7
Ouidah, Benin.
Morgan shielded her eyes against the bright sun as the zemidjan motorbike-taxi sped through the outer limits of the city. Tamarind and jasmine trees lined the streets. People walked along the dusty roadside, deftly avoiding the motorbikes and stray dogs as they headed for the central market. Only a few days ago, she and Jake had been back in Africa, further east in Rwanda, and now they were both in this sliver of a country in French West Africa.
Here in Ouidah, the landscape was marked by a dark past. The oldest area of the city was filled with the elegantly crumbling architecture of empire, the relics of wealth built on the backs of slaves. They passed an eighteenth-century Portuguese fort built to administer the slave trade, and several grand Afro-Brazilian houses bui
