Vodun. Timothy R. Landry
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had been waiting to see Daágbó for nearly two weeks. For many who live in the coastal city of Ouidah, Daágbó is recognized as the supreme chief of Vodún in Bénin. While his actual power and political reach are contested, receiving his blessing to conduct my research and hearing his perspective were important to me.1 I hurried around the house and stuffed into my brown leather messenger bag my Moleskine notebook, a pen, a bottle of lukewarm water, and a few gifts I had purchased for Daágbó in anticipation of this meeting.
In just a matter of minutes, Marie and I hopped onto the backs of two motorcycle taxis en route for Daágbó’s palace. As was customary, we arrived with a bottle of gin, 2,000 CFA (West African francs), and a handful of kola nuts. We were asked to wait for Daágbó in a long rectangular room wherein the supreme chief frequently held audiences with guests and dignitaries. The full length of the left wall was painted with an aging dynastic mural on which Daágbó Xunɔ̀’s predecessors since 1452 were represented. Lined up against each side of the room were more than twenty chairs for the priest’s visitors. At the back of the room, sitting in front of the doorway that leads to Daágbó’s private residence, stood his throne and a low rectangular coffee table on which Daágbó kept a tattered spiral notebook, a bottle of gin, four small etched glasses, and two cellular phones.
“Why is Daágbó considered the supreme chief of Vodún?” I whispered to Marie while we waited.
“A long-ago grandfather of his was a magical whale who had the power to turn into a man. As a man, the whale took many wives and had lots of children. Daágbó is descended from the whale’s human children, and so he owns the sea [xù]. The sea is where all the other vodún [spirits] come from. So, we believe all vodún live here in his palace.”
“Does everyone recognize him as the supreme chief?”
“No, not everyone. But a lot do,” Marie responded.
After sitting patiently and chatting with Marie for more than half an hour, Daágbó emerged from behind the wooden beaded curtain that separates his private living space from the palace’s public meeting room. We greeted each other. I offered him the gifts Marie and I brought for him, and he reciprocated by pouring us two small glasses of gin.
“Welcome to Bénin,” he announced. “Why are you here?”
“I would like to learn about Vodún,” I responded. “I want to understand how Vodún is spreading throughout the world.”
Daágbó took a sip of gin, smiled, and said, “Vodún spreads because it works.”
“Can everyone benefit from Vodún?” I asked.
“Yes, Vodún is for everyone. People come to Bénin from all over the world to learn about the spirits. The spirits are for anyone who can protect them.”
Daágbó was right: Vodún had become a global phenomenon. The fragile, but flexible, spirits and the secrets that safeguarded them could be found almost anywhere in the world. Today, it would be difficult to find a global city not occupied by Vodúnisants. While the religion’s amorphous and flexible nature has undoubtedly been one of Vodún’s strengths, it has also not been without its challenges. As media, film, literature, and public discourse show, Vodún is a West African religious complex that has developed a problematic celebrity and a global presence due to a series of interrelated historical events (McGee 2012). From the sixteenth to the nineteenth century, millions of enslaved West Africans were forcibly removed from their homes and sent to European colonies in Cuba, Brazil, Haiti, and the United States. In these places, new religions, such as Lucumí, Candomblé, and Vodou, formed out of the mixtures of European, Caribbean, and West African religious practices.
In the late 1920s and early 1930s “Voodoo” was propelled into the Western imagination by U.S. literature and film. William Seabrook’s 1929 publication of The Magic Island and the 1932 release of the film White Zombie profited from racist, pejorative, and exaggerated images of black magic, skull-laden altars, bloody sacrifices, and staggering zombies. Where literature presented adherents of religions such as Buddhism as the enlightened “Oriental” other, African religious practitioners were represented as illogical, bloodthirsty idol worshipers. By the late 1960s, a few U.S. black nationals traveled to West Africa for initiation into Vodún and òrìs̩à [Yr. spirit, god, or divinity] worship in order to reject Christianity’s structural whiteness and to empower themselves, through ritual, with African spiritualities (e.g., Clarke 2004). At the same time, Cuban Americans who could no longer return to Cuba, because of the U.S.-Cuban travel embargo, began visiting West Africa in search of initiation into spirit cults that mirrored those found in the Afro-Cuban religion of Lucumí. Then, by the late 1980s—as the U.S. New Age movement continued to surge—middle-class, white, U.S.-based spiritual seekers began traveling to West Africa looking for divine power while also rejecting the politics of what they called “organized religion” (see Clarke 2004: 4–16). Since then, the Béninois state has teamed up with the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) to promote the country’s “Voodoo culture” as an international commodity, thereby inspiring travel agencies to market Bénin as the “cradle of Voodoo,” and some local tourism offices, such as the one in Ouidah, arrange initiations for foreigners who wish to become Vodún priests, devotees, and diviners (Rush 2001; Forte 2007, 2010; Landry 2011). Influenced by, and in some cases even supported by, these national trends, Daágbó and his predecessor—along with many other Béninois Vodún priests—have welcomed countless American and European spiritual seekers to Bénin (e.g., Caulder 2002). It is indisputable that Vodún’s international presence is on the rise and the religion’s global relevance is becoming increasingly more evident. This constellation of global events inspired this book.
As is illustrated in Daágbó’s claim that “Vodún is for everyone,” I explore the ways in which Béninois enhance Vodún’s global appeal and contribute to the religion’s multinational success. Since the late twentieth century, practitioners of African religions have enjoyed a greater Internet presence; spiritual tourism in Africa has been on the rise; African religions and spiritualities have enjoyed new global expansions; and African immigrants have contributed to the burgeoning religious diversity of some of the world’s most cosmopolitan cities. This ethnography is first and foremost a look at the ways in which African religions, such as Vodún, have begun to expand in new directions with the support of recent trends in spiritual tourism. However, it is also an exploration of contemporary Vodún, a religion that was born in the West African rain forest but has begun to thrive in new places around the world. That is to say, this book is not meant to be an ethnography of foreign Vodún practitioners as much as it is an ethnography of Vodún within today’s globalizing world. Vodún is becoming more popular in local, national, and transnational arenas—especially as spiritual markets, encouraged by processes of religious secrecy, serve to legitimize the transnational practice of Vodún. Vodún’s growing reach across national, ethnic, racial, and class lines makes the religion the perfect example of an indigenous religion gone global, where according to Daágbó, the spirits exist for “anyone who can protect them.”
Defining Vodún
While “Vodún” is the progenitor of the English word “Voodoo,” the religion in reality is nothing like what we have seen in movies such as The Serpent and the Rainbow or The Skeleton Key or, most recently, in the television series American Horror Story: Coven, where Papa Legba, the ever-important Haitian spirit (lwa) of the crossroads, was depicted pejoratively as a cocainesnorting demon who demands the ritual sacrifice of babies. There is no doubt that African religions and their adherents have suffered profoundly from U.S. and European racist conceptualizations of Africa that have proliferated in film, media, and political discourse (see Barthkowski 1998). As Adam McGee points out, because Voodoo “is coded as black, presenting voodoo in scenarios that are belittling, denigrating and, most especially, aimed to evoke terror is a way of directing these sentiments at blacks without openly entering into racist discourse” (2012: 240). Yet despite these challenges Vodún and its Caribbean derivatives continue to thrive.
Far removed from Hollywood’s racist imagery, Vodún is a religious system in