There’s a little village on the goudron, the paved road that runs up the length of Benin, and the name of the village is Guessou-Nord.  It’s the mirror image, more or less, of Guessou-Sud, which is on the southern side of the larger town Bembereke.

The town is typical for a northern town au bord de la voie.  The businesses – boutiques and gas-sellers and coffee-houses where you can buy Nescafé with condensed milk – are all clustered along the paved road that runs to Niger.  The houses scraggle off into the brush on either side – concrete gives way to mud, occasionally marked with an unexpected church or school, usually foreign-financed, in fine new grey concrete.

It is not published in any guidebooks and perhaps not even known outside the Bariba-speaking community, but in this little hamlet lives the finest potter in all Benin.  Her very name, Mamawekegii, means “amazing pot woman”. A potter myself, in my life before Peace Corps, I learned of her when I mentioned my interest in pottery and asked whether it was still a living tradition at all.  The lighter plastics had largely replaced pottery in terms of portable dishes, and concrete in terms of fixed water containers, but pottery, I learned, was still used for ceremonial objects, and the greatest potter of the Bariba lived somewhere in the maze of mud houses in a little town on the northern road. 

I went to visit her once, with a Bariba-speaker (since my “hello-how-are-you-how-much-does-it-cost” Bariba won’t get me very far in terms of discussing art) and learned for myself what it is she does.

She was a woman of about forty years old, straight-backed and muddy-handed and with an air of joy and confidence unusual in a village matron. Her pots – usually round-bottomed jars given by the bride’s family to new couples on their wedding day – are made in two pieces, around moulds.  The whole of Guessou-Nord makes pots, and you can see them stacked up on the side of the road for sale as you go past. But the remarkable thing about her pots – the amazing part, which gave her name and fame - is not their shape but the clay sculptures she applies to the surface as they are drying.

Proudly, she showed a pot that she had just finished.  Every inch of the upper surface was covered with designs in low relief.  A king – a Bariba king, she explained, pointing at the tribal scars on his cheeks – and his wife; a Fulani man and his wife, who was so pregnant that her belly stuck out like a cone.  Strings of cowrie shells.  A design of bird eating a lizard eating a snake, while at the bottom a chicken devoured a scorpion.  On one side of the pot was the squat figure of a man holding some kind of rectangle in his hand, next to his head, and on the opposite side of the pot was another one.  I was trying to figure out what they might represent when the Amazing Pot Woman explained it to me.

“Radio!” she said, and mimed holding one to her ear.

It gets talked about a lot, but there in that town in Bembereke was the first really successful example I’ve seen of a traditional art drawing its inspiration from modern scenes.  The Amazing Pot Woman showed me another of her recent creations: a flat object which appeared to be the lid of very large jar, perhaps a water-pot, adorned with several small figures.

“This is the house in the middle” my interpreter explained to me, indicating the hollow hut set in the center of the piece.  “This is the mortar for pounding – here is the medicine man – here is the king and his wife and their children.  Here are the Fulani.  It’s a Bariba village, you see.  Here’s the dog, here are the chickens.  Oh, here’s the medicine man’s bowl. “

“Who are these?” I said, indicating a couple on a motorcycle.

“Oh, those are the Fon. They’re the ones who ride motos.” (The Fon are the largest ethnic group in the comparatively more prosperous south of the country.)

“So what is this for?”

“It’s…” He listened for a while the streams of excited Bariba.  “It’s a charm. A-“ pause again –“a very strong charm, apparently.  She tells me that this will protect you against anything anybody sends against you. She’s very emphatic about that.  If you have this in your house, nobody can ever kill you.  She’s repeating that – ever, ever, ever. Because the dog will catch the evil, and the medicine man will grind it in his bowl, and the woman will pound it in her mortar, and then they will sweep it into the hut – you see, there’s the broom sculpted besides it – and it will never be able to hurt you.  Ever.  Ever, ever, ever.”

She is one of the happiest people I had met in all my travels; it shone through her face, in the way that she pops pots off the huge molds, and the way she orders her young assistants to fetch her more clay, or scores a identifying scar onto a sculpted face.  She is doing exactly what she is good at, she has recognition and honor, and she knows how to keep evil away, so it would never bring any harm.

Her talent has not entirely escaped the notice of the outside world – there was a Swiss woman – or maybe she was French – who had come to observe her some time ago, as I was proudly informed by one of the children of the household.  She had even wanted to bring the Amazing Pot Woman to the exterieur, the generic term for all those lands abroad.

“But she didn’t go,” he said, marveling a little at the incomprehensibleness of that, “she didn’t have any interest.” Ever. Ever.

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Katherine Nehring served three years in Peace Corps Benin.  She now lives and writes in Washington DC, and does pottery just across the river in Alexandria, VA. She has driven across the US, walked across Spain, and biked across town.  She currently working towards becoming a conservator of wall paintings, which should keep her traveling for a good long time.