Cotonou
— — a city the zémidjans carry from one hour to the next.
Not only on a wall.
“Benin's largest city, on a thin strip of coast between Lake Nokoué and the Atlantic. The streets move on the backs of yellow-shirted zémidjans, motorcycle taxis that thread the traffic in their thousands. Inland on the lake, the stilt village of Ganvié still holds twenty thousand people above the water, where their ancestors built houses no slaver could reach.
Cotonou, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Cotonou sits on the Gulf of Guinea coast of Benin, on a six-kilometre sand spit between the Atlantic and the brackish Lake Nokoué. The city of about 700,000 (1.2 million in the wider metropolitan area) is the country's largest, the economic capital, and the seat of most national government, though Porto-Novo to the east remains the official capital. Cotonou grew rapidly after independence in 1960 and serves today as the terminus of the rail and road corridors reaching north to Parakou and on into Niger and Burkina Faso.
Ganvié rises from Lake Nokoué about 18 kilometres north of Cotonou, a village of around 20,000 people built entirely on stilts above the lagoon. Tofinu families settled here in the 17th century to escape Fon slave-raiders from the kingdom of Dahomey, who by religious convention would not pursue captives across open water. The community still fishes the lake with palm-frond traps called acadjas, and the school, the church, and the market all stand above the same shallow water, reached only by pirogue.
Dantokpa Market spreads over about 20 hectares on the southern bank of Lake Nokoué and draws an estimated one million visitors a week, putting it among the largest open-air markets in West Africa. Stalls run from textiles and cooking pots through the fetish market, where Vodun practitioners source the dried herbs, beads, and animal parts of the tradition that began in the old Dahomey court. The market keeps daylight hours and is reached on a zémidjan from anywhere in the city for a few hundred CFA francs.