Starting this off with a warning – there are some fairly graphic photos of dead animals in this post. Togo and Benin are considered the birthplace of voodoo practices, which was fascinating to learn about and provided some of the highlights of the whole trip, but those practices do include animal sacrifice.
We started our day off with a drive to the border and a lengthy border crossing. Togo’s stamps took up an entire page in my passport. Thankfully I’d gotten a new one expressly for this trip. Most border agents were fairly polite about the way they stamped and made everything pretty neat, but there were so many visas and stamps and crossings that it chewed through a lot of pages.
We started in Lomé’s main market and visited the cathedral. You may be wondering about the prominence of a cathedral in a place where voodoo is practiced. We asked our guide, Isaac, about that, and he said that the people of Togo and Benin do not consider it to be an either/or. You don’t have to choose Christianity or voodoo, but you can practice both. The way he described it, it was Christianity during the day and voodoo during the night.
We ascribed to the same principles, I guess, because as the sun went down, we headed to the Akodessawa Fetish Market. This is not the way that most Westerners use the word “fetish,” just to be clear – there are no sexual connotations here. A fetish in voodoo culture is a powerful object, like an amulet or a talisman. Our guide basically said that this is where you would come if you needed parts of a specific animal for a ritual.
“Let’s say you went to the voodoo practitioner and he told you that you needed a chameleon,” Isaac said, choosing an extremely relatable example that I’m sure all of us have experienced. And yes, I did see dead chameleons at the market.
It was both heartbreaking and fascinating. Nothing really could have prepared me for walking behind a table filled with horns and feathers and skulls and skins, only to find a basket of dog heads staring back at me. And once we’d had a chance to explore, we got our first look at the kind of ritual that such a market facilitates.
First, we were taken to a room where they explained the various types of fetishes to us, including ones that helped travelers stay safe and ones that kept people healthy and ones that helped in the romance department. And then, once we had seen how those worked, we headed back outside for the main event: a chicken sacrifice.
We saw a lot of chickens get sacrificed as we traveled across Togo and Benin. Sometimes, the death was quick and the birds didn’t seem to know they were coming, and those were more or less fine. That wasn’t the case here – to be honest, I found this one pretty upsetting. I felt as though the chicken was in distress, and when he reached for another one, I wandered back through the market instead. The bones were even more unsettling in the moonlight.
From there, we headed to our hotel on the beach!
Togo was a fascinating introduction to voodoo culture. I have never seen anything like the Akodessawa Fetish Market and I can’t imagine that I will again. We didn’t spend too much time in Togo, as we were heading to Benin the next day, but it was extremely memorable! And Benin absolutely blew me away… but that’s a story for next time.