Ouidah voodoo festival

Every year on 10 January, Benin celebrates its national religion with a festival in the coastal town of Ouidah (a place also known for its slave-trading history).  I've never managed to schedule a work-related trip to Benin in January, so I bit the bullet this year and bought my own flights so as to visit this festival.

I've long wanted to experience a real voodoo ceremony, having read about the way people can supposedly become 'possessed' by spirits, but this is really a matter of luck, being in the right place at the right time.  A colleague has an aunt who carries out similar ceremonies here in Senegal, and I've pushed for an invitation, but the aunt says it would be too dangerous for me - that evil spirits might come up through the ground and enter my body, which would be a terrifying experience for me and could leave me permanently damaged - and so she will not allow me to attend one of her ceremonies.  Needless to say, I don't believe in evil spirits, so have no fear of any such ceremony going wrong in that way, but this isn't really an argument you can use here.

So the voodoo festival in Ouidah would have to do as second best.  & I feel I should be careful here in any case not to give the wrong impression of voodoo - the Hollywood impression of a set of dark and perhaps evil practices - as the religion is not based around trances and animal sacrifices, those play only a small part related to major problems or events in people's lives.  The day-to-day practice of voodoo is far more mundane.

I found no information about this festival on the internet other than the date, and even on a trip to Benin in December no-one could give me any information, so I turned up not really knowing what to expect - even whether I would find the festival!  I arrived in Ouidah late the evening before, found myself a hotel room, and asked the hotel manager what was going to happen.  There will be a big procession to the beach, he told me, and after the official ceremony, there would be "voodoo here, voodoo there, voodoo everywhere!", waving his hands about excitedly.  Voodoo is indeed everywhere in Ouidah (and in much of Benin and parts of neighbouring Togo), as it is the national religion.  You see little shrines next to houses, often sticky with the residue of earlier sacrifices (usually of beer or grain porridges, rather than animals), and various buildings with voodoo symbols painted on them (a rainbow, or a snake, for example).  But I didn't fly all this way, for a two-day visit, to see a fetish or a painted building.

On the day of the festival I followed my hunch - a sound of singing and clapping which I traced to its origin in the local chief's house.  In return for a $10 payment for a 'photo permit' I was allowed in, and watched the chief and his entourage prepare, then we left in a big chaotic procession towards the python temple, with all the chief's family and guests dressed in their ceremonial finery. 

Ouidah apparently means, in the local language, 'town of pythons' and the python is the most important local deity, so sacrifices had to be made there before the festival could start.  Two goats and two chickens were the victims, presumably fed to the pythons later.

Then we made our way the 4km to the beach (the chiefs in their 4x4s, me on the back of a motorbike taxi) for the festival.  This was a strange event, formal in some ways (the US Ambassador was there, and Benin TV were broadcasting it live), but as well as the speeches and displays of drumming and dancing from the main stage of the big square, there were more animal sacrifices performed away from the stage, and various private dances with frenetic drumming in corners (including those in the first photo above) - mostly far more interesting, and with a far more authentic feel, than that put on for the Ambassador and the TV.

Walking back into town after the formalities were over I passed another troupe of dancers heading towards the beach area - looking at the photos afterwards I had to ask myself why I hadn't followed them.  Bare breasts, grass skirts, ointment smeared over their bodies and the prospect of some wild dancing - I have to admit that as much as I want Africa to develop (clean water and education for all, but also further into the 21st century), it is this traditional, even 'primitive' side of the continent that really draws me in.

Revisiting this post to add a further comment, as my lack of articulacy in the last paragraph was bothering me.  What I was trying to reflect was the conflict I so often face between the sensational and the mundane, in terms of representing Africa in my blog.  Of course I am more attracted by exploring (and writing about) the sensational side, but at the same time I don't want to give the wrong impression of the continent.  Bare-breasted women in grass skirts dancing around blood-smeared fetishes to the beat of frenetic drumming is something I want to see and write about, and is a valid image of a part of Africa, but it no more represents the wider African continent (nor even the voodoo religion) than a burnt-out car on a Belfast street represents the wider UK.  & I thought it was important to come back and make this clear, because so much of what one reads about Africa relies on stereotypical images of the place as primitive, poor, corrupt, disease-ridden, etc - and whilst those images do represent a part of the truth, it is only a small part, and I don't want to contribute to an overall negative view of this continent that I love so much.

