Togo and Benin

The concrete room was no more than 6x10 feet long, a low 7-foot ceiling, made lower by all the tangled hanging Voodoo ritual objects.  The only source of light was through a tiny window up in the corner and a door that led down a dark hallway: one way to more shrines, the other way to the multi-building compound where the rest of the tiny village was waiting patiently for us to finish up the ceremony.  Three feet in front of me was the main god that looked like a long dead Jabba the Hut, surrounded by other variously sized gods and spirits including a dead crocodile that was the guardian of this shrine.  All of them were covered in layers and years of various types of animal blood, feathers, wax and gin. The Voodoo priest was finishing up his incantations and his two assistants were starting to dance.  A dead chicken with its throat freshly cut was lying on the concrete floor, its fresh blood dripping from all the various objects in the shrine. Ninety degrees outside and jungle humid. This was the first of two shrines and sacrifices I was going to go through.  Noah, my guide, was smiling at me saying, “You have to dance, the spirits are happy.”  This was a line that he would repeat a number of times throughout the trip.  So dance I did. We were deep in the jungle backwaters somewhere in Togo.  We were deep in the heart of Voodoo.

This is how I would open up the episode that we just filmed in Togo and Benin.  It was all based around Voodoo and the various ceremonies that surround the religion – the national religion of both countries.  I went in thinking we were going to easily dispel all the Hollywood stereotypes of needles going into dolls, crazy sacrifices, keeping people believing in a religion through fear of unimaginable consequences.  But even one day into it, I was beginning to realize it was far more complicated than just figuring out if  Voodoo was simply either good or bad.

Togo and Benin are in essence brother countries.  Relatively stable for a while now, it is still a region that has its people living very close to the edge.  It's a daily struggle for the majority of the population to make enough money to put food on the table.  They have a really tough history.  In the last half a millennia, they have gone through the scourge of slavery, colonialism, political unrest and a pervasive struggle to make it day to day.  That being said, most people were quite welcoming - if not a little wary at first -  and seemed relatively happy, but you had that sense that people were always close to the breaking point.

The first stop on the trip was to the fetish market in Togo.  This is sort of the grocery store for all things Voodoo.  Voodoo relies on fetishes, which are objects of all variety that are inhabited by one of the hundreds of gods and spirits in Voodoo.  So all those god figures and objects in the room I talked about earlier were technically all fetishes.  In a way, the use of fetishes is similar to the practice of praying:  you pray for something and you hope for results.  Here you get a fetish for something and you hope it will cure your problem.  In essence if you have a problem with your neighbor and you want to do something about it, you go to a Voodoo priest and explain the situation.  The Voodoo priest then says you need to go to the fetish market with the shopping list he gives you to make a particular fetish for your problem out of a combination of individual fetishes.  For example: to make your boss like you, you would get two wooden dolls, a piece of aardvark skin, some specific type of branch and leaves - all of which on their own are fetishes, wrap them all together to make the fetish for your problem, say the name of your boss and yourself a specific number of times and there you are.  There are different combinations of fetishes for every sort of thing.  From the simple daily things of trying to have a good day at work to the other end of the specturm like trying to get rid of a death spell cast on your child by a witch, which is apparently a regular thing that people come in to have taken care of (supposedly there had been three people in that morning to the fetish market for this specific reason).  These combinations are sacred to the people that know them, and they are passed down from generation to generation and not revealed lightly.  This is also in part why Voodoo exisits on a practical level as well. In an area where people really feel that they have no control over their lot in life, the ability to go to a Voodoo priest to try and take care of a problem with a neighbor, to have someone fall in love with you, to have children, to make your boss be nicer to you – it gives them a feeling of control.

