From the adventurer, he has above all the curiosity. For his penultimate summer issue, François Pécheux proves it once again by descending from north to south, over more than 500 kilometers, the Ouémé, the largest inland river in Benin. With the only certainty: “At the end it’s the sea”. For six seasons, he has been navigating on sight between, on the port side, the concept of this magazine of discovery – the journalist puts himself on the stage, carrying a basin of sand and sharing food and lodging with the natives – and, on starboard, high quality reports on the country visited.
Also François Pécheux does not hesitate to pay with his own person: even before having found the source of the Ouémé, near Mount Tanéka, he will have thus coughed while smoking a long pipe under the “talking tree”, with a village chief who is not turning 80; he will have drunk water from a well; before being bitten by ants more than a centimeter long and riding a moped, the preferred means of transport of Beninese.
These adventures, whose lightness can amuse, also allow you to visit a village in northern Benin and rub shoulders with the inhabitants who live there, while Benin has emerged, in 2020, from the back of the twenty-five poorest countries. of the planet, and has since continued to recover, with growth of 7.2% in 2021 and 6% in 2022, according to the World Bank.
Great agricultural valley
There is activity 200 kilometers further south, in Ouinhi, where men extract sand from the river before women carry it to the trucks that transport it to town, where it is used as construction material. But while François Pécheux struggles to lift a basin, Beninese women carry an average of 100 per day, paid 5 euros.
Further down the Ouémé, Adjohoun is the largest agricultural valley after that of the Nile. Here again, behind the “gaguesque” situation of a François Pécheux unable to rise more than 50 centimeters from the ground to catch bunches of palm nuts, the locals are having fun: “Ami François, at work. And viewers learn about traditional and artisanal palm oil production.
The arrival in Ganvié, known to be the largest lakeside city in West Africa, was expected. The stopover will prove to be enriching, both in terms of its history (born three hundred years ago on the water, to protect itself from slavers) and the importance of the Christian, celestial and evangelist cults. Equally expected, the capital, Cotonou, on the other hand, will mark a break, with its buildings, its teeming traffic and its inhabitants dressed in Western style. François Pécheux had warned: you should not travel with preconceptions.
