West to East (1958)

We had allowed ourselves, in terms of engagements at the other end, two months for the four-thousand-mile journey from Ghana to Uganda, but we were always clear that half this period should be spent in Nigeria, where my professional links with the university college at Ibadan were close, and likely to get closer, and where so much more was going on in the overlapping fields of archaeology and oral tradition than in any other African country. The implied consequence, that we would have to rather rush through the French and Belgian territories along our route, was sad, but it had to be accepted. From Accra we followed the coast road nearly all the way to Lagos, crossing the Volta by ferry at Tefle into the eastern part of ex-German Togo, which had been a French mandate since 1918 and was to become an independent country in 1958. Our stay there was confined to a single night in a charming rest house in a grove of palm trees beside the sea at Denu and to the acquisition of some CFA francs at a slightly reduced rate of exchange from one of the many Hausa traders, armed with briefcases, who flagged us down on the approaches to the capital city of LomÉ. ¹ Next day we crossed into Dahomey, known today as BÉnin, and there we made a diversion northwards of something less than one hundred miles to visit the capital of the precolonial kingdom of Dahomey at Abomey. After their occupation the French had made their colonial capital on the coast at Cotonou, and soon afterwards they had abolished the traditional kingdom, converting Abomey into a provincial headquarters and recognising the head of the royal line only under the ambiguous title of le reprÉsentant du roi (king's representative), the current holder of which lived in a modest house on the outskirts of town. The palace area, occupied and added to by nine successive rulers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, had become a museum that also housed the local offices of the Institut FranÇais d'Afrique Noire (IFAN).