Now comes the striking part.  The fetish market we just entered – one of the largest in all of West Africa – is an open area about 75 yards square, open dusty ground in the middle, the edges all little open front huts with big tables in front of them.  It's what’s on those tables and what’s covering the dusty ground that is the striking part.  The whole place is filled with skins of animals, skeletons, entrails, entire animals, all baking in the hot African sun.  It smells like death that has turned to salted shoe leather if that makes any sense.  But it's the kind of animals and the amount that is pretty rough to behold.  Lizards, geckos, little birds, chickens- no big deal but then the big stuff starts:  Skins of leopards, hip bones of Hippos, monkey pelts, puffer fish, rare pythons, hawks, eagles, crocodiles, a live monkey and a live hawk waiting to be bought for sacrifice, both of them shadows of what they should have been.  All of these dead animals that shouldn’t be dead.  I get it as far as a chicken goes.  The chickens here have a far better life than the ones we eat by the millions in the States.  But come on, a leopard or hippo?  That’s a problem.  And there were lots of them.  All of these animals, wooden dolls, stones, sticks, leaves are all actual fetishes – each object has a specific purpose on it's own, and each object can be combined with other objects to cure any myriad of problems.  So it's to markets like this one that all Voodoo practitioners come to get what they need to make the fetish.  And I have to admit, a lot of it was pretty tough to see.

In many ways Voodoo is somewhat the same as any other major religion, and of course in other ways (just re-read the previous paragraph), its dramatically different.  Voodoo deals in the supernatural, in faith.  It acts as a way to explain the unexplainable, it gives solace to people, it gives people a way to try and controll the uncontrollable in their lives.  There are Voodoo priests that are considered to be good – taking care of all sorts of issues.  These are by far the vast majority of Voodoo priests.  There are witches that are considered to be very bad – randomly casting spells on unsuspecting people who then have to go to a Voodoo priest to counteract the spell.  Then there is black Voodoo and bad Voodoo priests, and again people then have to go to a good Voodoo priest who specializes in counteracting black Voodoo spells.  You will see flags at the top of bamboo poles blowing in the wind in the cities, in the villages, on river banks in the middle of uninhabited thick jungle.  These flags all have different colors denoting the kind of Voodoo being practiced – the type of priest available for services.  White flags mean good Voodoo, black means bad, and red over black means someone that counteracts bad Voodoo. 

We went to a few different ceremonies, all in quite remote parts of the country.  Each village or area has its own very specific type of Voodoo, and its always stronger than the neighboring village's Voodoo, and they all have elements in their ceremonies to protect them from rival Voodoo:   specific fetishes set up to defend against another village's potentially invading Voodoo spirits.  Yet at the same time, they all acknowledge everyone else's Voodoo as long as it is good Voodoo - it's just that theirs is stronger.  One village we went to used a form that involved going into a trance and cutting oneself with knives, glass, whatever sharp object is at hand, not to mention eating glass and other things that a nice soft digestive tract would seem to react unfavorably to, yet the main spirit that the ceremony was for was a healing spirit.  Another village had what is commonly referred to as haystack fetishes.  These are around human height and are literally that – a tent shaped haystack.  They come out of an off-limits compound – off limits not only to us but to the rest of the village except for a select chosen few – they whirl around in a circle and then at the appropriate time they are lifted up to reveal that there is no human underneath, but instead various types of fetishes sitting on the ground beneath.  Then the haystack is lowered back down, a couple seconds go by with the handlers shaking the haystack, it then pops up off the ground a little bit (you can’t see underneath because the hay is long enough to always trail on the ground) and starts spinning around again.  As the dance goes on, the “reveal” of the different types of fetishes under the haystack gets more and more dramatic – to the delight and shrieks of the villagers, especially the children that have come out to watch.  At one point a crocodile came ruining out from underneath one when it was lifted up, was then corralled and summarily put back under the haystack and in a few seconds the haystack was up and spinning around again (crocodiles are sacred in this village). It is quite a bit of magic, and the purpose is not only to show the power of that Voodoo, but also for these haystack fetishes to pass on judgments and revelations to the villagers.  Another ceremony uses an elaborate costume to deliver edicts to that particular village, and if you are unfortunate enough to be touched by someone possessed by a spirit in one of these costumes during the ceremony, you are likely to die shortly there after.  You don’t waste time foolishly trying to figure out what is making the haystack fetish whirl around or if you will really die if you are touched by one of the other spirits.  You just believe.  In a way it's like a magic show.  Some people spend all their time trying to figure out how the magician did the trick; others just revel in the wonder of the magic. Of course this has much more meaning to them than just a magic show.  In my mind these ceremonies in the villages served very much the same purpose as going to church or the synagogue or the mosque.  They act as a way to deliver morality lessons and point out the bad things going on in the village as well as the good. They are a place for the villagers to come together over common belief, to hang out with each other (and they were, without exception, all quite welcoming of us), and to have some fun.  Like any religion, there are some parts to Voodoo that aren't very good, but again like any religion, those sorts of elements disappear over time as people become less and less isolated by location and perspective.

