There are lovely with Delphine meetings like I wanted to share here. I met Delphine Cotonou while taking the decision to move here to find his friend from Benin.
And what decision, determination, and what courage! Delphine is a journalist. She has this way of telling you with details spatiotemporal detailed each of these meetings, these days that you build a trip. She wrote. She writes columns, often.
Here is a text that she wanted to share by offering me to illustrate:
"So far I've written columns after an event, a moment of life, an encounter that inspired me. Nothing was planned, premeditated. This is special: it speaks of a place that has always caught my attention in Cotonou, a place where I purposely made this week to know him better. I did not go alone, but with Karina, an illustrator friend who I asked a favor: eat there with his pencils, and color. My words, his features.
This place is called Central Park zem Camp Mary. Central Park
zem, because it is the headquarters of motorcycle taxi drivers. Camp Mary as it is located in the heart of Cotonou, just opposite the army camp.
is a huge shed with large As branches of poles and structures for holding a corrugated iron roof. It is against the wall of the Faculty of Medicine. Front on the pavement, dozens of motorcycles are parked perpendicular to the sidewalk, despite the signs ...
"no parking"! A month ago, a company set up a small wooden cabin painted red, white, green. "Mecarun" offers zem of "anti-pollution" and "Air Stop, anti-leak of military technology"! The
zem are likely to any time of day. Dressed in their yellow jumpers, they come here to sit on wooden benches. To eat at the good ladies who have installed their canteens. They also come to read newspapers. They flock to
a "wall" of a thirty titles attached with clips of cords, such as laundry drying on a wire. They read together. To learn more, they buy the newspaper vendor who has his stand behind.
But zem mainly come to talk politics!
Here, in the central park of Camp Mary, we can take the temperature of the country and follow the fiercest debates. Moreover, MPs, ministers, and even, even ... the president stop their cars on the roadside to see the zem! That's what we learn by talking to Donald, Leon and Hubert, the head of the park. He was elected for one year and he oversees the order of the place and that moderates the heat of his colleagues when the fever rises. It is a rule posted on a plywood panel, the Rules issued by the Association of Friends Zem (2AZ). Article 5 states: "racism, regionalism and quarrels are strictly prohibited." In case of non-observance, fine!
"Here every zem is political, but the head of the park is apolitical! "says Leon. Donatien
supports President Boni Yayi and his party, the Forces for an Emerging Benin cowries. It belongs to "Action Front of zémidjan for change." It's written on his chasuble, around the design of two zem supporting a cowrie.
I decide to call it "zémergent!
Immediately, another zem shows us his back. He argues for the PRD, Party of Democratic Renewal. A third shows its belonging to the RB, the Renaissance of Benin.
Pffff ... we never imagined we would find ourselves in a semicircle. Leon
him as a logo printed on its jacket: "SOS zem. This is not a union but an association of motorbike taxis that pick up injured in an accident for driving at the teaching hospital. He is one of the few to wear a helmet!
In Central Park Camp Mary, who we meet zem remake the world and other life-saving!
Thank Donatien, Hubert and Leo
BONUS: there are 100 000 zem in Cotonou for a population
1 million inhabitants! Even if not all politicized, they are a sacred force, a powerful lobby. "
Delphine Bousquet - Friday, January 9, 2009 in Cotonou
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