Wednesday, 8 October, 2008
Our last day in Kara.
Today we drove north past the turn-off for Pessare and on to Kante. We picked up Jon by the side of the road after several miscommunications with Peter via their cell phones. Taylor, Jon's replacement Peace Corps volunteer (PCV), was there too but she wasn't coming with us because there wasn't room in the car. We drove north and east from Kante all on unpaved roads into the UNESCO-protected area with the so-called fortress villages. On my map of Togo and Benin, it says that Tamberma County was settled by the Tamberma people, closely related to the Somba in Benin, in the 17th cenntury as they sought refuge from the king of Abomey as he raided for slaves to trade with the Portugese. We crossed the Koran river over this one-lane bridge with most of the side rails missing:
Jon took us to one of the furthest fortress villages, I think in Warango on my map. He knew a family there that lives in a two-story fortress house and he took us inside and up to the second story. (The cover photograph of this Tales of Togo blog is a picture of this magnificent house.) At the entrance door, he explained that they considered the house to be a part of the family and that it was made up of different parts of the body.Outside the entrance were several smaller conical structures (visible in the cover picture), each topped by an inverted calabash bowl. They are used as a fetish and for sacrificing small animals and chickens on top. A larger rounded cone about 8 ft high represented a major god. The outer walls are made of mud, stones, and sticks, covered with a smooth layer of mud and cow dung with patterns marked in certain areas. On the very top of the wall above the entrance were two raised nobs - a third had recently been broken off to indicate the death of the man who had lived in the house.
The front entrance to the house was about 6 ft tall and wide enough to let a cow pass through. Cows were kept in the house if needed for protection. Two small rooms were on either side of the entrance way. In one of them, two girls demonstrated how they alternately pounded on some grain in a hollow in the ground to turn it into flour.
The first major inner area had the skulls and jaw bones of various sacrificed animals and birds hanging from the ceiling. It was considered a holy room so Jon warned me not to take photographs there. To the right was a passageway where the cows would have lived. It led to several secret rooms where people could hide if necessary. To the left and up a step was the kitchen with a fire still burning.
(The picture shows Carolyn inspecting this area.) Walking through the kitchen got us up another step and onto the roof. The one bedroom under the central thatched roof was entered through a very small hole in the wall.
(The picture shows Carolyn looking into the bedroom and Jon looking on.)Jon said the bedroom had been known to sleep 12 people but there was just one mat on the floor smaller than a single bed when I looked in.
Three other conical thatched roofs on the corners of the building covered the grain storage containers similar to the one we had seen in Alex's compound at ground level. (This is a reference to an earlier visit with another PCV who lived in a nearby village called Pessere.) Here they were perched one story up but it was not clear why as it would appear that they could have been knocked off relatively easily if somebody wanted to get at the stored grain. I climbed up to the apex of the thatching on a pole with places to put your feet cut out to form a simple ladder.
There a wooden handle let me remove the top of the thatching and peer inside. (I didn't realize it at the time but that handle was shaped so that you could use it to hold the upside-down thatched "lid" in place while you looked inside.) The volume was divided into three or four sections with vertical walls but all appeared empty. Jon said this was because they hadn't started the harvest yet. (It was the end of the rainy season.)
They were drying various items on the roof, however, in small quantities - beans, peppers, etc. - in the hot sun. Jon pointed out a failed crop surrounding the house with what looked like dead corn stalks. Apparently, this often happens if the farmer plants the corn at the time of the first rain and then a dry spell ensues. The new corn shoots die from lack of water.
On climbing back down to the entrance, I took several photos and we gave the woman outside 1,500 CFAs (about $3) for letting us see her house. The woman had an interesting white stone attached to her face below her lower lip. Jon said this was traditional.
Apparently, this was a very typical two-story fortress house in the area. We saw several others on the way but Jon said that many more were there but not visible from the road because the vegetation was so high at this time of the year before harvest time. He promised us a view from one of the mountains nearby so that we could see more clearly the extent of the village but we never made it. Instead we drove across the border into Benin to a small restaurant for a late lunch. The border guards on both the Togo and Benin sides seemed quite friendly, especially when Jon told them we were Corps de la Paix volunteers. They didn't even want to see their PCV passports and never asked for anything from any of the rest of us.
We waited for about half an hour for the rice and beans and fried cheese dish at the restaurant. It was pretty good but scarcely lived up to the build-up given it, first by Amanda (another PCV), then by Peter, and especially by Jon. They got a pot of superhot sauce that almost made them gag but they declared it delicious.
We drove the 32 km directly back to Kante, stopping on the way to visit Jon's Togolese friends. They took us to the local market to try to find wooden statues for Carolyn to buy. We walked about half a mile to the crazy market with many people milling about but we were too late and many of the storekeepers were closing for the day. As a result we barely made it back to Kante by dark and we had to drive the ~50 km back to Kara (on the Route Nationale) with our headlights on. This was a bit scary through the mountain pass with big trucks grinding along so very slowly to avoid going out of control, some without any tail lights at all.