We also went to Ouidah in Benin, which was one of the main slave trading ports in all of Africa.  Slavery was certainly a subject that came up over and over again in this part of Africa, and where we were, Ouidah, was the epicenter.  Estimates range up to half of all slaves to leave West Africa left from here, at the peak of trade around 20,000 slaves a year. European slave traders made deals with the strong West African Dahomey kings that would last from the early 1500's to the mid-1800's.  For the Europeans and the long line of Dahomey kings, it was a perfect relationship:  The Europeans got strong labor to take to the Americas and the Dahomey kings were able to fill their coffers with money and equipped their army with weapons keeping them un-defeatable until the early 1900’s. The slavery story in Ouidah starts just on the edge of town towards the ocean.  Picture a small unremarkable square. Only two small markers post the squares' history.  This was the slave market.  Then  a little winding road that quickly turns into a two and a half mile long by ten meter wide red dirt road that stretches straight ahead for two and a half miles or so, over little hills and through swamps and rivers, dead-ending at the ocean where the boats would eventually pick up the slaves.  This road is named simply The Slave Road.  It was along here that all of the slaves were marched.  There are a number of important stops along the road,  but the two that stuck with me were these:  there used to be a holding building much closer to the ocean referred to as the place of darkness. This was a small building with no light where all of the slaves were brought, left for up to four months, never to see the light of day, no where to defecate, disease of all types, rarely food, and death.  European accounts at the time speak of this as a place of death and pestilence.  Countless numbers of slaves died in this building, the survivors too weak to resist their captors, clearly a two-fold plan on the part of the slave traders:  to weed out the weak and to weaken the strong.  Not far from this is a large Kola tree that still stands from the 17th century called the tree of return.  When the slaves were let out of the storage buildings and sent to the ships, they would quickly walk three times around this tree with the strong Voodoo belief that when they died in a foreign land their soul would be able to find its way back home to this tree.  Its here that Voodoo seemed to have a positive role in helping the slaves in a small way to try and manage in an unmanageable situation.  It was also something that the slave owners could never take away from them. From here it was a short walk to the beach at the end of the road, on to little boats, and loaded onto the ships bound for the Americas.

The most poignant point for me was standing on the road looking out over a beautiful river area filled with palm trees, mangroves and winding streams, the red dust slave road disappearing behind me towards town and in front of me towards the ocean, and further down the road standing looking out at the ocean itself with the surf steadily rolling in where the slave road road comes to an abrupt halt.  Both scenes perfectly unchanged over the centuries – nature just watching time pass by, the dusty road the same as it ever was.  Both scenes exactly the same way they would have looked to all of those slaves for all of those centuries as they were marched along the same dusty road to be shipped off to a life beyond imagination.

Benin and Togo offer a lot of different things to the adventurous traveler.  They could in theory become quite the tourist destination, with fascinating culture, Voodoo, great adventure travel – especially if they get a handle on preserving their wildlife, which right now seems to be going rapidly in the opposite direction.  We didn't even get to the much more arid north of the country with its own distinct vibe. The beautiful coastline that seems to stretch across both countries seemingly uninterrupted would in Europe or the States or the Caribbean be overcrowded with hotels and resorts.  But none of that is going to happen any time in the near future.  There are too many social and economic hurdles to get over right now.  I guess at some point the modern world will catch up here as it seems to do every where else in the world.  In some ways that will be a good thing, and in some ways that will be too bad.

The never ending coast line of Benin and Togo

 

Northern Romania

From Benin/Togo, we were off to Northern Romania – Transylvania.  In location it was quite a contrast:  hundred degree heat, palm trees, ocean, crowded, Voodoo, to 25 degrees, spruced covered mountains, snow, tiny remote villages and Orthodox Christianity.  

