VOODOO CAPITAL OF THE WORLD
By Bob Van Leer

  (COTONOU, BENIN, Saturday, Jan. 20, 2001) - This country is the voodoo capital of the world and today we visited voodoo shrines and met the voodoo "pope".

  A highlight of the day was a five mile boat ride to visit the unusual city of Ganvie'. This city of 12,000 people is built on stilts on the shallow waters of Lake Nokoue. All the houses and even hotels and restaurants are built over the water. The markets are collections of dugout canoes with the occupants selling their wares.

  This unusual city location came about because the powerful King of Dahomey was battering his way from the interior to the coast led by corps of 2500 women, who served as personal bodyguard of the king. A superstition of the Dahomey people was that they wouldn't attack over water and the small Tofinu tribe fled to the lake and built their city on stilts in order to survive.

  The country is nearly as large as Pennsylvania with a population of about six million.

  Almost half (47%) of the population is age 14 or under. Only 3% is over 65. Life expectancy is listed as 50.18 years, but this seems high from the people we see. Almost no one has gray hair. The average woman has six children.

  Indigenous beliefs (read voodoo) are the religions of 70% of the population. Of the balance, 15% are Muslim and 15% are Christian.

  The is still equatorial Africa and not far north of the equator. The temperature at
8:00 a.m. was 79 degrees and went up rapidly from there. The supposed air conditioning on our bus was basically useless.

  Our first destination after leaving the ship (again with a police escort) was Ganvie'. The listed Gross Domestic Product per capita is $13000, better than Ghana at $360, but the looks of the country we drove through didn't indicate this. Buildings are marginal, mud brick or concrete block walls with corrugated iron roofs. And none of them look even remotely new. There is a different kind of taxi here, motorbikes. A motorbike or motor scooter that has a driver with a yellow shirt is a taxi for hire.

  Again we saw many acres of vegetable plots, each small plot with a dug well. They were mostly irrigated by hand with a couple of pumps seen.

  At the lake, we boarded 10 passenger wood plank boats powered by 15 h.p. Yamaha outboards. None of the boats we have been on has any kind of life preserver. We headed for Ganvie' through the morning mist and found the lake quite busy. There was traffic to and from Ganvie' and a lot of fishermen. Some were working set nets in pens, but most casting nets from dugout. They bundled up the nets and heaved and suddenly, in the air, each net opened up to about a 30 feet diameter circle and hit the water. The fish they were bringing in were small, perch-like fish 4-8 inches in length.

  Much of the traffic to the village was also in dugout canoes, often with only 3-4 inches of freeboard. Children as young as about four were wielding paddles in the canoes. A measure of the economy here is that in the age of jet airplanes and space travel, the dugout canoe is still a viable means of transportation here.

  The village gets enough tourist traffic that many of the residents are tired of having their picture taken. One young boy had a paper mockup of a video camera and pretended to take pictures of the tourists.

  But this area is not in the main line of tourist travel. Our guide said that maybe four cruise ships a year call here. In the Caribbean south of Florida, we have seen more cruise ships than that tied up to the docks in a port at one time.

  Our next stop was the Sacred forest of Kapasse, a park containing statues of the voodoo gods. We were met by the 17th King of Kapasse. Our guides showed us around the statues of the gods including Legba, the god who protects homes and villages; Shango, the thunder god, who makes it rain; and the god of smallpox. An interesting one is Aziza, who is the long-distance weapon. This is classic voodoo where, say, you can stick a pin in a voodoo doll and someone in the next city is supposed to feel pain. And finally there was the god who tells the future. In voodoo we were told everything is spiritually connected and there is one spirit in the sky. Priests are intermediaries.

  We visited the voodoo "pope". The world-wide chief of voodoo, in Ouidah, Benin's voodoo capital. This "world-wide" is more than just talk. He has been sponsored on official visits to Cuba, Haiti and Brazil. He gave us a blessing of "peace in our families, success and security".

  At the Temple of the Sacred Pythons in Ouidah Betty agreed to have a six-feet long python draped around her. At the Brazil Museum we saw some extraordinary sculptures made up of scrap metal. They were heavy on old auto parts, but also used bicycle frames, motorcycle parts and plumbing fixtures that we could identify.

  This country was put together by the Dahomey kings and was named after them until independence from the French in 1960. The country was built on the slave trade and for more than a century the Dahomey kingdom sent about 10,000 slaves per year through these ports to the Americas. Most went to Brazil and Haiti, thus spreading voodoo. Dahomey refused to cooperate in stopping slave trade since this was the kingdom's largest source of income. It was not stopped until 1882 when the French seized Ouidah and Cotonou.
Benin has had the usual series of coups after independence including a flirtation with Marxism-Leninism.

  This tiny country has 42 identifiable ethnic groups, and more languages than that. There are only an estimated 5500 Europeans in the country. All of the countries we have visited here are fragmented tribally and have a history of weak and often corrupt governments. How would you turn this around and build a better life for these people is beyond me.

  After leaving Benin we will spend the next four days at sea and tomorrow we will cross the equator leaving winter behind and head into summer.