OUIDAH: On the newly-renovated streets of Ouidah, thousands of Beninese and foreign tourists gathered this week to discover the rituals and deities bound up with voodoo, a popular animist tradition which has grown to become the focus of a international festival.

For some years now, the Beninese government has been promoting the ancestral religion as the spearhead of an ambitious tourism policy. The old Vodun festival, celebrated on Jan 10, has given way to Vodun Days, a three-day festival of dancing, mask parades and traditional ceremonies in the coastal city just west of capital Cotonou also known for its role in the Atlantic slave trade of bygone centuries.

Although scenes of animal sacrifices on altars have been kept far from the tourist gaze there has been no question of diluting the sacredness of the event’s ceremonies.

On the Fort Francais esplanade, guardians of the night in Zangbeto masks, acting as sentinels of social order in the voodoo rite, emerged in a straw whirlwind to cavort in hypnotic and mysterious fashion before an audience of devotees mixed in with equally fascinated tourists.

A little farther away, in the sacred Kpasse forest, followers of the deity Kokou performed as if in a trance a circular dance to the beat of drums, daubed in a yellowish powdery substance.

“I’ve been really enjoying the groups performing at the Sacred Forest. It feels more authentic than the big stadium ... ‘shows’, for lack of a better word,” said Australian tourist Kate Mills, 37 “I think here it doesn’t feel like a show as much. It is a performance for the performers, not for us. And we are invited to watch, but it feels more authentic as a result.

Published in Dawn, January 11th, 2026