Vodun days
Hi BoBers,
Vodun is an animist religion in West Africa and the origin of the Voodoo traditions of the Caribbean and mainland America. It is celebrated every year on the 10th of January in Benin, where it is practiced by most people alongside Islam or Christianity. Lately, the festival has grown in popularity, partly due to massive investment by the current president and autocratic leader Patrice Talon, perhaps in an attempt to launder the country’s reputation a little after the coup attempt in late 2025.
The emphasis was very much on Vodun as holistic religion, emphasising its focus on peace and connection with nature, probably to counteract foreigner’s (and my own) ignorant association of voodoo with bloody sacrifice. I saw some impromptu sacrifices on the street by residents during the celebrations, but they were very much not on the official program, which was well typeset and had been broadcast for weeks over every imaginable form of social media. There were even, somewhat inexplicably, guys hired to ride bikes through the town with big banners during the festival.
As a well-organised, curated and somewhat sanitised cultural festival it was a massive success. The massive parties on the beach in the evening added some well-needed chaos back into the mix, with the heaving crowd happily flowing around the dozens of people sleeping on the sand. Police formed a line hundreds of metres long to stop any ill-fated attempts as swimming and armoured vehicles stationed at the entrances. The festival ended with a big ceremony in a brand new area with limited seating that we managed to sneak our way into with some quick thinking from my friends.
Seeing this very rich expression of centuries of religious practice reinforced to me how much (white) Australia is lacking in this regard. There’s a kind of dismissive approach to this kind of local culture as arbitrary and useless that I think is a bit misguided. One of many lessons.
Still exhaustedly buzzing after the festival, it was time to head to the economic capital Cotonou.
Bloodlessly,
J&BoB
