Whoodoo? Youdoo?

Benin is a country with an intellectual bent, full of little cafes where middle-aged men with glasses are to be found sitting with newspapers, arguing over politics, waving their newspapers about, and pounding back cups of coffee. I myself made a second home at Cafe Eureka, a mere shack on the street corner in Ouidah that proclaimed itself to be "the Cafe of arts and culture". The interior was covered in mathematical proofs scrawled over the rough-cut boards, and I found it a congenial place indeed for a bit of a ponder - though what the proofs were proving escaped me.

All this intellectual infrastructure in Benin is a good thing, because the place leaves you with a heck of a lot to ponder. Especially along the coast, the culture is an absolutely fascinating hybrid. It starts with the Portuguese colonization of South America and the beginnings of the empire of Brazil, whose work was done mostly by West African slaves shipped out from the Benin coast. Early on, several powerful Brazilian families settled in Benin and established control of the trade. They were fruitful, and by taking dozens of local wives, had hundreds of children that helped create a distinctive Afro-Brazilian culture all along the coast as far as Lagos. All through Benin you see Brazilian architecture, meet people named Da Silva and the like, and generall bump into this peculiar hybrid, of one colonial creation colonizing and merging with its own historical antecedant, to create all kinds of complexity, complexity furthered by the split within the Afro-brazilian community, a large portion of which ended up Muslim. Such was the path that led to a beautiful pastel-coloured mosque in Porto Novo, built as an exact imitation of the Catholic Cathedral of Salvador de Bahia in Brazil.

The most famous aspect of this cultural hybrid is the religion that went with it: voodoo, or much more properly, vodun. It's the major part of Beninoise identity for tourists, who come equipped with morbid hollywood stereotypes that are, indeed, not entirely untrue. There really are voodoo dolls, creepy fetishes made from monkey heads, and a general dread of curses and enemies, along with a great deal of death-centric ritual. This is all window-dressing, though, for a truly vibrant animist faith that has a pretty consistent set of rituals from Brazil to Haiti to Benin. To travel Benin is to be immersed in Vodun culture, and the slavery that spawned it.

I wasn't much up for the schlocky side, like paying the local priest to cast bones for your fortune, but that wasn't much of a problem. Most of the time, vodun is just something that's there. In Ouidah, my first stop, a little orderly town full of cafes and museums, you find a sacred forest full of voodoo shriness, and more of them lining the road to the old point of no return, where slaves were loaded into the ships and taken away. You see rich beninoise stop their Mercedes' to offer a quick prayer to one, then drive away in a cloud of dust.

Benin is generally a tidy country. It's very visibly richer than Togo, and has such things - real sidewalks, public squares! - to make it seem positivel sophisticated. A few days in Porto Novo, the capital, pounds that impression right in, with tons of elegant old buildings and more Afro Brazilian history. As nice as it was, the highlight of my couple weeks came at the next stop, in Abomey, the old capital of the Dahomey kings.

There, I dived right back into the vodun, staying at a run-down hole of a hotel run by a fellow who knew everything about the community and the local religious calendar (he was the next president of one of the secret societies). I had the luck to show up in town in time to catch 3 nights of ceremony and dancing, at all of which I was the sole foreigner, which was pretty intense indeed. The first night, the risen dead chased us through the dusty backstreets and beat us with swords until we yeilded coins. The second night, a secret society of women danced together to thank the local river god, and the third night, there was a dance to invite a good rainy season that involved frantic drumming, much spastic dancing and flipping about, and eventually, the killing of 2 goats which were then flung about the dance ground wildly - the dance ground being a patch of dust 5 feet from my room window, so no sleep for me! Well worth it, though - I've rarely felt as honestly admitted into local culture as I did then.

When not dancing, I chased down the ghosts of kingdoms past - Abomey is full of palaces with their selection of creepiness - thrones mounted on human skulls, reliefs of the king beating someone to death with a severed limb. These were not pleasant people, back in the day. They did, however, produce an empire that resisted the French for a long time. It was a rare pleasure to be in an African place which had a historical identity almost entirely rooted in its precolonial past, however bloody that past may have objectively seemed.

It was also an even rarer pleasure, in a complete aside, to be in an African country where cheese - delicious, soft, fried cheese - was a big menu item at street stalls. I nearly died of joy, for days! It was largely in pursuit of cheese, and the Burkina Faso border, that I found my way north, but on the way I found Dassa Zoume, a crazy town buried in epic rock formations, and the town of Natitingou, where the Tata Somba houses (same general idea as the Tamberma valley in Togo) made another appearance. I spent many evenings at my favourite bar in the region, La Breche, which was a restored Tata Somba house where you could put your feet up and look over the Atakora mountains. Joyousness!

And so ended my Benin experience - vodun dancing, snake eating (tastes like chicken!), cafe-sitting, and all. For a place I had few expectations of, it worked out to be a real highlight of this trip.
Peace