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500-Year-Old Religion at Root of Benin's Culture
By Karl Vick
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, February 24, 2006
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.
"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."
© Copyright 2006. The Washington Post Company
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