Danoli Fetish Market in Northern Benin

Join in on a voodoo ceremony in the countryside in the north of Benin.

A man from Benin who lives in the USA had paid 1.000 usd for a white calf to be sacrificed. He spoke on a mobile phone in its ear to tell the wishes that his sacrifice hopefully would make happen in his life. The tied the calf, cut the throat, the cut of ears and continued the ritual. (They do eat the meat, but the head is kept as I understood it). 

A family came together all dressed in green, and the father placed lots of candy and soda water first. The hammered sticks into the sticky black pole that was the man of the two bigger poles. His son waited with a chicken and a small goat in a rope. They would be sacrificed too.

There were two big places, the bigger one being the man and the smaller being the woman.

There were also two smaller poles, again a man and a woman.

Here two young men were performing the rituals of sacrificing a chicken. It’s head was cut, then the feathers were pulled and placed on the pole. Two bottles of red oil based on palm oil were sprinkled over the pole and feathers. All sticky and clueing by now. Wishes were said to the pole, the chicken 🐓 and the gods.

A small goat has maybe been run over by a car, or not been paid or sacrificed properly, so instead of being sacrificed and eaten, it was burned under some palm leaves.

It’s was a place of heat and sun and dust and faith. It was a place of hopes and faith and both work and experiences and some fear, discust, scare and ugliness.

I felt completely safe as we had agreed beforehand that we were welcome. We paid through our fixer for one of the people taking care of the place to show us, to tell us about the culture, ceremonies and people, and thus we were also told where to stand and not to, and we could contribute to the community. That way we were welcomed and could behave respectfully. We learned.

The women took awhile to warm up or maybe we just had to take it all in before we could relate to others. When we did it was as meaningful and rewarding as always. An older woman looked at my breasts and noticed they were lifted more than hers. I couldn’t help laughing, pulled my Tshirt a side and showed her my bra and tugged the bra straps a few times for it to snap loudly and show the bra was tight and lifted my breasts a lot. That made us all laugh and then the tree woman and all the kids were laughing and taking pictures together for a while.

One of my prescious moments in life.