by Joël Noret & Narcisse M. Yedji

Since 2017, Cotonou – the economic capital of Benin – has witnessed several urban development projects. Aiming to showcase the city as the new face of a new Benin, attractive to both businessmen and tourists, the plans have involved extensive tarmacking projects, the development of the city’s first shopping malls, the rebuilding of several markets to ‘modern’ standards, the erection of emblematic statues – notably that of ‘’, branded as an ode to feminine courage and a national emblem –, and the design of a new coast line. The urban poor have paid a disproportionate price in the implementation of this new – that is, a shiny urban renovation project disconnected from the sociological realities of the city and from the needs of whole swathes of its population, especially in the urban precariat.

In what follows, we argue that the successive waves of evictions of thousands of poor urban dwellers have pressurized in multiple ways and in the longer run already fragile existences. As neighbourhoods and livelihood were dislocated, their ex-residents were simultaneously witnessing their life chances shrinking for the foreseeable future, and faced with the traumatic aftermath of dislocated homes. A ‘generative’ process in itself, as Gunvór Jonsson recently argued on this blog about evictions in Dakar, there is no doubt that state pressure grounded in neoliberal urbanism affects the urban poor in multiple ways. The following paragraphs explore such multi-layered consequences, from degraded economic conditions to tarnished senses of one’s place in the social world.

Cotonou’s evictions in retrospect

In Benin’s economic capital, the combination of a fight against ‘informal’ petty trading along main roads and avenues in the name of a ‘’, and the redrawing of the city’s waterfront have led to the eviction of more than 10.000 ‘illegal’ people since 2017, in many cases adding more pressure and insecurity to already precarious lives. Of course, evictions already have a long history in Benin, having first been practiced by colonial authorities, and then periodically resurfacing throughout the postcolonial history of the country. Yet, their magnitude since 2016 and the coming to power of Patrice Talon, is unprecedented.

The first wave of evictions planned under the current president took place in 2017. , as well as more than two dozen kilometres of roads and avenues, were cleared from the ‘informal’ petty trading activities taking place on the pavement, as well as from extensions of more established businesses who had infringed on the public domain. In parallel, a historical waterfront neighbourhood of fishermen – known as Enagnon – located on the east side of the mouth of the estuary flowing through Cotonou, was then the first neighbourhood to be evicted. Enagnon was an old settlement built out of a mix of concrete and precarious materials, and looked indeed like a slum. State authorities argued that it had become a place of criminal activities, and the area was to give way to new coastal infrastructures . Approximately 550 houses were then destroyed and , with compensations ranging between 150 and 300 euros per house.

At the time of the evictions, Enagnon was known to be one of the city’s poorest neighbourhoods. found that households’ monthly income in such neighbourhoods then was averaging 120 euros a month (with the mean size of households at 4.4 people) – that is, significantly less than the mean of 265 euros per month for (with an average size of households at 4) at the time. Less than a quarter of the adult population had attended secondary school. There was indeed little chance that such a population would challenge the state, despite the extremely low compensations offered. As expected, the design of the new waterfront took precedence over the poor’s without much protest.

On the other (west) side of the mouth of Cotonou’s estuary, the , known as Xwlacodji, was finally erased entirely in 2021. This was following earlier waves of partial evictions in 2012 and 2019. The last wave in 2021 included compensations given only to the last remaining house owners. At 8000 euros and a small replacement plot thirty kilometres away, on the eastern edge of Cotonou, these were significantly higher than those paid in Enagnon a few years earlier, despite not being in line with the actual value of the land in this central, waterfront district – probably around ten times higher than the compensations.

The compensated eviction of Xwlacodji was also in stark contrast with the simultaneous eviction of another old waterfront neighbourhood, Fiyegnon 1, approximately eight kilometres westwards. Indeed, in Fiyegnon 1, this other fishermen’s neighbourhood was entirely evicted . At the time of its foundation, approximately 60 years earlier, the settlement was born out of a community of fishermen settled there at the turn of independence, after having been first evicted from the site of the new presidential palace. In 2021, the vicinity was still inhabited by many fishermen who depended on their proximity to the sea for their livelihoods, although there were also many other workers of the so-called ‘informal’ economy. The neighbourhood totalled 623 registered households and about 3,000 inhabitants distributed over approximately eight hectares next to Cotonou’s beach. Just as in Enagnon and Xwlacodji, houses were built both in cement and in more precarious materials, depending on the economic conditions of the households.

In Fiyegnon 1, people benefited from electricity and water connections, and held state certificates attesting of the limits of their respective plots. Yet, in September 2021, following a ministerial order published two months earlier, the neighbourhood was entirely destroyed by bulldozers supported by a heavy police deployment. No compensations or relocation scheme were implemented. Instead, here as in Enagnon, evicted citizens were left contemplating their denied citizenship, in an African illustration of what precarious can experience at the hand of state contempt.

Lives under pressures

Inevitably, each of these evictions generated their own set of miseries, depriving mostly poor city dwellers of a home, a neighbourhood, and a livelihood. Turning thousands of lives upside down, the multiple anxieties – inextricably economic, social, psychic – generated by these events, have been putting additional pressure on already fragile social existences.

