The Slave Route is not a tourist attraction

I want to start with what Ouidah actually is.

Not the tourist version. Not the cultural heritage brochure. What it actually is.

Ouidah is a city in Benin where an estimated one million people were processed for deportation across the Atlantic between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. They walked the Route of the Kings, passed through the Tree of Forgetfulness, crossed the beach, and boarded ships. The Door of No Return is not a monument someone built to commemorate tragedy. It is the exact location where the last land touched their feet.

This is not ancient history in the way that phrase usually functions—as a way of putting distance between us and the events. Many descendants of those people are alive. They have passports. Some are my age and live in Paris, Brooklyn, São Paulo. The timeline is short enough that the connection is felt, not just known.

This is the place for which I am building a travel resource. And it took me a long time to understand what that actually meant.

An Energy That Runs Through Lineages

If I am here, building this digital sanctuary, it is not by accident. It is a matter of family, blood, and energy. My uncles are from Ouidah. I grew up with the echoes of this city in my ears long before I could walk its sandy streets. Every time I return to Ouidah, I feel a particular vibration—a density that you cannot find anywhere else. It is not just an emotion; it is a physical force.

Ouidah possesses a "threshold energy." It is a place where worlds touch: the world of the living and that of the ancestors, the solid ground and the infinite ocean, documented history and spiritual memory. To work on Ouidah is to accept navigating this permanent tension.

From Tourism to Art: Ten Years of Sedimentation

My relationship with Ouidah was built in successive layers. Twelve or thirteen years ago, I was working in the tourism sector. I was organizing tours, tracing circuits, guiding people through these same streets. Back then, I already saw the limits of the "transactional model" of travel. I saw what people came to consume, and what they systematically missed.

Then, over the last ten years, my approach became more visceral, more creative. I carried out artistic projects for Effet Graff, using the city walls as parchments to tell other stories. I had the privilege of working with the Centre CIAMO (International Center for Arts and Crafts of Ouidah) for several years as a trainer.

It was there, in the workshop and on the ground, that my vision expanded. I worked with colleagues from Benin, Togo, Ghana, but also Finland, France, Italy, USA, and Brazil. This international collaboration—this mix of expertise and perspectives—made me realize that Ouidah is a global crossroads of memory. You cannot understand Ouidah while remaining locked in a single perspective. It requires the input of Ghana, Brazil, and Europe to grasp the scale of what was played out here—and what continues to be played out.

Heritage is also Infrastructure (and Speculative Fiction)

I have been thinking a lot lately about why I work in both speculative fiction and heritage tourism, and why they don’t feel like separate things to me.

In the book I am finishing, titled TADOW (echoing the Kingdom of Tado, the original source), the first African colony on Mars makes very deliberate decisions about what to carry forward. You can explore this universe at tadowuniverse.com. In that fiction, as in the reality of OuidahOrigins, the message is the same: culture is not a decoration. It is the operating system.

Ouidah is a case study in what happens when a culture is forcibly interrupted. The diaspora communities that emerged from that interruption have, over centuries, rebuilt operating systems out of fragments. The journey back—physical or metaphorical—is not nostalgia. It is maintenance. It is people going back to the source to understand what they have been working with all along.

The Problem With the Word "Tourism"

Tourism is a transactional category. You arrive. You consume experiences. You leave.

That framework is inadequate for what happens when someone from the diaspora walks the Slave Route. It isn’t consumption. It is something closer to witnessing—being physically present in a place that explains something about your own existence that no document could explain as completely.

The term "Roots Tourism" is used for this, and it’s better. But it still centers the activity on the movement and the discovery, when what many people are actually seeking is confirmation. Proof that the life they have been living in another country was not, in fact, the original story.

What It Costs to Really Know This History

Something happens when you understand Ouidah fully—not just the facts, but the scale. It isn’t comfortable. It isn’t the feeling you get at a nice beach. It’s closer to the feeling of having a gap in your family history explained in a way that simultaneously answers questions and opens new ones.

Diaspora travelers coming to Ouidah didn’t end up there by accident. They saved for the trip. They made decisions. They don’t want to be protected from the weight of the place. They want the whole truth, told plainly, by someone who knows it.

The Anecdote Behind "Remanences"

Two years ago, I began building what has become the engine of the Remanences section of this site. I wanted academic knowledge about Ouidah—often locked away in dusty theses or inaccessible PDFs—to be available to everyone.

I implemented an automated pipeline: a scraping system that retrieves theses on specific topics from the HAL platform, then passes them through a processing chain I designed to summarize, format, and disseminate these works in a readable format, without losing their scientific rigor. This is the pipeline I connected to OuidahOrigins. It's not just data aggregation; it's an act of digital restitution.

What I’m Building, and Why

ouidahorigins.com is the culmination of these years of tourism, art, training, and speculative reflection. It is a personal project I have carried within me for a long time. It will eventually be a bilingual resource for diaspora travelers visiting Benin, Togo, and Ivory Coast.

I am one person building this with no financial budget, but not without resources. To compensate for the absence of a large team, I have mobilized a veritabe army of AI agents to help me with maintenance and development. These are not generic tools: they are agents I have fed and trained with all the resources, texts, and archives I have consumed about Ouidah for over ten years. They have become the digital guardians of this knowledge.

These agents are, in a way, alive. They periodically work to scan everything being said in the "machine world" about Ouidah and automatically inform me every week on WhatsApp. I can even give them orders through that same channel. It's practical, even if they sometimes make mistakes that I strive to review as soon as possible.

This is a design constraint that has forced good decisions. When you can’t compete on massive production value, you compete on depth, honesty, and technology-augmented specificity.

While waiting to have the means to sustain this project "properly," I keep moving forward. That said, I am not against support or collaborations from those who resonate with this vision. Otherwise, we can just have a coffee together if our schedules permit. Sometimes, I organize tours for friends. If you're interested, contact me. But I warn you: it will be particular.

→ Contact the Concierge — or send a missive to open the circle.

→ Visit ouidahorigins.com — the resource is live and growing.