Skip to main content

Review: Show Me the Magic: Travels Round Benin by Taxi by Annie Caulfield

Genre: Travel.
Themes: Travel, religion, magic, people, Benin, West Africa, friendship.
Reading challenge: What's in a Name 2016
Challenge book no.: 5/6, a book with a country in the title.

Writer Annie Caulfield travelled to Benin with the specific intention of writing a travel book, or so it seems from what she writes in the book. She describes her travels around the country by taxi, visiting vodou practitioners and religious sites, tribal leaders and interesting people and places with her driver, Isidore, as an active participant. He became her friend and seems to have had a hand in finding people and things of interest for her to visit. The outcome is a fascinating and often funny book about a country that is little known or spoken of outside of West Africa.

It was interesting to read this book and compare it with the last book I read about Africa, Blood River. These books were published at an interval of about 5 years and there is such a difference between them.
Blood River is about the war-torn Central African country the Democratic Republic of the Congo (hereafter referred to as the DRC). Not being either a historian or an anthropologist, I don’t know how similar the native cultures of these two countries were before the colonial era, but the post-colonial contrast is stark. Tim Butcher, who wrote Blood River, travelled through the DRC at as much speed as he possibly could, seems to have been afraid for his life most of the time, and encountered a chaotic, broken-down society riddled with corruption, anarchy and anomie. Caulfield, on the other hand, traveled at a relatively leisurely pace, rarely felt threatened, met lots of interesting people and learned about the history, culture and customs of Benin.

While Benin has seen its share of trouble in the past, including coups, regime changes and dictatorship, Caulfield’s description shows a peaceful country that is safe for travellers but probably not much visited, if one is to judge from the reactions of people outside the bigger cities and towns when they saw her. Her descriptions of the few foreign travellers she did encounter along the way are funny and far from complimentary, and neither does she spare either herself or Isidore or various corrupt, greedy and pushy locals she met along the way, but she also has much good to say about other people (and, eventually, more good than bad about Isidore).

A detail that particularly fascinated me was the descriptions of the Tata Somba, the fortified huts of the Somba people. Caulfield calls them castles, and they do look exactly like small single-family castles.

Read this book if:
  • You are doing a country reading challenge and want to find a (non-fiction) book about country that not many books have been written about;
  • You are interested in Africa in general 
  • and Benin in particular;
  • You love travelogues of all kinds;
  • If you like reading about interesting cultures;
  • You like funny travel authors. 
Another book about Benin (when it was called Dahomey) that I can recommend is the richly detailed (but still short) historical novel The Viceroy of Ouidah by Bruce Chatwin.

Comments

Trish said…
Travelogues are a favourite of mine, especially of places I'll probably never get to. I love the cover on this one!

Popular posts from this blog

Book 40: The Martian by Andy Weir, audiobook read by Wil Wheaton

Note : This will be a general scattershot discussion about my thoughts on the book and the movie, and not a cohesive review. When movies are based on books I am interested in reading but haven't yet read, I generally wait to read the book until I have seen the movie, but when a movie is made based on a book I have already read, I try to abstain from rereading the book until I have seen the movie. The reason is simple: I am one of those people who can be reduced to near-incoherent rage when a movie severely alters the perfectly good story line of a beloved book, changes the ending beyond recognition or adds unnecessarily to the story ( The Hobbit , anyone?) without any apparent reason. I don't mind omissions of unnecessary parts so much (I did not, for example, become enraged to find Tom Bombadil missing from The Lord of the Rings ), because one expects that - movies based on books would be TV-series long if they tried to include everything, so the material must be pared down

List love: 10 recommended stories with cross-dressing characters

This trope is almost as old as literature, what with Achilles, Hercules and Athena all cross-dressing in the Greek myths, Thor and Odin disguising themselves as women in the Norse myths, and Arjuna doing the same in the Mahabaratha. In modern times it is most common in romance novels, especially historicals in which a heroine often spends part of the book disguised as a boy, the hero sometimes falling for her while thinking she is a boy. Occasionally a hero will cross-dress, using a female disguise to avoid recognition or to gain access to someplace where he would never be able to go as a man. However, the trope isn’t just found in romances, as may be seen in the list below, in which I recommend stories with a variety of cross-dressing characters. Unfortunately I was only able to dredge up from the depths of my memory two book-length stories I had read in which men cross-dress, so this is mostly a list of women dressed as men. Ghost Riders by Sharyn McCrumb. One of the interwove

First book of 2020: The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel by Deborah Moggach (reading notes)

I don't know if I've mentioned it before, but I loathe movie tie-in book covers because I feel they are (often) trying to tell me how I should see the characters in the book. The edition of Deborah Moggach's These Foolish Things that I read takes it one step further and changes the title of the book into the title of the film version as well as having photos of the ensemble cast on the cover. Fortunately it has been a long while since I watched the movie, so I couldn't even remember who played whom in the film, and I think it's perfectly understandable to try to cash in on the movie's success by rebranding the book. Even with a few years between watching the film and reading the book, I could see that the story had been altered, e.g. by having the Marigold Hotel's owner/manager be single and having a romance, instead being of unhappily married to an (understandably, I thought) shrewish wife. It also conflates Sonny, the wheeler dealer behind the retireme