Beninese celebrate each year in the month of January the "festival of Voodoo" during a grand ceremony held annually in Ouidah (south), which attracts thousands of their neighbors in West Africa but also fans from Brazil, of Haiti, Cuba or the United States, where voodoo imported by the slaves remains still alive.
Emerged from the late sixteenth century in the town of Tado, on the banks of the Mono river that separates the Benin in Togo, voodoo is practiced by at least 62% of the population (6.7 million total), mainly in the south of the country, according to latest official statistics of Benin.
Fons whether Christian or Muslim Yorubas, the faithful, however, continue to celebrate for most parallel the cult of "voodoo" ("spirits" in his language, one of the main ethnic groups in the south). They are symbolized in temples or houses Family by "legba"small mounds of earth or clay, which are made of offerings, most often in the form of alcohol or blood of a small animal sacrifice.
There are up to 200 deities, which essentially represent the natural elements (iron, sea) and animals (pythons, bats) or disease, war or masculinity. Anxious to protect these cults, members of Benin in August 1998 adopted a law establishing January 10 "National Day of traditional religions."
This holiday in Benin is also an opportunity for many of their neighbors Togolese, Nigerian and Ghanaian who revere the "voodoo" to go to Ouidah, about forty miles west of Cotonou, for a big traditional ceremony by Daagbo Hounon Houna, a leading dignitaries of the culte voodoo.
Dances to the sound of drums rituals, invocations by the high priests of their guardian spirits in trances with the key ...Thousands of devotees throng every year on the beach of Ouidah, around the "door of no return" where hundreds of thousands of Africans were deported as slaves to the Caribbean islands or the American continent over the centuries past.

Origine
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