Benin: When The Corn Is This High    
By Kelley Calvert

As I arrive at the camp, the women clap their hands together and greet me with so much enthusiasm that laughter bursts through my nervousness and creates an immediate bond—we are all new to this experience. I am perhaps the first foreigner to visit this remote village in northern Benin.

Let me restate: village is in itself too big a word for this family’s collection of mud-caked houses and straw-thatched roofs. Language is always the problem in this world. In a never-ending conundrum, I lack the words to explain my ideas because they do not translate into this language, and I cannot accurately describe this world because it does not fit into my language. As I follow the women to their homes, they chatter at me and laugh when they see that I do not understand. Every person believes that their corner of the world is the world. The fact that I do not speak Fulfalde is cause for constant amusement. How did this girl make it through life without learning Fulfalde?

I met the women in the ‘real’ village a few kilometers down the road. It is a real village because many people live there, and they have a market. The market in West Africa is the center of social life. The women come out with their goods: pots, pans, tomatoes, onions, peppers, fruit, and fabrics for making clothes. Everyone in the village comes to buy these necessities for the week, making the market a bazarre of human activity. The men stumble by drunk from the local wheat brew, and children chase bike tires with sticks down dusty pathways, while the women chat away the day.  Aside from the commercial purpose to the market, social ties are strengthened by hours of conversation with neighbors, relatives, and visitors from surrounding villages.

Generally, villages have one or two markets a week, and these market days alternate with the  surrounding villages. In this way, a crafty businesswoman can sell her wares nearly every day of the week.

 The Fulani women come to the market with cheese. That is what they are known for selling. The Fulani are different from other groups in West Africa; they are perhaps the group least touched by colonialism. They have refused the colonial languages of French and English remaining faithful to Fulfalde, a language with several dialects spreading through Mali, Niger, Ghana, Benin, and Nigeria. They live away from the large villages and tend to live in small camps.

Traditionally, they are herders and their animals are of great material and psychological value to them. Their cows give them milk from which they make the cheese, which is extremely valuable at the market. Last week I bought cheese from them and asked them how they make it. That is how I ended up here—a dusty corner of West Africa hidden by weeds, trees, and crops. The village is traceable only by small paths in the undergrowth made by bare feet tromping home.

The Fulani are incredible to look at because they are beautiful, yet the word ‘beautiful’ is again inadequate.

What is recognizable about art, what makes it immediately present is ones intuitive reaction to it. Like art, beauty is immediately identifiable but unexplainable. We know a piece of art by what it tells us beyond the paint.

Beauty in a human is that recognition of spirit, that moment that stops us and forces us to stare for a brief dumb instant before looking away in embarrassment. The Fulani women are known for elaborate decoration. They are not beautiful in the notorious Greek aesthetic; they are beautiful like a piece of art- angles and color, lines and detail. Their faces are tattooed with ink and time, their skin jumping out with color, beaded necklaces and headdresses, mirrors and Leggos. They have taken what they could find and created themselves.

             

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