A day with Voudou in Benin

This was written in 2013 and was published in The Prisma Multicultural Newspaper but it’s another one that can’t be located at the moment in the archives, so I am posting it here in full until the link becomes available.

I arrived in Abomey in time for the 3 day annual Voudou festival. The big day is supposed to be the last, the 10th of Jan., but this is just when there is most public activity in the streets, the ceremonies taking place on the evenings of the 8th and 9th are far more interesting, if you can see them.

I was fortunate to have the help of Damien, a guide at the Tourist Office in Abomey, who also took me, free of charge, to a ceremony at his own house, since it happened to be the anniversary of his father’s death.

Inside their compound, one room has an altar (or Hotel de la Divinite) which is used for all ceremonies. As you can see in the photo it has a collection of skulls of all the previously sacrificed sheep, and lower down stains and feathers, from chickens and the various liquids that have been given to the divinity to drink, including gin, beer and a red oil made with chili peppers. Damien explained that whether the animal sacrificed is a chicken or a sheep depends mostly on how much money is available: a sheep may cost 25,000 CFA, a chicken only 2,500. On this occasion 2 chickens were killed by a male relative in front of the altar and some of their blood splashed over it. He wipes the knife on the bird’s feathers, before using the dead animal as a mop to clean up spilt blood on the floor, and flinging its body through the open door, to later be plucked and cooked.

Before this the whole family had gathered in the room, his sisters bowing down to the ground in front of their mother, and Damien and his brothers bowing to the altar in the same way. Three drinks were passed around for everyone to taste, Gin, Beer and Fanta, as well as 3 plates of food. Then some Kola nuts were produced, bitten into 4 pieces and thrown on the ground. Damien later explained that this was a divination - a positive answer is indicated by the pieces falling in two parallel lines.

The first question was to his father: “Are you happy with the way things are ?” If the answer was “yes” then all is well. If not, further questions are put in order to identify the source of his father’s concern and find a solution. At this point Damien said , his father “stands behind me and gives me his strength”.

It is interesting that the psychotherapist Bert Hellinger, who studied Zulu religion , also incorporates the ancestors into his work with families. A healthy situation exists when the same sex parent stands behind the person seeking help, and this is represented in Hellinger’s method by using other group members. Likewise bowing down before a figure representing a parent is used as a healing ritual.

The All-night Ceremony

Later that day I had arranged to meet Damien to go to a public ceremony at one of the many temples scattered all over the town.

We met near my hotel at 10.30pm but didn’t move on until gone midnight as he was being updated by phone that people, and especially the drummers, had not arrived. “They get drunk and fall asleep, and someone has to go and wake them up”, he explained.

This temple is dedicated to the goddess Lissa, and the first part of the ceremony took place in private inside the temple. We could only hear the drumming and chanting, and when it was over the adepts and their disciples emerged and mostly departed quickly, so that the second group, by now over a hundred people could hold their ceremony outside the temple. Once again we all sit in a large circle, jokes are shared and shots of strong local gin are passed around, until the drummers arrive.

Several times we had to move our chairs to allow groups of people to chant and pray apart from us, and during one of these moves Damien realizes he has dropped his mobile phone. We are comically crawling around with torches raking through the sand for some time but no luck. Calling the number gets a ‘phone turned off’ message and Damien is now convinced that ‘the thieves’ have taken the Sim card out and he has lost all his important contacts. From then on and after the ceremony he stops everyone we meet to tell them about the scandalous theft of his phone, eliciting varying degrees of sympathy…

During one of the group prayers a small goat kid has been sacrificed, and is then brought into the centre of the big group and laid on a bed of leaves, legs still twitching, while a woman kneels beside it stroking its body gently with a leaf, from tail to head. This goes on for probably an hour, until a young guy appears and begins to spin and cart-wheel across the arena many times as he enters a trance. Gradually he moves closer to the dead animal and eventually motions the woman to move away. He lies beside the body a few times appearing to whisper to the animal, then leaping away and cart-wheeling around once again. Finally, lying beside the animal he raises one arm high above his head with fingers pointed down, quivering, as if about to strike. He does this a couple more times, and then suddenly leans forward and seizes the dead animal in his teeth by its bloody throat and stands up for all to see.

After turning round a few times he grabs the body by its legs and beats it hard against the ground, maybe 10 times or more, before flinging it high into the air, turning his back and walking away, like a toreador.

Damien explains that having been possessed by the divinity he symbolically feeds it by biting into the animal, but in Voudou there are three classes divinities, and those below the earth and in the sky must also be fed. This is the reason for beating the earth with its body and throwing it into the air.

The ceremony ends at 8 am and mu guide ferries me back to my hotel to sleep for many hours until the final evening ceremony.

When we come back for this at 5pm it turns out his phone has been found, but – he can’t have it back until after the ceremony and must pay 2,000 CFA. This is because everyone must see that it has been returned in order to dispel suspicions – but I have the suspicion that they are enjoying teasing him too.

The final ceremony includes more chanting, and drinking, but it is more of a spectacle. Children as young as four or five put on furious shows of dancing and cart-wheeling that would shame our kids in the UK. And finally some tourists appear – shipped in by minibus for the last hour or two of the ceremony - but maybe animal sacrifice is not something for a tourist brochure.

Note: I Euro = 656 CFA, fixed exchange rate.