BBtv WORLD: Roots of Voudun and Slavery's Legacy in Ouidah (Africa)
Today's Boing Boing tv is an installment of our ongoing BBtv WORLD series, in which we bring you first-person glimpses of life around the globe.
From the 17th to 19th centuries, millions of African people were sold into slavery, transported on ships to the Americas. With them came spiritual traditions including Voudun, which we now know as “voodoo.” Its roots are in the Dahomey kingdom on the West Coast of Africa, now the country of Benin.
In today’s episode, I travel to Benin’s port city of Ouidah, one of the most important slave trade ports, and a center of the Vodoun religion.
We visit the Temple of Pythons and learn about Voudun religious practices, and witness some of the most important sites in the history of the slave trade.
We walk along a beach that was the single most highly-trafficked embarkation point for West African slaves headed over the Atlantic to the Americas. One million people were forced on to ships here, many transported to Haiti and Brazil, where Voudun transmuted into voodoo and Candomblé.
Outsiders called this region the Slave Coast. Ouidah's residents today call the former boarding platform on this otherwise idyllic beach the Gate of No Return. -- XJ
(Photos: Xeni Jardin, CC license)
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Divine Horsemen film about Voudon.
Wow, human history really is crazy. Just think, at one point in human history, it was reasonable to deal in the slave trade and treat fellow humans as though they were not fellow humans at all, but an altogether different form of life which could be shipped and traded as a commodity.
That this worldview is almost entirely extinct from today's world - and that this chapter in history repulses and chills the modern viewer - is evidence that we have a completely different take on the world from the people who did this.
This means to me that human consciousness and worldview is not rigid and unchangeable, but that our entire understanding of the world can be remade, and we can progress and become more enlightened. Our repulsion is evidence that human nature is not altogether innate, and that we can change. This is perhaps the only positive lesson I can take from ugly chapters in world history.