01 A façade out of place
The reference works describe the city's architecture as "an original style with Portuguese and French influences". It is an accurate description but a thin one: what makes this city singular is not the mixture of two European influences, but that one of them arrived back, crossing the Atlantic in the other direction.
02 Who built them
They are known as Agudás: an Afro-Brazilian community established in several countries along this coast, made up of people who left Brazil and their descendants. Their presence is especially significant in two cities of Benin, Ouidah and Porto-Novo, and beyond the border in Agoué, in Togo, and in Lagos.
The surnames are the most visible part of the inheritance: de Almeida, Amorin, de Campos, Gomes, Olympio, de Souza, Wilson. You read them on letterboxes and shop signs.
The reference literature lists eighteen families with identified ancestors and approximate nineteenth-century dates. That "approximate" matters, and we will come back to it: the documentation of this community is far poorer than its built footprint would suggest.
03 What to look at on the street
Four things, and none requires going inside anywhere. First, the pediment over the door: a moulded crown, sometimes with a relief motif in the tympanum, serving no structural purpose. Second, the date carved into the moulding, which turns each house into a dated document.
Third, the louvred shutters: angled slats that let the air through and keep the rain out, which is exactly what a city with 1,325 annual millimetres needs. And fourth, the external staircase to the upper floor, with a pierced concrete screen.
And to see the earlier layer, the one that was here before all this, it is enough to go into the Musée Honmé, housed in a royal palace. The contrast between the two building types — earth wall and open courtyard against moulded façade and staircase — is learned better in an afternoon than in a book.
04 What is not known
Now the uncomfortable part, and it is larger than usual. I found no published figures for the Agudá population, no systematic architectural description of these buildings, no precise dates for the various returns, and no inventory of the city's built heritage.
To that is added a caveat the reference works make about the city's early history: it rests on oral traditions that only began to be collected in the late nineteenth century, and they call it imprecise. When you read a closed chronology of Porto-Novo, ask where it comes from.
None of which takes anything from what you can do, which is the best part of this: walk the old town reading dates off the lintels. Each one is a firm fact, carved by whoever built the house, and does not depend on anyone having published it since. The one on this article's cover reads 1912.
_at_Lola_Ya_Bonobo_-_1.JPG?width=1600)