R 'n R in Benin

No, not rock 'n roll, not rest 'n recuperation either - but Rooney 'n Ronaldo! After a ridiculously busy week in Benin (still working in my hotel room at 4am one night) I had a Saturday at leisure to enjoy myself, and I managed to find a venue showing the football. Or at least some of it, between blank screens when the generator (or perhaps the satellite?) cut out from time-to-time. Or when I was not being distracted by the adverts running across the screen for matches to be shown later in the day. Everton -v- Bigminham? Middlesbrough -v- Hotspurs? But great as always to watch a game in a room crowded with hundreds of fans.

Back in Dakar now I have also made further attempts to watch the beautiful game, as a very kind man answered my plea for help on the Senegal network of facebook. First he took me to his friend's house to watch a Man Utd Champions League match. All was looking promising until half-an-hour before the game, when the lights went out. A power cut. As he had a laptop I asked him if he had tried Sopcast? We downloaded it and found the United game. Just a tiny screen, and quite a fuzzy picture (Senegal internet speeds are not great) but better than nothing. Until his battery gave out at half time.

Today we tried again - the Premiership game against Blackburn was supposed to be on. But the Canal operators in Senegal had decided not to buy coverage, so all we were faced with was a blank screen. Unfortunately I think I am coming to accept that it is one interest I will have to put to one side whilst I am in Senegal.

Back to Benin - a lovely country, from the little I had time to see. Poor, of course, but without all the hustlers of Dakar, and with some truly great tourist sites. The stilt village on Lake Ganvie is in fact rather a tourist trap, but is no less pretty for it. A whole village built in a shallow lake (originally sited there for safety during one of the old tribal wars), all the houses on stilts, and each family with a number of pirogues to travel in. Even with a cloudy sky it was lovely, helped too by the jewel-coloured little malachite kingfishers flitting around the dock.

I also managed to visit the voodoo Python Temple in Ouidah. I don't know why pythons are quite so important in the voodoo religion, but in this temple there were about fifty of them, stretched out lazily in their 'house' apart from those being brought out for us tourists to drape around our necks. They are let out at 5pm each day, so that they can make their way into another little house where food is put out for them. There is however nothing to stop them leaving the compound at that point, which some have been known to do. The guide said villagers are not afraid if they find one in their house as this is supposed to be a good omen. & in this continent where everyone seems to be absolutely terrified of snakes (I suppose with good reason) that is saying something.

Afterwards, whilst I was queueing to get into Cotonou airport for my flight home, I was approached by a very attractive and well-dressed young woman asking me if I would mind carrying a small bag back for her. Of course I declined, but it reminded me of stories I was told earlier in Togo (next-door to Benin) - of the attractive well-dressed women you see hanging around the airport being part of the drugs trade, either waiting to collect an assignment or waiting to offload one onto a naive passenger. I did wonder if there was something rather more proactive I should have done, like accepting the bag and then handing it to a policeman for its contents to be checked, but if it was drugs then it is quite possible that the police are in on the deal, and that handing over the bag would get one into all sorts of trouble.

Now I am back in Senegal, where the weather has changed in my absence. The wind only blows from two directions into coastal Senegal - either from the south-west, where it picks up moisture from the Atlantic bringing summer rain and humidity, or from the north, where it picks up dust from the Sahara making the rest of the year dusty and hazy. So now the humidity has gone and it is cool enough to sleep at night but we once again have dust everywhere. A plague of insects has also appeared, some quite nice (millions of white butterflies everywhere), some less so (ants over everything, and crickets getting into the house and chirping loudly all night).