500-Year-Old Religion at Root of Benin's Culture
Avoce Hodonou raises a bottle of rum, a 'hot drink' or hard liquor, on National Voodoo Day on the beach at Ouidah, Benin.
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By Karl Vick
Washington Post Foreign Service OUIDAH, Benin--There is no school in Benin on National Voodoo Day, so
4-year-old Catherine Maria Goretti went to the beach with her family. They
wore their Sunday best even though Voodoo Day fell on a Monday this year, and
gathered with a few thousand fellow believers near a cheerful little statue
of the god of people who have died and returned as spirits.
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"She's too small to know voodoo now," said Catherine's father, a police
officer named Louis Hodonou. But she was old enough to watch, and there was a
lot to see.
The high priest of voodoo arrived in a Mercedes-Benz. Shaded by a heavily
sequined top hat and an umbrella held by someone else, Daagbo Hounon made his
way at a stately pace through the throng of chanting disciples.
A burly man in his late sixties, the high priest held a goat in the air,
slashed its throat and let its blood collect in a bowl at his feet as an
offering to the spirits. He poured Royal Stork Gin onto the sand to welcome
the ancestors. He sat on a floating mat, drifted out to sea and returned a
few minutes later with a pot full of meat and cassava.
Eventually, he made a speech.
"Thanks to this holiday, the voodoo religion has become a national partner
that strives to contribute . . . to the reinforcement of civil society, the
basis of any democratic process," Hounon said.
It was, in short, a fairly typical National Voodoo Day in Benin, which has
celebrated the holiday on January 10 since 1996. A slender, vertical West
African country tucked between Nigeria and Togo, Benin is the birthplace of
voodoo. Perhaps two-thirds of its 6 million inhabitants practice the faith,
which is an official religion here along with Christianity and Islam.
The practice was banned by a Marxist regime in 1972, but it remained so
popular that when then-President Nicephoro Soglo gave it its own day four
years ago, the gesture was widely interpreted as election-year pandering.
"Le jour de voodoo," said Leonard Aguenou, a resident of Cotonou, Benin's
largest city. "Voodoo Day. Like Christmas Day or Easter Day."
Not exactly, of course. But it is a surprisingly wholesome occasion, devoid
of many of the sensational associations Hollywood has invented for voodoo. In
the five centuries voodoo has been practiced in Benin--often by people who
also count themselves as Christians--it has thrived as just one more
polytheistic African faith, bound up with everyday life in countless ways,
even gassing up one's car.
"You can never forget your voodoo roots," said Louis Hodonou. Added his
cousin, Avoce Hodonou, "Voodoo is the basis of our culture."
It is a complex culture, but anchored--as most African societies are--in the
veneration of ancestors, who are considered intermediaries to the spirit
world, the world of the creator. Voodoo, in fact, translates from the Fon
language of Benin as "spirit" or "god." It emphasizes maintaining a close
relationship with the spirit world, and keeping in harmony with it.
The religion has much in common with the faith of the Yoruba tribe in
neighboring Nigeria, whose beliefs form the core of Santeria, a religion
widely practiced among Latino immigrants in U.S. cities. Santeria and voodoo
both feature many gods.
There is Legba, the god of crossroads, who acts as a messenger to other gods.
In downtown Cotonou, a gas station has gone up beside a famous shrine to
Legba. At "Station Legba," as the sign says, you can fuel up and leave a
priest instructions to pray for you.
There is Ogun, the god of iron. At the crowded home of the high priest, Ogun
is represented by a pile of used auto parts in the courtyard. "He's to
prevent accidents," a guide explained. "If you want to make a long trip, you
pray to him."
And there are numerous other gods, any of which may from time to time take
temporary possession of a believer's body, especially during ceremonies. This
is usually a welcome event, an opportunity for real communion with divinity.
Given the Western associations of possession with exorcism, it can make for
an unsettling spectacle; however, Hounon, the high priest, dismisses such
fears.
"Everybody knows what voodoo really is," he said. "Voodoo is the good-doer.
It exists for doing good."
On the wall above him hung a Certification of Appreciation from the New
Orleans City Council, a token of the reach of his faith, sometimes known in
the American South as hoodoo.
"Voodoo is an old pastime. It belongs to our ancestors. It's there, and it
exists for the welfare of society," the high priest said.
The night before National Voodoo Day in Cotonou, east of Ouidah, thousands
gathered in a soccer stadium to see the "parade of phantoms," a show
featuring mounds of thatch that appear to be moved by spirits.
On the holiday, hundreds gathered in a Ouidah side street to see "people who
had passed away." These turned out to be men bedecked in costumes so colorful
and so elaborate they resembled floats. The decidedly physical spirits danced
in a dusty circle, pretended to charge at onlookers and stopped frequently to
ask for money.
Voodoo was carried from Benin to the New World by West Africans who boarded
slave ships off this very beach. Forbidden by Christian masters, voodoo
became an underground phenomenon in Haiti, wrapped in a secrecy and fear that
made it a tool of repression for hundreds of years.
Papa Doc Duvalier, the longtime Haitian dictator, used to wear sunglasses
with one lens missing, an emblem of the god of the dead, noted Maureen
Tilley, an associate professor of religious studies at the University of
Dayton. "So he would be seen as one who had power over life and death by his
garb," she said.
It was never like that in Benin. However, many of the faithful here do
believe in voodoo's capacity to punish those who do bad, Avoce Hodonou said.
He has seen the evidence, he added.
"The way it happened, I was in the car," he said. "People were in it. The
thunder, or lightning, killed two persons in the car, and the remaining two
people were brought out, and then the car burned." The victims, he said, had
offended the god of thunder, who sometimes works with the snake god.
"If you do bad," said Agathe, Catherine's mother, "and you kneel down to
urinate, the voodoo on the ground will look inside you. Yes."
"The ground will attack you and leave a pimple on your body," Avoce Hodonou
said. "It kills you. The pimple is the manifestation. . . . Your body can be
covered in pimples."
If it all sounds rather threatening, that's the idea.
"If you are worshipful and you are playing tricks, then you can die," Avoce
Hodonou said. "When following the good ways of voodoo, then you live safe.
That's the main law: Respect your fellow. Don't betray him."
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