Dassa-Zoumè

The hills above the plain gave this place its history. Tradition among the Idaasha, a Yoruba-speaking people, traces their ruling line to migrants from the Egba country of western Yorubaland, in what is now Nigeria, who settled among the granite domes, where the rock offered shelter and a lookout. The name joins two old settlements, Dassa and Zoumè, and the earliest quarters grew at the foot of the inselbergs rather than on the open savanna around them.

That choice mattered from the seventeenth century onwards, when the Kingdom of Dahomey, expanding north from Abomey, raided the peoples of the middle belt for captives to sell at the coast. The Idaasha and the neighbouring Mahi are said to have used the caves, clefts and steep slopes as refuges, and the hills are still pointed out as hiding places. Dahomey pressed repeatedly into the region without absorbing it completely, and the French conquest of the 1890s ended the raiding by bringing the whole area under one colonial administration.

Colonial rule reoriented the town towards the north–south axis. The railway from Cotonou reached the Collines early in the twentieth century and the road followed it, turning Dassa-Zoumè into a staging point for yams, cotton and groundnuts moving south. Catholic missionaries arrived in the same period, and the development of the Marian grotto at Arigbo eventually made a provincial market town into a place of national pilgrimage. The Collines department was created in 1999, when Benin reorganised its provinces, and Dassa-Zoumè replaced Savalou as its administrative seat in 2016.

Dassa-Zoumè is Yoruba country at its western edge. Idaasha, close to the Yoruba spoken across the border in Nigeria, is the language of the market and the compound, with French used in school and administration and Fon and Mahi heard from neighbours to the south and west. Praise names, drumming and the authority of family heads and traditional rulers remain part of public life, and Egungun masqueraders, ancestral spirits in layered cloth, appear at funerals and festivals as they do elsewhere in Yoruba country.

What sets the town apart is the weight of Catholicism laid over that older culture. The sanctuary of Notre-Dame d'Arigbo draws tens of thousands of pilgrims each mid-August, when coaches arrive from Cotonou, Porto-Novo and beyond and the hillside fills with candles, hymns in several languages and all-night vigils. Islam has a long presence through trading families, and Vodun shrines stand in the quarters and the villages, so it is common for one family to take part in more than one tradition.

The farming year gives the other rhythm. New yams are not eaten until the harvest is formally opened, a rule kept across the Collines and celebrated with the yam festivals of neighbouring towns in August, and the rotating markets of the hill country still set the pattern of the week.

The commune of Dassa-Zoumè had about 112,000 people at the 2013 census, most of them in villages and hamlets rather than the town itself, which is modest in scale and low in build. Its position on the main highway and the railway gives it more movement than its size suggests: coaches stop, traders load yams for the southern markets, and lorries heading for Parakou and Niger pass through day and night.

Farming is the foundation. Yams are the prestige crop and the one the Collines are known for, grown alongside maize, cassava, groundnuts, beans and increasingly cashew, whose nuts are dried and sold on for export. Cotton is grown on some of the surrounding land. Beyond agriculture, work means small trade, transport, teaching and administration, since the town is a departmental seat, with the pilgrimage supporting hotels, food sellers and craft stalls for part of the year.

The day starts early and pauses in the afternoon heat. Water and electricity can be unreliable in the outer quarters, and many households depend on money sent home by relatives working in Cotonou or abroad. Young people leave for the coast for schooling and work, and return for funerals, harvests and the August pilgrimage, which is when the town is fullest and the compounds most crowded.

The Collines are yam country, and igname pilée is the dish of the town: boiled yam pounded in a wooden mortar into a smooth, stretchy dough, torn by hand and dipped into a sauce of groundnut, tomato and meat, or dark leafy greens. In the drier months yam is also dried and ground into flour to make télibo, a stiff brown paste with a distinctive sour note. Maize dough — plain white akassa or the red, palm-oil-coloured amiwo — is the everyday alternative, usually with a peppery tomato sauce and smoked fish brought up from the lagoons.

Wagasi, the soft cow's-milk cheese common across northern Benin, is sold in pale discs and fried in slices until it squeaks, either as a snack or stirred into sauce. Roadside grills do chicken and mutton, and bush meat such as grilled agouti appears in season. Fermented néré seeds, afitin, give many sauces their pungent depth, and groundnuts are roasted or pressed into kuli-kuli, crisp fried sticks of peanut paste.

For drinking there is palm wine, tapped and drunk fresh, and sodabi, the strong spirit distilled from it, alongside bissap made from hibiscus, ginger juice and bottled beer in the maquis. Roadside stalls sell oranges, pineapples and mangoes in season, and the cashew harvest brings both nuts and the sharp juice of the cashew apple.