Long gone are the days when the West African coastline looked either insipid or
grim, though large stretches of it look as uninhabited as it did in the days of
Conrad.  But the seas remain dangerous and, even where the indelible mark of
human intervention has changed the coastline temporarily, nature continues to
dominate to this day.  In fact, the shoreline along the Gulf of Guinea remains
in some ways, as dangerous as ever.  Having the ocean at Cotonou's sandy fringe
makes me think rather than living in Africa we really just live at the edge of
it.  The Africa of reputation – the caravan trails through the arid
interior, the dusty sahel trampled under the feet of wild animals, the dense,
impenetrable jungle – all lies inland from our breezy and wide-horizoned
vantage point.  But the coastline of the Gulf of Guinea, of which Benin claims
a narrow slice, makes a good metaphor for the continent itself: tempting but
untamed, and forbidding, if not downright dangerous.  Joseph Conrad was
captivated by the Gulf of Guinea over a century ago when he sailed past a
century ago en route to the Congo.  At the time, West Africa's shoreline was
just a string of isolated trading posts unsuspecting of the impending
imperialist scramble that would end with the feverish partition of an inhabited
continent.  From Heart of Darkness:


[The coastline] was almost featureless, as if still in the making, with an
aspect of monotonous grimness.  The edge of a colossal jungle, so dark-green as
to be almost black, fringed with white surf, ran straight, like a ruled line,
far, far away along a blue sea whose glitter was blurred by a creeping mist.
The sun was fierce, the land seemed to glisten and drip with steam.  Here and
there grayish-whitish specks showed up clustered inside the white surf, with a
flag flying above them perhaps.  Settlements some centuries old, and still no
bigger than pinheads on the untouched expanse of their background. … 



We called at some more places with farcical names, where the merry dance of
death and trade goes on in a still and earthly atmosphere as of an overheated
catacomb; all along the formless coast bordered by dangerous surf, as if Nature
herself had tried to ward off intruders; in and out of rivers, streams of death
in life, whose banks were rotting into mud, whose waters, thickened into slime,
invaded the contorted mangroves, that seemed to writhe at us in the extremity
of an impotent despair.


Long gone are the days when the West African coastline looked either insipid or
grim, though large stretches of it look as uninhabited as it did in the days of
Conrad.  But the seas remain dangerous and, even where the indelible mark of
human intervention has changed the coastline temporarily, nature continues to
dominate to this day.  In fact, the shoreline along the Gulf of Guinea remains
in some ways, as dangerous as ever.

The road west of Cotonou known as La Route de Peche leads along the shoreline
towards Togo and eventually, Accra.  But the pavement ends at the airport on
Cotonou's western extreme, and beyond, the roads unravels into a rutted dirt
track that runs for hundreds of miles along the uniform and unhilly African
coast.  Just outside the city limits, clusters of beach bars and popular
weekend destinations give way to villages of palm thatch huts tucked among
groves of coconut palms.  They are the temporary homes of the fishermen who
live there as long as it takes to gather up a catch from the meager waters of
the coast, and they camp there, grilling fish over open fires, drying sardines
in the roadside sun and preparing the better fish for market.  As we bump
slowly down the tortuous road, chickens and goats flee from roadside and
children dressed only in dingy underpants smile \"yovo! yovo!\" at us.

Through the coconut palms and over the low, scrubby dune lies the long sandy
coastline that makes up much of the Gulf of Guinea: a steep, short beach of
coarse, brown sugar sand that slopes down to meet the water.  The horizon is
almost limitless to both the east and the west, and the eye is drawn naturally
to where the sand and the forested coastline disappears into the sea mist,
unencumbered by the sort of hotels, harbors, and docks that break up the
coastline of just about everywhere else I've ever lived.  And in the absence of
human construction, the sea is the principal actor on the stage.

The waves thunder incessantly along the shoreline, striking at an angle that
enables the sea to carry away the sand in a strong and persistent littoral
drift.  Hardly anyone swims off the Cotonou beaches, as tenacious rip tides
pull swimmers out beyond the waves and eastward along the shore – or
under.  Rather, it remains provides sustenance for the fishing families that
ply the coastline in simple wooden boats they propel with outboard motors,
laying out nets and wide semicircles against the shore, then dragging them in
by their two ends up and onto the sand.  The sea is far more dangerous to them,
as they must force their heavy wooden craft through the surf to fish, and send
swimmers back through it to shore with the knotted ends of the fishing nets.

The strength of the sea along this stretch of coast is most evident on
Cotonou's east side.  Over the decades since Cotonou's wooden pier was replaced
by a modern port with a stone jetty breakwater at its back, the shifting sands
of this littoral current have rapidly accumulated along the up-current side,
and the current, sweeping back to meet the African coast, has taken a bite out
of Cotonou's eastern side, allowing advancing waves that claw their way
inexorably inland sweep away several Cotonou neighborhoods over the years.  But
the same process is well known to every harbor pilot that has had to guide
ships into Cotonou harbor across a channel that grows increasingly glutted with
the sand the current deposits on the sea floor.


Regardless of the strong currents, the Gulf of Guinea is gorgeous to look at,
and cautious swimmers can splash around at the water's edge.  And the unspoiled
coastline has whetted the appetite of many developers, economists, and
politicians, who would like to find the investors to develop the Route de Peche
into something better than palm huts and potholes.  If that enormous project
ever comes to fruition, Benin's coastline will sport the luxury hotels and
vacation spots that will provide more consistent income to the locals than the
artisanal fishing has, and it would alter the look of the shoreline
dramatically.

But until then, the jungle, the dangerous surf, the mist, and the quiet
coastline remain in many ways just as Conrad remembered it.  And for an
adventurer in search of mysteries and charm, that's not a bad thing at all.