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Madagascar
 Photo: Kira Kaplinski
Madagascar
 

The Dead Shall Rise Again In Madagascar (cont.)

In Benin, traditional religion is strongly present and its undercurrent has been beating away for thousands of years.  Although well-documented and explained in literature, voodoo still has a dark side that slides through the fingers, that eludes comprehension.  Answers to questions are hard to find, and not everyone is willing to give them easily even if they have them.  Catholicism has overwhelmed the daytime face of voodoo, leaving it the night as its only realm, where it creeps out of the shadows to show the underground face of Beninese religion.  Certainly, an important change has happened in voodoo since its days as the only religion here, and it seems to be somewhat of a slide to a darker existence, where voodoo’s one time purpose of maintaining the balance of good and evil among humans has now been overcome by the perception of voodoo as being used mostly—through the world of sorcery and magic—for evil.

It seems here that even the staunchest Catholics keep a fear of sorcery inside them.  After all, as one Beninese man tells me, “Voodoo is the reason Christianity and Islam exist here.  Those are the people who are most afraid of voodoo and sorcery.  Go ask any Catholic why they’re Christian.”

So I do.  And sure enough, the young couple I ask responds quickly and surely.  “If you don’t have God,” they say, “then what protects you from sorcery?”

While it might seem bizarre to entertain beliefs in voodoo traditions while ascribing to Christianity, in reality, there isn’t the void that one would think exists between introduced European religions and voodoo.  In fact, when voodoo faithful were brought to the Americas as slaves and their traditional practices were prohibited, it turned out to be quite easy to superimpose many of Catholicism’s traits straight on top of voodoo’s.  Catholics believed in the existence of a single supreme being, like voodoo faithful.  All of voodoo’s lwa have been ascribed a corresponding Catholic saint—a non-God that can be solicited for luck, wealth, protection, whatever that particular saint or lwa represents.  In addition, Catholicism’s highly ritualized ceremonies, many of which make use of water or fire, were not so difficult to relate to for the slaves who suddenly found themselves removed from their homeland.   Praying to saints and taking part in many Catholic rites and rituals was a surprisingly easy cover for slaves who wanted to keep alive their own beliefs.

In the world of magic and sorcery, however, voodoo and Catholicism have a much greater chasm between them.  Magic and sorcery may exist within the minds of Catholics, but they are anti-Christian, heretical.   In voodoo, sorcery exists as a necessary part of the religion, albeit a negative part that voodoo faithful must accept as always hovering on the edge of their generally balanced world.  The use of sorcery tips the balance, towards illness, malice, death; however, it can always be counterbalanced by the positive workings of a more powerful vodounon or bokonon, a traditional healer, who can overcome the sorcerer’s power.  

The sorcerer or witch, azéto in Fon, can best be described as a human being who possesses a spirit that guides him or her to the destruction of that which is close to him in life.  The azéto exist in a realm of secrecy—although family, neighbors and friends may have a “hunch” about who among them is an azéto, this fact is meant to be kept secret.  It is the sorcery present in voodoo that we hear about most often as foreigners in a strange land; though it is merely a slice of the whole religion, it is the part of it that is feared as much by the faithful as by the Catholics. 

And it’s impossible not to accept sorcery as reality in Benin as I find out.  I am visiting with my friend Clarisse Kinhou, a Catholic fabric seller who lives with her husband and four children here in town, when we hear a commotion outside her home.   Apparently, a robbery happened the night before at a neighbor's house—some electronic equipment had been stolen, and the woman of the house was accusing her mother-in-law of both being a witch and of having orchestrated the robbery. 

“Come on,” Clarisse says to me.  “You’re going to see what happens here in Benin.”

We go down to her house to check out the situation only to find the woman screaming at her mother-in-law in the front courtyard; a few other neighbors have gathered there as well.  On top of the robbery, there is a new commotion: the woman had gone to the home of some other neighbors to tell them about the situation and had left her bedroom door locked.  She had come back to find that her mother-in-law had apparently committed a new act of sorcery.  She wants to show us, she said, what this “liar, witch, and imbecile” has done.

As she leads Clarisse and me through her house to her bedroom, we can hear it before she even unlocks the door.  The buzzing.  As she pushes the door open and we peer around the frame, we see the source of the sound right away.

The room is full of bees, hundreds of them, blanketing the fluorescent bar light attached to her wall in a thick swarm.  A swarm of bees.  I see them with my own eyes; hear their buzzing with my own ears.

All I can do is try to express my level of disbelief.  But as Clarisse and I head back to her place, she shrugs it off—the old lady is a sorcerer, and she’s seen this all before.  I am appalled by her acceptance of this as sorcery—although it’s clear that she and the other neighbors find the woman’s situation regrettable, they certainly don’t see it as bizarre.  It is at this moment that I see how common this whole scene was to Clarisse and the others:  discontent within a family, a spell cast, a strange ensuing event that would be inexplicable at home but had a perfectly acceptable explanation here.  Of course, I tell myself, it would not be impossible to collect hundreds of bees and get them into a locked room without using magic.  It would also be feasible without sorcery to remove certain items from inside a house in the middle of the night without waking any of its occupants.

“That’s exactly it,” Séwêdo says when I tell him the story and my thoughts. “There’s almost nothing an azéto does that is impossible for a regular person to do.  But the azéto does it easily, just by thinking about it, and without remorse.  Don’t you see why there’s so little outright violence between people here in Benin?  If I want to harm somebody, I don’t have to break into their house with a knife or a gun.  I just have to find asorcerer.

As Clarisse and I left the bee woman’s house that day, I teased her because she had always expressed a dislike towards voodoo.  “So even you believe in sorcery?” I asked.

Clarisse looked at me severely.   “This is the way things are,” she said slowly, gravely.  “This is the way things have been since forever.

I came here to find the truth about voodoo, to get the facts behind its twisted Hollywood image.  But here the truth may actually be stranger than fiction. 

Sorcerers, the revenants, a thousand gods and spirits—the way things have been here since literally forever.  Long before Judaism, Islam  or Christianity were even specks on the horizon, the Beninese lived and believed this.  It isn’t that the Beninese practice two religions at once; they simply have no choice in whether to “believe” in voodoo or not because it is just there, plain as day. 

In the end it didn’t matter what I believed about the revenants, or about what had happened the day of the bees.  Moreover, the truth didn’t seem to even matter.  The only thing that mattered was what the people believed, and this time in Benin the people believed what they have always believed.  Since virtually forever. 

It is several days afterward that I learn from Clarisse the dramatic end to the neighbour’s story.  The woman had summoned her husband to return immediately from the city, which he did, and they had devised a plan.  The husband would smoke out the room to burn the wings off the bees, then collect them, and ground them into powder.  The powder would then be put into a porridge to be eaten by the woman and her husband.  Since each bee represented the spirit of one sorcerer, eating the bees would kill all of those sorcerers.

But when the husband went to the room ready to smoke it out, he heard only silence.  He put the key in the lock, turned it, and pushed the door open.  The light was still on, and the room empty, exactly as it had been left.  But the bees were gone.

 

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