The voodoo that's no hoodoo

BENIN: MAGIC FLOWS THROUGH THE CITY'S STREETS DURING CENTURIES-OLD FESTIVAL

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HATS OFF. Women dance in their colourful clothes and massive jewelery at the voodoo ceremony in Ouidah. Pictures: AFP TAKING SHAPE. A form of Egungun spirit dances ahead of a voodoo ceremony. BEADS GALORE. A dancer in traditional clothing and jewelery at the festival. SPIRITED. Egungun is a manifestation of departed ancestors.

(AFP)

On the newly renovated streets of Ouidah, thousands of Beninese and foreign tourists gathered this week to discover the rituals and deities bound up with voodoo, a popular animist tradition that has grown to become the focus of a international festival.

For years now, the Beninese government has been promoting the ancestral religion as the spearhead of an ambitious tourism policy.

The old Vodun festival, celebrated on 10 January, has given way to Vodun Days, a three-day festival of dancing, mask parades and traditional ceremonies in the coastal city just west of capital Cotonou, also known for its role in the Atlantic slave trade of bygone centuries.

Although scenes of animal sacrifices on altars have been kept far from the tourist gaze, there has been no question of diluting the sacredness of the event’s ceremonies.

On the Fort Francais esplanade, guardians of the night in Zangbeto masks, acting as sentinels of social order in the voodoo rite, emerged in a straw whirlwind to cavort in hypnotic and mysterious fashion before an audience of devotees, mixed with equally fascinated tourists.