Some people start their mornings with coffee

I woke up this morning at the normal time to which I allow myself to sleep when I don’t have to teach in the morning, around 8 a.m.

By this time, all the students are already at school, which means, for a few moments, my neighborhood is relatively quiet.

This morning, though, as I was in my kitchen heating up water for tea, I heard people outside my neighbor’s house. She’s a nice lady and makes her living usually by being a tailor. In the past few months, she’s also started selling the local moonshine out of her house. For 100 CFA, men come by, take a shot of sodabe and then ride off on their motorcycles, rarely staying more than 5 minutes. One of my favorite nighttime activities is to sit on my front porch and watch how many of the men who stop by I recognize, either as colleagues or the father of one of my students.

When I came back from vacation three days ago, a small hut with benches and tables had been erected outside her house, I guessed in an effort to expand her business, at least expand it out of her living room. And business has expanded, the area outside my front door becoming less like a front porch and more like the street outside a bar, but besides moto horns and loud voices, there haven’t been any real complaints.

And so, this morning, as I sipped my Harney & Son’s Tower of London tea, I silently toasted the men taking shots of sodabe next door at 8:30 in the morning. 

Shots with the king

Barefoot, I follow my host father and his brother into the dark room. The king is sitting directly next to the door. The first thing he says to us is to greet me by the local language term for a white person.

I kneel, and he blesses me by lightly brushing my head with a bundle of what looks like blonde horse’s hair.

This is our king’s first day at work. The previous one died before I moved to the area, and tradition dictates that the son appointed the new king must stay apart from the public in his house for six months before being presented to the public as our new monarch.

He addresses me in French, and I am momentarily thrown. The past four-hour ceremony had been conducted in Ife, which meant I spent a majority of it daydreaming and hoping I wasn’t committing a grave cultural mistake.

We chat for a moment before he turns to a man standing next to him and instructs him to offer me a shot of sodabe, a liquor made from palm that is basically the moonshine of Benin. There is good sodabe, there is bad sodabe and there is sodabe that will make you go blind.

I have already declined a shot at lunch today, but I don’t want the biggest news of the day to be the American who couldn’t handle sodabe.

It tastes like isopropyl alcohol going down, proving that just because you’re the king doesn’t mean your booze is good.