In 1919 a man from a village near Grand-Popo travelled through West Africa and came home convinced that two peoples of the same coast were not speaking to each other. He founded an association to fix it. A century later, the whole coast still comes back on Pentecost Sunday.

Brothers united

Nonvitcha means brothers united in Mina. It is the annual reunion of the Xwla and the Xwéda, two peoples of the coastal lagoons of southern Benin, held at Grand-Popo.

The man behind it is Adolphe Gnansounou Akpa, from the small village of Doyi at Grand-Popo. In 1919 he travelled through Cameroon, Ghana, Nigeria and Togo, and what struck him on the journey was not anything he saw abroad but something he understood about home: that the Xwla and the Xwéda, who share a coast, were not acting as one. He founded Nonvitcha in 1921 to do something about it. The first celebration was held in 1923.

It was set up as a formal association — a non-profit under the French law of 1 July 1901 — and the Dahomey administration approved its statutes by decree in 1933. That is unusually documentary for a festival. Most of them cannot produce the paperwork.

Pentecost

The date is Pentecost Sunday, the fiftieth day after Easter, which puts it in May or June depending on the year. The official day is a large thanksgiving mass on the Nonvitcha square, presided over by the bishop of Lokossa. Around it run the rest of it: cultural, sporting and recreational events across the weekend, and the crowds that fill a small coastal town.

The association did not stop at the party. It builds — schools, health centres, laboratories for schools — and describes its purpose as strengthening the bond between the two communities, reviving their spiritual and artistic inheritance, and working on the economic and social development of the coast. The festival is the visible part of a body that does other things the rest of the year.