I always find it very telling to hear about other people’s experiences of space, especially when they are travelling in a place where they can’t rely on the cues they are used to. Someone like me, who was used to maps and street names and generally to written signs indicating the location of things in the city, navigating Bangkok was a huge adjustment because I initially had no clue how to read Thai, nor did I know that most people in Thailand don’t orient themselves using maps.

Since then, I’ve noticed how what we pick out in our visual environment is trained by our interests but also by experiences such as getting lost in Bangkok and working out strategies for that not to happen too often.

More than any landmark, this is what struck me the most on my first few days in Cotonou: the yellow wave of motorcycle taxis, the yellow of MTN-sponsored shops and ads, just yellow everywhere. In Cotonou, you hardly see any buses, minibuses, or any form of public transport other than shared green and yellow taxis. What you see a lot of, on the other hand, are motorcycle taxis donning the yellow sleeveless shirt indicating their registration number with the city council. Each city enforces their own regulations regarding this form of public transport and they have colour codes – blue in Porto Novo, green in Ouidah, purple and yellow in Bohicon – but nowhere is it as massively visible as in Cotonou, where competition for passengers is stiff.

Another observation that took a while longer to register but is no less impressive, is the contrast between the languages you hear on the streets and the signs and various written material present in the city. I can’t tell Fon from Gun or Minna but I definitely hear some French seamlessly woven into speech here and there, a bit of Nago (a dialect of Yorùbá) on a lucky day, and the occasional exchange in Nigerian Pidgin English. In all these daily conversations, French isn’t the most used language, unless a foreigner is involved.

But if you were to block your ears for a while and look only at the signs, you would be forgiven for quoting French, not Fon, as the city’s main lingua franca. I mentioned the wide dominance of French in the publishing sector, but it goes way beyond this aspect. Billboards, electoral campaign posters, shop signs, booklets about how to be a good wife: all these are in French, entirely. Of course, the language of instruction in Benin is French, and international brands probably produce advertising concepts that are only regionally localised, but what of local shopkeepers? Simply put, they learnt to write in French and wouldn’t think of using their own languages in writing, provided they knew how to.

In Porto Novo, I had a nice chat with a lady called Raoulat who owns a kitchenware store. We spoke for a few minutes in French, then in Yorùbá, and she helped me find my way to the Jardin des Plantes (botanical garden). She seemed so concerned about my well-being that I decided to send her a reassuring text once I got to my destination. A few minutes later, she called me back…to say she supposed I got there safely, but she was sorry she couldn’t read her mother tongue, Yorùbá. I was embarrassed not to have thought of that beforehand, and remembered how my own grandparents, who were native Breton speakers, never learnt to read or write it, but were literate in French, a language they had to acquire the hard way at school.

I started looking out for bilingual signs or at least traces of the languages I heard spoken in Benin. Porto Novo was different from Cotonou in this regard: Nigerian movies in Yorùbá are quite popular there, and there are entire shops full of DVDs with covers in Yorùbá or a mix of Yorùbá and English. The botanical garden, though currently in an alarming state of neglect, has multilingual labels indicating the plant species in Latin, Fon, Yoruba and French:

Guedevy Hotel in Abomey is famous for its wall decorations depicting the symbols of successive Danxome kings, but something else altogether caught my attention: a bilingual Fon / French reception sign! Granted, the font for ‘Agbaji’ is somewhat smaller than the French but still…

So the trip continues!

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Did you miss part 1? Head over here to read about Benin’s multilingual youth.