Cotonou

Cotonou began as a small fishing settlement on the sandbar between Lake Nokoué and the sea, in territory controlled by the Kingdom of Dahomey. Its name is explained from a Fon phrase meaning "by the river of death". The village is thought to have been formally founded by King Ghezo in 1830, and a French treaty of 1851 allowed a trading post there; under King Glele the territory was ceded to France by a treaty signed in 1878, which King Béhanzin tried without success to challenge after Glele's death in 1889. The town grew rapidly after the harbour was built in 1908, and a channel cut through the sandbar joins the lake to the ocean, dividing the city.

Under French rule Cotonou became the colony's commercial outlet, with the railway inland to Bohicon and Parakou starting here and trade in palm oil and cotton passing over the wharf. Porto-Novo remained the capital, but business and population moved steadily west. After independence in 1960 the shift became decisive: a deep-water port opened in the 1960s, the government's offices and ministries settled here even though the constitution kept Porto-Novo as the official capital, and Cotonou became the seat of government in practice.

The city expanded across the lagoon into Akpakpa and north towards Abomey-Calavi, absorbing villages as it went. The Marxist-Leninist years under Mathieu Kérékou left their mark on the streetscape. Public works in recent years have reshaped the centre with paved and drained streets and a rebuilt seafront, and the building of a new bridge across part of the market forced some Dantokpa traders to move. Coastal erosion, which worsened after the deep-water port was built, and flooding in the low-lying quarters remain the city's hardest problems.

Cotonou is a Fon-speaking city with large Yoruba, Goun and Mina communities and traders from across West Africa, and French serves as the common tongue between them. Christianity, Islam and Vodun are all practised openly and often by the same families: a Catholic cathedral, mosques, evangelical churches broadcasting their services, and shrines to Legba at compound gates all belong to the same streets. The Zangbeto, the raffia-covered night guardians of Gun communities, and the Egungun masqueraders of Yoruba tradition appear in processions that stop traffic.

Music is the city's strongest export. Cotonou's orchestras of the 1960s and 1970s mixed Fon rhythms with Afrobeat, soul and Latin music, and the recordings of that era have found audiences abroad; Angélique Kidjo, who was born in Ouidah, is the country's best-known musician. Evenings belong to the maquis, the open-air bars where food, beer and loud music share a courtyard, and to the clubs of Jonquet.

The city also has an art scene out of proportion to its size, built around the Fondation Zinsou and a generation of Beninese sculptors and painters who work with salvaged materials. Sculptures and monuments raised in public squares in recent years, among them a large bronze of a Dahomey woman soldier, have made the debate about how the kingdom is remembered a visible part of city life. Manners are formal and unhurried: greetings first, bargaining expected in the markets, and a strong obligation to feed a guest.

The city proper had 679,012 inhabitants at the 2012 count, and the continuous urban area spreading north into Abomey-Calavi and east to Sèmè-Kpodji holds over two million people. Growth has been outwards rather than upwards, and the sandbar is full, so new quarters spread across drained wetland north of the lake.

Work turns on the port, on trade with Nigeria, Niger and Burkina Faso, and on the market economy around Dantokpa, where thousands of traders, many of them women, deal in cloth, food and manufactured goods. Government ministries, banks and the university at Abomey-Calavi employ many others; a very large share of the rest of the city earns its living informally, from zemidjan riding to street selling. The motorcycle is the engine of that economy, with an estimated 72,000 zémidjan working in the city.

The day starts before dawn with the first riders and market deliveries, slows in the midday heat, and reopens in the evening. Weekends belong to the beach at Fidjrossè, to funerals and weddings that fill whole streets with rented chairs and loudspeakers, and to church or mosque. Flooding in the rainy season, traffic on the two lagoon bridges, waste collection and the erosion of the shoreline are the running complaints of city life.

Maize and fish are the base of Cotonou's cooking. The everyday starch is a stiff maize dough: white akassa, fermented and wrapped in leaves, or amiwo, cooked in a red tomato and palm-oil stock and usually served with chicken or fish. Both come with a sauce of tomato, okra, groundnut or leafy greens, and with fish from Lake Nokoué — tilapia and shrimp, fresh, smoked or dried. Djenkoumè, a dark maize dough enriched with tomato and oil, is a festive version of the same idea.

Street food is constant. Akara, fritters of ground cowpeas, are fried at the roadside in the morning; ablo, small soft steamed cakes of maize and rice flour, are eaten with fried fish and pepper sauce; and gari, coarse cassava meal, is soaked in water with sugar as a cheap and filling drink, or served as gari foto with egg and tomato. Skewered and grilled meat, called brochettes, and whole grilled fish with onion and chilli dominate the evening braziers. Wagasi, the soft Fulani cow's-milk cheese from the north, arrives fried in slices.

Drinks are pineapple juice from the plantations of the plateau, bissap made from hibiscus, and chilled beer in the maquis. Palm wine is tapped inland and distilled into sodabi, the clear spirit poured at ceremonies. Lebanese bakeries and restaurants have been part of the city for generations, and French bread, shawarma and Nigerian dishes are all easy to find.