This can first be understood in terms of concrete health outcomes: in both the 2017 and 2021 eviction campaigns, several people with health conditions had strokes when bulldozers started operating through the settlements, and others followed in the next few days. One year after the Enagnon eviction of 2017, the number of deaths resulting from strokes occurred in the aftermath of the destructions could be estimated . In a similar macabre vein, in 2023, the head of the Fiyegnon 1 district counted more than twenty deaths in the two years following the eviction, which resulted directly from strokes that had occurred at the moment of destruction or soon afterwards. The structural violence of evictions here translates quite literally in pressure in the urban poor’s bodies themselves. Or, as a woman from Enagnon put it after her 2017 eviction, ‘government handed us over to death’.

In this sense, and in the manner of Marx evoking the somatic consequences of the radically exploitative working day of 19^th century factory workers, evictions driven by neoliberal urbanism call for a carnal political economy of such oppressive ‘development’ policies, channeling our attention to both the economic and political dimensions of such destructions, and their bodily consequences, with crucial health implications, revealing social pressures as internalized and embodied. Indeed, shortly after the 2021 eviction of the Fiyegnon 1 neighbourhood, residents inevitably complained of the somatic and psychic discomfort and stress that came with their material losses, sometimes in terms evoking trauma. ‘I can’t sleep’, ‘I can’t forget’, ‘I’m angry’, were common reactions and sentences among evicted residents in the aftermath of the destruction of their houses and livelihood. Feelings of alienation and dispossession were common. Several people compared the way they were treated to the way animals are treated, suggesting they were considered like ‘dogs’ or ‘chickens’. Reflecting on the state brutalization that residents were experiencing, a man once erupted in a group discussion that the evicted had been changed in ‘refugees in their own country’, forced out of their homes with ‘a mattress on their head’.

In fact, longer-term consequences of such evictions must be considered in a multidimensional perspective, as they affect people’s ‘life chances’, in Max Weber’s words, over the longer run. As we researched the consequences of Fiyegnon’s eviction in the year that followed the destruction, it quickly became clear that residents had not only experienced denied citizenship and the loss of a home – many residents actually lived on the family plots to which they had a form of property right – and a neighbourhood which was a space of everyday sociability. In both Enagnon and Fiyegnon, where we conducted follow-up research with ex-residents, people were left at the mercy of their kin network or other social relationships in the short term, and forced into rentals on the longer run. Yet, crucially, many residents also lost or witnessed the degradation of their livelihood and their chances to make a living.

Indeed, in such popular neighbourhoods, economic chances and income-generating activities were, for many residents, closely intertwined with the local space and – now dismembered – community. Coastal fishing activities, for instance, require the coordination of a few dozen men – some men being involved on a daily basis, others more episodically. These fishermen are now scattered over the surrounding districts, which complicates coordination and weakens the sector. As a consequence, many women involved in petty trading of fish have seen their activities equally disrupted. Others were cooking in the street for local residents looking for a ready-made meal, or selling quotidian domestic products and food items, from sugar to toilet paper, and oil and tomatoes. Street-sellers – among which an overwhelming majority of women – have now lost their selling spot, and struggle to renegotiate one on another street.

In fact, the destruction of the neighbourhoods has had, in part, different effects on men and women. Forming a clear majority of those with land rights on the evicted plots, many men have experienced a net loss of property, and the security and status that go with it. Simultaneously, both men and women have then experienced a loss of economic opportunities as a result of reduced fishing activity. Part of the men, though, were working out of the neighbourhood, and haven’t seen their livelihood compromised in the same way. This was less the case for women. Indeed, for many women active in the so-called ‘informal economy’, livelihoods were often closely intertwined with the local social fabric. Their loss, and their experience of pressure, tended to be located in their economic prospects, resulting from the destruction of their small capital during the eviction, and/or the loss of their selling spot, which was often close to their house.

In short, not only have evicted households seen their land rights ignored, their homes destroyed and their local community dismembered, with all the health outcomes of such experience of structural state violence. Pressurized by a brutal urban policy, they have experienced a reduction of their economic prospects and of their life chances that equates to a longer-term . Unfortunately, their case is far from exceptional, as massive evictions have swept the continent in the last decade. A few dozen kilometres east of Cotonou, similar analysis of how neoliberal urbanism aiming at reinforcing the international attractivity of the city actually weakens the right to the city and the social conditions of the urban poor has recently been made about the neighbouring . A growing body of literature now unequivocally shows how such neoliberal urbanism reinforces social inequalities and deepens the spatial divisions of the city. In further destabilizing and pressurizing precarious working class households, the economic theory underlying such public policies actually reveals itself as bad and damaging economic policy. By making poor households more vulnerable and deepening the social and spatial divisions of the city, the hidden costs generated by such pressurizing policies far outweigh the benefits of a redesigned waterfront.

Joël Noret is Professor of Anthropology at the Université libre de Bruxelles (Belgium). His research focuses on the production of social class in Benin. He has recently edited the volume Social Im/mobilities in Africa (Oxford, Berghahn Books, 2020).

Narcisse Martial Yedji is a political sociologist and a Department Lecturer at the Université d’Abomey-Calavi (Benin). In the last few years, he has been working on evictions and the production of urban space in Cotonou.

Photo: The site of the now evicted neighbourhood of Fiyegnon 1. Coconut trees have replaced houses and streets. Picture: Joël Noret, July 2022