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…
