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Benin’s Not Benign, But Beninese Love In Spoonfuls I’ve recently returned from a truncated adventure in West Africa, initially spurred by my curiosity about the world voodoo festival held each year in Ouidah, Benin. The strange festivities consist of dazed adherents in crude costumes drumming and chanting and sacrificing and scaring. And every January 10th it takes place in a very poignant spot: It’s the very beach where nearly a million slaves ritually circled a sacred tree, ensuring that their spirits would remain behind in Africa, and then left the continent, ultimately headed for Brazil or Haiti or Louisiana. They took their voodoo beliefs with them, which now thrive wherever they ended up. I’ve often traveled in rough, uncomfortable circumstances. But of the 107 other countries I’ve visited so far, Benin was the most challenging. More difficult than: • Trekking treacherous trails in Sikkim’s Himalayas, between Nepal and Bhutan. • Hitchhiking from Nairobi through Zimbabwe and Zambia to Cape Town (four times). • Medevac’ing myself out of the Papua-New Guinean Highlands following a mass attack of infectious fleas. • Baking beneath baboons while waiting for any ride to anywhere on an empty rutted dirt road north of Malindi, Kenya, bound for Lamu Island. • Unknowingly overnighting in a dangerous prostitute motel in El Salvador (alone), and semi-securing myself by stacking furniture against my door as a blockade (just like in the movies).
Copyright 2014 by George Walther 2
• Participating in a Coptic bachelor party in Egypt, where the celebrants seized me and urged me to slather the nearly naked groom with henna sauce. And others I’d love to tell you about some other time. • Webster’s synonyms for “benign” include “favorable,” “wholesome,” “harmless,” and “inoffensive.” Not one of them describes my week in Benin; it was