We made it in late night in Bucharest and immediately flew out later that night to arrive in Bahia Mare up in the north west of the country.  It's a big enough city, the center filled with the expected concrete grey, small windowed apartment buildings of the Communist era, peppered in with great 17-1800’s European architecture, and then as we drove out to the edges of the city, the architecture gave way to the famous wood buildings that this part of Romania is so well known for – traditional hand hewn dovetail cornered homes to skinny wood churches with towering needle like spires, a style that goes back for centuries in this region.  It was a beautiful area.  Winding switchback roads going up and down the low-lying mountains, heavily forested with both deciduous and coniferous trees.  A few hours later and we had disappeared into remote villages where horse drawn carts are still the best way of moving things around rather than trucks.  We were here to see a way of life that seemed to hearken back to the turn of the last century: combining horse power with motor power, traditional wood buildings slowly giving way to cinder block built homes. 

And horinka. Horinka turned out to be the theme of this trip.  It's a spirit that most people make themselves, brewed out of different types of fruit fermented in big barrels in their backyards.  Tobi our guide told us that up here they start the day with a shot, eat lunch with a few shots, say hello to each other with a shot, eat dinner with a number of shots, go to bed with a shot.  Combine this with a diet that is made up of a variety of home made lard – the variety coming from the different and oh so subtle different ways of smoking it, various types of home made sausages, home made cheese, and home made bread, and more home made lard.  And more horinka.  So take that part of the equation and add to it that the northern Romanians are one of the most hospitable people I have ever run in to, and you get a gustatory roadblock that was unavoidable for us.  Picture us wandering through a little village filming some stuff, and seconds later Tobi is telling us that the people in this or that house want to feed us.  We wander into a traditional house that opens immediately up onto their dining room, and there spread out on the table are bottles or horinka to be interspersed with hot spiced wine, and plate after plate of four inch slices of lard, sausages, cheese and bread.  I don’t know if you have had this sort of situation at some point in your life or not, but when you have a scenario where people constantly invite you into their house and offer you the best that they have to give, there is no way you can turn it down.  I will say that some of it was pretty good, and all home made.  Even some of the lard was decent, but six days of eating that diet and nothing else got pretty tough.  It was a constant diet of lard, sausage, cheese and horinka.  At all hours of the day.  Lard and horinka just after breakfast.  Lard, sausage and horinka for lunch, lard sausage cheese and horinka for mid-afternoon and lard cheese and horinka for dinner.  Not a vegetable or leaf of lettuce or piece of fruit (unless you count the horinka), to be seen for miles around.  Now intersperse in between those meals more shots of horinka (every person we would run into had their own brew and wanted us to have a shot with them, not only from a hospitality standpoint, but also from pride of their own horinka brew), and you have our trip throughout northern Romania according to my stomach.  

 

Traditional wood church, typical Northern Romanian house (note the satellite dish and the wood barrel under the tree brewing Horinka), typical village scene and some lard

Now I really want to impress upon you that while the objects we were finding here were ok, the food was a challenge  and the horinka a little blurring at times, it really was the old architecture, the landscape, the people themselves and the old way of life that was stunning.  That was more than reason enough to come to Northern Romania.  They all seem to give off this stubborn we’ll-bear-through-it-all sort of vibe, and they have had a lot to bear through over the ages.  But the biggest challenge to their traditional way of life is the ever impeding modern world.  The younger generation has less and less interest in living in the five house village up in the mountains that you can only get in and out of during winter by horse-drawn sleigh or the rarer four wheel drive vehicle.  Modern things like cell phones, internet, television and the draw of the big city will surely be the thing that eventually virtually ends this centuries old lifestyle.  So get there while you can!  Operators are standing by to book your ticket.

My addendum to Romania is Bucharest.  I was prepared for an ugly city over run by depressingly grey block communist buildings.  The Romanian crew we were traveling with were all from Bucharest and were all decrying it's crowdedness, it's corruptness, it's fast paced morally devoid way of life, but of course I think they were all in a nostalgic frame of mind as we were wandering through this beaucolic scene in the north putting back shots of horinka aver five minutes.   It made them think of a Romania that has long since disappeared in Bucharest.  That makes sense.  But that’s also life in any big crowded city in the world.  But Bucharest is more than that.  It's filled with beautiful 17th, 18th and 19th century buildings, many of which are in really rough shape, many in really good condition. Right next to those are the stark, forboding concrecte buildings of the Communist era. I really liked spending our last day wandering around the center of the city.  It's a bustling place, with some nice hotels, good museums, shopping and a lot of good, non-lard serving restaurants. . . .we ate a lot of lard - that's all I'm trying to say.  Anyway, I liked Bucharest, so there.

Buildings in varying degrees of life in Bucharest