ABSTRACT
This chapter makes the case that emotional responses to landscapes and politics of mobility, whether collective or individual, can serve as important categories of analysis in explaining social, political, and economic transformations. It does by expanding upon the conceptual framework outlined by Howard and Shain and examining localized and impassioned responses by members of the Ọhọri community to specific roads and paths carving through their natal homeland in a valley of wetlands. That members of the Ọhọri community blockaded roads into their social and political space during an early colonial era and violently attacked functionaries shortly after Dahomey's independence indicates the extent to which landscapes of mobility can evoke emotional and politicized responses. And in doing so, people living in the valley have re-interpreted and produced new ways in which to imagine their sense of community. Various road building schemes in colonial and post-independence eras occurred in the valley with varying degrees of success and failure.
