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How One Black Woman Started a Book Revolution in Benin
She stared down the obstacles to make reading material more accessible in West Africa
Ayaba Totin knew she had to leave France when her daughter, now seven, came home after her first day of kindergarten and told her that she didn’t want to be Black anymore. A classmate had said that her skin was ugly, called her names, and wouldn’t let her join games. Even three years after the incident, Tobin still bristles with frustration when she recalls the day. “I taught her to be proud of her skin and to love herself. I thought all of my hard work had been erased in one day,” she says.
A year after the incident at her daughter’s school, she moved from Toulouse, France, where she grew up, to Benin, where her parents are from. “We don’t have any of those problems with racism anymore,” she says with a touch of irony because Benin, the West African country of 11 million people, is over 90% Black. But she had no illusions that things in Benin would be perfect. In fact, she moved to her ancestral country with the goal of tackling what she views as one of its major problems: access to books.
Benin is one of the 10 countries with the lowest literacy rates in the world, seven of which are in West Africa. Only about 51% of young people in Benin are literate.
For Totin, a bibliophile who ran a book review blog in France for three years, books that center Africans and people of the diaspora have always been an essential part of maintaining self-esteem. The only problem is that in Benin, a country roughly the size of Texas, there are only a few options for getting books. There are three main public libraries in Benin: a national library in the capital, Porto Novo, a library at the French Institute in Cotonou, and one at the U.S. Embassy. There are also a few small libraries run by nonprofits and foundations like the Fondation Zinsou scattered throughout the country and university libraries, which are not open to the public.
Few people in the West can imagine going to school without a library on the premises, but the vast majority of grade schools in Benin have no library. For textbooks…
