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The Shifting Shoreline of the Gulf of Guinea

Benin Coastline with Waves

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. Route de Peche


Fishing Hut

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. Courants, Drapeau Rouge

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.

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