of his residence where a dog was regularly sacrificed and his blood spilled in the small bowl carved in stone to drive out any bad intentions of his visitors.
François leads us to the door of the dark room, a dark room where kings committed suicide in shame after having failed in their mission, for example after having lost a war or not having been able to contain an epidemic. According to François it would have happened twice since the foundation of the dynasty in 1688. Eighteen kings reigned over Porto-Novo until 1908 until King Toffa signed the treaty placing Porto-Novo under French protectorate . The seven kings who followed until the 1976 succession crisis no longer had political power.
We end up in the people's court. Among other things, this is where the new king is introduced to his folk after the previous king "went on a journey." Because a king does not die, he simply goes on a journey.

The people's court .....

.... and the new king.

We are handing over the long awaited note by François before leaving the residence and taking a look at the last buildings on the site: the courthouse and the prison.

It is just 5pm when we leave the museum. We want to walk to the botanical garden just over 1.5 km from the museum. We pass a pretty conical voodoo temple, the Zangbeto temple, then a little further in front of the remains of what were certainly magnificent colonial buildings unfortunately completely neglected and almost in ruins.

The Zangbeto voodoo temple

Old colonial houses

Monday August 05: Visit of Songhai Center.
The tour starts on time at 8:30 am and one of the young people in training serves as our guide. The training lasts 18 months, he is in the 14th month.
The Songhai Center looks like what you could call a model farm, but it is above all a training center for training and agricultural experimentation. It was founded in 1985 by a Nigerian Dominican father who became American and now also Beninese with a doctorate from the University of California.
The principle is simple on paper: it is an integrated and autonomous system based on agriculture, animal husbandry and fish farming, 3 interdependent activities. As plant production is used to feed farm animals and fish, animal “digestion” waste is transformed into fertilizer for agriculture and bait for fish and fish pond water (runoff water ) is used for watering and preparing poultry feed.

At the center of it all, fueled by the residues from the 3 activities, is the biogas production facility which supplies part of the energy to the center.

Our young guide explains the operating principle of the center.

All these primary products (primary production) are transformed on site (secondary production) using machines of all kinds manufactured in the workshops of the center, "tertiary production" consists of the reception, transport and marketing of products .
This is theory. The visit will allow us to discover the details of the complexity of the project and its organization.
The concept is very successful since today additional production centers have multiplied in the country and even in neighboring countries up to Ivory Coast and Nigeria.
The visit is extremely interesting and the young apprentice who guides us clearly knows what he is talking about. A very beautiful and promising project which does not need outside help by self-financing. The best part is that the training of young people is free, they only have to pay for their uniforms and their school supplies. They are fed and accommodated free of charge and finance their training through their work in the center. There are between 200 and 400 young people in training here.