The covenant of the hills

Ethnicity is not an innate feeling but the result of a cultural process. This is what we are taught by the Taneka people of Benin who, through their centuries-old “covenant of the hills”, have transformed a border community based on kinship relations into a society based on difference and interdependence, a society in which no one is a foreigner and no one is indigenous. This is not an irrelevant lesson in an age when coexistence seems an increasingly distant goal.

Seen up close - as done indeed by Aime who knows well those hills - the historical experience of the Taneka people reveals the complex web of mediations, resistances and innovations that this people were able to put in place in the process of building their own society. A long process that began in the 18th century, with a close alliance between families of different origins in order to defend themselves against slave raiders, and that was by no means limited to resistance but gave rise to rules, traditions and customs capable of binding together different memberships. Debunking the clichés that want Africans to be “tribal,” this conception proves to be as “modern” as ever, especially when compared with that resurgence of localisms and nationalisms based on autochthony, roots and the bond between land and blood that we witness in Europe, indeed typical of a tribal conception in which one is born as a holder of rights. On the contrary, one becomes a Taneka: a great lesson from a small people who were able to eradicate “natural” bonds and invent new relationships based on living together as a choice.