Voodoo Adventures

Much as I enjoyed Nigeria, I'm coming to the conclusion that it's French speaking West Africa I like the best. After Abuja, we crossed over the most insubstantial of frontiers to spent a thoroughly enjoyable week in Benin. Only the change of language evident in the first village we encountered after the Nigerian passport 'hut' told the story that we'd actually arrived in Benin. Later, a short 24 hour dash across tiny Togo, just 56km wide on the coast, brought us to Ghana yesterday. I almost got myself arrested at the Ghanaian frontier by an irate soldier in a mix up over currency exchange, so it was an inauspicious arrival. Still, Grace flies in tonight to join me in Accra, so Ghana may well emerge as my favourite country yet. Anyway, it's the last chance to win out for the anglophone countries, as it's French all the way to Dakar hereafter.

Benin and Togo have a quite distinctive feel, much of that distinctiveness coming from the prevalence within local culture of voodoo, the worship of ancestor gods. It was from this region that voodoo was exported to Haiti, Brazil and other parts of the New World with the slave trade. In Ouidah, in Benin, a sleepy little town with a pretty Portuguese fort, you can follow a four kilometre walk to an undistinguished stretch of sandy beach from where over three million slaves were loaded into European slave ships to be transported across the Atlantic in appallingly inhumane conditions. And Ouidah was just one of scores of such ports of embarkation. Ghana alone has over 30 surviving European forts doted along its coast that were used as trading bases for the lucrative slave trade, some dating to as far back as the fifteenth century. Local beliefs held particular trees, especially the iroko tree, to be sacred. Along the 'Rue des Esclaves' at Ouidah you pass two sacred spots that illustrate the interplay of voodoo and the slave trade. The first is the tree of forgetting. Here the local chiefs responsible for selling the slaves would force the male slaves to circle the tree nine times, the female slaves seven times, in a ritual intended to enact the surrendering of their cultural roots. In this way they would relinquish their African identity and behave submissively towards their new white masters. The second tree a little further along was a tree of the spirit. Here the slaves would choose to circle the tree twice before proceeding to the beach in a ritual which they hoped and believed would enable their souls to return to Africa after they had died in distant captivity.

One of the less acknowledged aspects of the slave trade was the extent to which it relied upon warring African kingdoms to provide a steady flow of human captives for the trade. In Benin, you get a flavour of this local context visiting Abomey, the old capital of the Kings of Dahomey. This expansionist royal house was spectacularly successful in its pursuit of war against rival royal neighbours and came to control a large area of southern Benin before being snuffed out by the military superiority of the French in the 1890s. Two royal palaces survive in Abomey which give a wonderful flavour of the wealth and cultural richness of this kingdom, but also illustrate its cruelty. Human life was held cheap to an extent which surprised even this student of medieval history, and a dynastic commitment to almost perpetual warfare meant the kingdom had a ready supply of captive enemies to make it a big player in the slave trade.

The old kingdoms of Benin were without exception voodoo kingdoms, and indeed the last king of Porto Novo committed ritual suicide in 1976 having lost his honour when the latest in a line of post-independence military dictators decided to outlaw voodoo in the country. That ruling was relaxed more recently, and everywhere you go in the country you spy lumpy, rather odd looking fetishes on the edge of villages that protect their communities from various unwelcome misfortunes. Voodoo temples are orientated towards different deities, each with its select group of the 'initiated' who can enter inside and participate in the more sacred rites. There seems to be little personal choice about becoming initiated, if you are selected by an elder it is not politic to refuse. Still, it's clear that despite its penchant for human skulls and dried dead animals, voodoo here is not understood as a sinister or negative thing in the least. It has a vibrancy in its celebrations made patently evident when some of our group got invited along to an all singing and dancing get-together in Abomey which centred on the exorcising of a demon from a young boy. It's interesting to observe how easily these local beliefs sit alongside Christianity. I was told that quite a high proportion of religiously Christian Beninoise keep up voodoo practices as well as attending church because they believe that it is important to keep old traditions alive.

My final encounter to date with voodoo involved a trip to the fetish market in Lome, the capital of Togo. I rather liked Togo on a brief acquaintance and spent an enjoyable few hours there shopping for an african mask, before chilling out over lunch with a bunch of stall traders who told me all about the country's woes, how the President was a criminal, and how Togo's miraculous qualification for the World Cup was the only decent thing that had happened to the place recently. After such a friendly welcome, the fetish market came as something of a disappointment. Half demolished in a move to 'improve facilities', it now consists of a confusion of trestle tables exposed to the beating sun, which are laden with dried dead animals, bats and snakes being particualrly popular, assorted skins, quite a number of skulls, and various sculpted figurines that have been banged full of pins. I was led into a delapidated tin shed for some voodoo hard sell, with an aggressive trader acting as translater for an ancient and nattily dressed voodoo doctor who sported an expressionless face and pineapple nose beneath his trilby hat. Having identified a good luck charm as the item I wanted to buy, there was some protracted mumbo jumbo to be got through as we both uttered a series of prescribed mantras. The old man then tossed a set of cowrie shells on the sandy floor to determine the price. Unsurprisingly, the pattern revealed that the price was exorbitantly high. A firm refusal to pay such a hefty sum soon brought the price tumbling, and I eventually exited the shack wearing my charm having agreed a much more reasonable rate and no doubt picked up a hex from the decidedly disgruntled trader in the process. It doesn't matter what you believe in, there's always money to be made from religion.