Ganvié: Benin's city built on water to escape the slave trade

Benin was a bonus. The roads had been kind, nothing serious had broken, and we
finished the Togo leg with days in hand, so we added a country. The first thing we
did was take a boat out to Ganvié: a town of some thirty-seven thousand people built
entirely on stilts over a lagoon, sometimes called the Venice of Africa. The only way
in is by water.

The reason it sits out there is the part that stays with you. Generations ago people
built on Lake Nokoué to escape slave-raiders who, by custom, would not follow them
onto water. A whole town grew out of that one act of hiding, and it never came back
to shore. The descendants of the people who fled are still living above the same lake.

Life has been rebuilt to work on water. The men fish, the women sell the catch from a
floating market where boats raft up side by side to trade, and a family needs three
boats: one for the husband, one for the wife, one for the children to paddle to school,
which they do alone from about the age of six. Fresh water comes from the village itself.
Everything else arrives by canoe.

Our guide gave us the breakdown with a grin. Most of the village fishes, a few are
artisans, and a slice of them, he said, quietly run fuel across from Nigeria. He told
it as a joke against themselves, and I have no way of knowing whether it is true.

It would be easy to photograph Ganvié as a curiosity and move on. What makes it worth
the detour is the why underneath it: a community that chose the water over a slave
ship, and built a life out there so complete that nobody ever left. Go by boat, take
someone local who can tell you how it started, and give it longer than the tour wants
to give it.