The Zinsou Foundation, Villa Ajavon

Built in 1922 for the merchant Julien Ajavon, the villa is a piece of Agouda architecture, the style brought back from Brazil by the freed men and women who returned in the nineteenth century. Verandas, wrought-iron balconies, louvred shutters, high ceilings designed for the air to move. The restoration preserved the original materials while adapting the interior to museum requirements, lighting and humidity control included.

Admission is entirely free and has never changed: exhibitions, guided tours, workshops, catalogues. The idea is simple and rare, that art should not be a privilege reserved for an elite or for foreigners passing through. The museum’s first public is the schoolchildren of Ouidah and the surrounding region, accompanied by Beninese mediators trained for that work.

These walls have held the great names of African photography, Malick Sidibé, Seydou Keïta, J.D. Okhai Ojeikere, and the major figures of the Beninese scene, Romuald Hazoumè, Dominique Zinkpè, Cyprien Tokoudagba, Laeïla Adjovi. The Foundation had already made its mark in 2007 in Cotonou with a Jean-Michel Basquiat exhibition, the first of its kind on the continent.

Its work goes beyond the museum. Travelling libraries and small neighbourhood libraries carry reading and the graphic arts into the schools and streets of the town.

For a visitor who came for memory and for Vodun, this stop has its necessity. Ouidah is not a museum-town frozen on its past. Seeing what its artists make today, in a house built by a Beninese merchant a century ago, is to understand that creation here has never stopped.