Natitingou

The Betammaribe and neighbouring peoples of the Atacora lived for centuries in scattered fortified homesteads without kings, each household defending itself from a two-storey earthen tower-house. The hills gave protection from the horsemen of the Bariba kingdoms to the east and from the slave raiding that reached deep into the region, and there was no town here in the sense the word usually carries — only farms, granaries and shrines spread through the valleys.

Natitingou itself is a colonial creation. The French, who took control of the region in the 1890s, chose the valley as an administrative post for the north-west, and a market, mission and school gathered around it. Colonial demands fell heavily on the Atacora, above all conscription during the First World War, which provoked the revolt led by Kaba in 1916 and 1917; it was put down by force and is commemorated by a stele in the town. Missionary schooling, unusually strong here, later gave the district an influence out of proportion to its size.

After independence the town became the capital of Atacora department and the home of a northern political class — Mathieu Kérékou, who ruled Benin for most of the period between 1972 and 2006, came from this district. From the 1990s Natitingou also became the gateway to Pendjari, with hotels and guides serving travellers heading for the park and the Somba country. That trade ended abruptly when armed groups from the Sahel began attacking across the northern border from around 2021, leaving the town with its administration, schools and markets but very few visitors.

The town is the meeting point of the Atacora's peoples. Ditammari is widely spoken alongside French, with Waama, Fulfulde and Dendi heard in the market and Bariba traders from the east. The Betammaribe — often called Somba, a name outsiders gave them — are known above all for the tata, a round two-storey house of earth and wood with a flat roof terrace and conical granaries, built for defence and for household ritual, with the ground floor for animals and the terrace for sleeping, drying grain and offerings. The Batammariba landscape of Koutammakou, inscribed by UNESCO on the Togolese side, became a cross-border World Heritage Site in 2023 when sites in Benin were added.

Initiation remains the central institution of village life. Ceremonies marking the passage of young men and women to adulthood involve seclusion, instruction, scarification in some families, and public dancing that brings whole valleys together in the dry season. Funerals are long and musical, with drums, horns and dances that can last days.

Christianity is strong in the town, the fruit of a century of mission schools, and Islam is as strongly present — the town is close to evenly divided between the two — but neither has displaced the household shrines at the door of the tata or the diviners consulted before planting, building and marriage. The town's museum exists partly to explain this to outsiders, and local guides from the villages have long done the same work in person.

About 104,000 people lived in the commune at the 2013 census, a good share of them in the villages rather than the town, which stretches along its valley road in low compounds under tin and thatch. It is a departmental capital, so government offices, secondary schools, a hospital and the army give it a salaried class that most northern towns lack, and market days bring in farmers from the hills.

Farming shapes everything else. Yams, sorghum, millet, maize and beans are grown on the slopes, women gather shea nuts and press them into butter, and cotton is grown on flatter land to the east. Cattle belonging to Fulani herders move through the valleys, sometimes into conflict with farmers over fields and water. Remittances from relatives in Cotonou and abroad matter to many households, and young people leave for the coast for work and schooling.

The security crisis on the northern border has changed the town's mood and economy. Soldiers and displaced families have arrived, tourism — once a real source of income for hotels, drivers and village guides — has almost stopped, and journeys towards the parks or the Burkinabè border have become a matter of official permission rather than choice. Daily life otherwise keeps its rhythm: early market, a long pause in the afternoon heat, and evenings in the maquis or the courtyard.

Yam is the foundation. Boiled and beaten in a wooden mortar, it becomes igname pilée, a smooth elastic dough eaten by hand with a sauce of groundnut, tomato or dark leaves, and dried yam is ground into flour for télibo. Where the rains are thinner, millet and sorghum are cooked into tô, a stiff porridge served with okra, baobab-leaf or soumbala sauce — the last made from fermented néré seeds, pungent and deeply savoury, which northern cooks use as others use stock.

The Atacora's own products fill the market. Shea butter, made by women from gathered nuts, is used for frying as well as for skin; wagasi, the soft cow's-milk cheese of northern Benin, is sold in pale discs and fried until it browns; and kilishi, thin spiced dried meat of Hausa origin, is sold in sheets. Grilled chicken and mutton are the standard evening food along the main road, with chilli, onion and sometimes fried yam chips.

The traditional drink is tchoukoutou, a cloudy beer brewed from millet or sorghum by women and served warm in calabashes in courtyard cabarets, a social institution as much as a drink in the non-Muslim villages. Alongside it come bissap made from hibiscus, ginger juice, sweetened milk in Muslim households, and bottled beer and soft drinks in the town's maquis.