Monkey's Heads and Voodoo...

Last week Andrea, one of the Fulbright researchers, and I went to Togo and Benin. We took a trotro for between 4 and 4 and ½ hour to Aflao, the town, in Ghana, that borders Togo and the capital city of Lome. We walked across the border and proceeded to get around Lome by taking “mototaxis” everywhere. Instead of having regular taxis all over the place, there are tons of small motorcycles and scooters around that are personal taxis and are really a ton of fun. The first night we had to check at a few different places, but found a place to stay relatively easily, and everyone we ran into was very nice and helpful.

The next day we were able to go to the Fetish Market, the largest one in West Africa and maybe the world. This is a market filled with items that are important in the “Voodun” religion. In the US we know it as Voodoo or Juju. Somewhere around 30% of the people in Togo still practice and the majority, more than half, of the people in Benin still practice. I learned, however, that Voodoo here is much different than what most Americans know it as. As slaves were taken from West Africa to the Americas, Voodoo came as well but changed as it made a home in the Western world. Plus, movies and books have demonized the religion as well by highlighting things like “black magic” and Voodoo dolls. These things do exist in the religion and are very real to its followers, but are not the main components of the faith. The market itself was pretty ghastly. It consisted of monkey heads, cheetah heads, monkey paws, snakes, elephant foots…you name it, it was there. It was really creepy to see and, like many things I have seen here, seemed surreal. There was a guy there that took us around and explained some of it to us and promised that all of the animals had died a natural death (not sure I really believe that). We were also able to meet the son of the Voodoo Priest (the priest himself had already left for the Voodoo Festival in Benin, more on that in a minute). The son of the Priest took us into his hut and told us about “gris gris”, charms, of sorts in Voodun. It was pretty cool and a very different experience than I have ever had before.

After a few days in Lome, we went to Benin for a Voodoo Festival that was pretty cool. There were a lot of tourists, a lot of white people, which, honestly, was a little strange to see. We walked around the festival and saw a lot of dancing and drumming and celebrations that I really did not fully understand, but neat to see because it is so different than anything I have ever seen. I am not sure if I will be able to upload it to the internet or not, but there were these large costume things that some of the people wore that looked liked a huge skirt but had no head. Again, I don’t really know what it was or what purpose it serves in Voodoo, but it was crazy.

After a few hours at the festival we decided to go and get back to Accra. Getting back through Benin was easy (again, taking mototaxi wherever we could) but getting into Togo presented a little bit of a hassle. Before having left Accra we had gone to the Togo embassy and purchased a visa that is good for all West African Francophone countries (Ivory Coast, Burkina Faso, Niger, Togo, and Benin). This was so we would save time at the borders by already having the visa and save a few bucks as well. However, the fine print on the visa stated it was only good for “single entry” into those countries. Getting in and out once is no problem, but we had already entered and exited Togo and wanted to reenter. The border official took my passport, looked at it, stamped it, signed it, and handed it back to me without hassle. As I stood there and waited, he took Andrea’s, looked at it and asked for mine back. Not thinking anything of it, I gave it back to him and he proceeded to cross out my entry stamp and told us that we each needed to pay 15,000 CF (30-35 dollars) to get another visa! We took out all of the CF we had and, all together, it amounted to exactly 14,500, not even enough for one visa. We told the guy and asked what we could do (all of this is in broken West African French by the way), and he was not happy with us. He called over another guy, who was very large and did not look particularly happy with us either, and he escorted us back across the border and told us we had to stay there until we had 30,000 CF! Luckily we had met another American at the festival who was going back to Accra at the same time we were. She saw that we had been escorted back across the border and she came over, found us, and loaned us enough money to get back into Togo. Once in Togo, we had/have multiple entry visas to get back into Ghana so the rest of the trip home went smoothly. For about 15 minutes, however, it was interesting to think about how we were going to get back to Ghana.

Traveling anywhere can be a challenge. Traveling in Africa is a whole new experience and a new challenge for me. Plus, the fact that everyone, on this trip, spoke French, but not just French, a strange combination of traditional West African languages and French, made communication difficult. Togo and Benin have been marred by political instability and Togo itself was rocked within the last decade by a bloody civil war that forced the withdrawal of much foreign investment. Everything worked out ok for us, luckily. All in all it was a great trip, but not without a little bit of drama near the end.