‘Ways of Remembering’: Transatlantic Connections and African Diaspora’s Homecoming in the...

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‘Ways of Remembering’: Transatlantic Connections and African Diaspora’s Homecoming in the Republic of BeninJung Ran Forte

AbstractSince the seventeenth century, the Atlantic ‘perimeter’ has been characterised by exchanges of commodities, bodies and cultural productions. Within this space, West Africa has established itself as an ‘ancestral land’: a pivotal physical and imagined location for its diaspora. Exploring how a ‘homeland’ is constructed, the article analyses practices of homecoming in the contemporary Republic of Benin. It argues that the particular historical conjuncture of the early 1990s, mainly characterised by the democratic transition, has allowed the restoration of Atlantic connections. Aspiring to establish a vibrant tourism industry, the new government strongly encouraged African American homecomings, commemorating the slave trade and celebrating diasporic cultures. The Vodun religion, because of its propagation across the New World through the slave trade, became the core symbol of this reunion, the very evidence of the strength of ancestral linkages and a foundation for black commonality. Reframing notions of ancestry and transnational belongings, the article examines how the insertion of Benin into global, economic and cultural circuits has led to the emergence of new cultural practices, meanings and subjectivities, both related to national and diasporic spaces.

The relationship between the African continent and its diaspora resides, implicitly or overtly, at the core of a wide range of social practices, cultural productions and identity configurations gathered under the label of the ‘black Atlantic’ (Gilroy, 1993). Notions of roots, heritage, homeland and ancestral belonging, while flexible and mobile as related to different historically determined constructions (Clarke, 2004; 2006), and particular locations, reveal the crucial role Africa plays within diasporic discourses. Such concepts

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must be considered as the results of the intense dialogue (Matory, 2005) that has characterised the Atlantic space since the seventeenth century. Since the late 1960s, they refer to the emergence of a particular African imagery in the Americas (Clarke, 2004; 2006), designating the continent as a place for return, and as a ‘homeland’, for black populations. Scholars have emphasised how ‘diasporic connections are made and remade, undermined and transformed’, noting that ‘they are neither universally constituted nor static’ (Clarke and Thomas, 2006: 19; cf. Hintzen 2002; Matory, 1999; 2005). Accordingly, it follows that cultural belongings are contingent and performative and result from a broad arena of identity negotiation (Clarke and Thomas, 2006; Hintzen, 2002).

The return to ancestral land exemplifies ways in which diaspora is today, collectively and individually, experienced, staged, rehearsed, performed and, thus, continuously recreated. Elucidating practices of African Americans’ homecoming in the Republic of Benin (previously Dahomey) since the early 1990s,1 this article analyses how diasporic signifiers are mobilised as crucial tools to revisit memory, renew connection and craft new belongings. However, as Charles Piot (2001) and Lorand Matory (1999; 2005) suggest, it would be rather incomplete and narrow to conceive of Atlantic linkages only in terms of dispersal and return, consequently implying the identification of an ‘origin’, a ‘provenance’. Considering African and American cultures as ‘historically coeval’ (Matory, 1999: 74), and therefore both actively participating in exchange and dialogue, allows us to rethink diasporic linkages in the past, as well as today, as results of joint productions of knowledge, practices and discourses, which travel back and forth across the ocean. Presenting experiences of African diaspora’s return in contemporary Benin, this article explores how the black Atlantic participates in the construction of postcolonial Africa(s) and highlights African contributions to diasporic worlds. 2

Transnational belongings, as well as their crafting, significance and relevance, refer to larger, historically determined processes, within which they are constructed, and which we must assess in order to discuss the emergence of new diasporic subjectivities and cultural productions. Exploring ten years of Benin’s contemporary history, this paper analyses how diaspora has been reinvented and tailored according to macroeconomic restructuring policies and cultural tourism market demands. The particular conjuncture of the


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early 1990s, mainly characterised by the democratisation process and the liberalisation of Benin’s economy, as well as by the launch of heritage projects and the growth of the tourism industry, figures also as a crucial moment for the strategic restoration of transatlantic bonds. This reactivation stands as an attempt to relocate Benin as a homeland within the African diasporic geography. At the same time, the reinsertion of Benin into global circuits has opened up new futures and opportunities locally, generating spaces for individual and collective agency and defining the conditions of access to financial resources for cultural creation.

Since the early 1990s, African American homecomings have become common (cf. Sutherland, 1999; 2002), and innovative paths to renew Atlantic connections have been explored. Festivals, performances, public ceremonies and intimate rituals create interstitial realities in which belongings are negotiated and meaningful narratives of ancestry forged. The encounters between African Americans and their ancestral lands that are presented in this paper could thus be analysed as creative and interactive moments, or what Anna Tsing (2005) calls ‘frictions’. The notion of friction is informative of global connections and entanglements, articulates local-global interrelationships and, at the same time, accounts for agency, creativity and movements of cultural forms, practices and meanings. Indeed, the reactivation and reproduction of diasporic connections denote today’s economic dependencies, transnational strategic alliances and aspirations for economic developments. Thus, the African American search for ‘roots’ and for an ‘authentic Africa’, and attendant claims of ‘cultural belonging’ are here at stake; economic issues cross personal and collective narratives, enacting ambiguous regimes of membership and stretching boundaries of belonging.

Atlantic ConnectionsMatory defines the ‘Atlantic perimeter’ as a historically constituted ‘migratory, commercial, and discursive field’ (2005: 273), which has been crisscrossed by movements of people, commodities, ideas and texts since the seventeenth century. The history of Benin tells many stories about this transnational space and the different and contradictory configurations it has assumed across time. From the 1670s to the 1860s, the town of Ouidah, situated along the Beninese coast, participated in the world mercantile economy, supplying over a million slaves to the New World. Ten percent of the entire Atlantic



slave trade transited through this port, estimated to be the second most important point of embarkation from the African continent after Luanda in Angola (Law, 2004).

Connections to Africa persisted following the forcible displacement of slaves, and resulted in new migratory flows (Cohen, 2002; Matory, 1999; 2005). For instance, while the Atlantic slave trade was declining in the nineteenth century, liberated slaves from Brazil and Cuba moved back to Africa and settled along the Bight of Benin (Verger, 1953; Cohen, 2002; Matory, 2005). Since the 1830s, the town of Ouidah, as well as other coastal areas of the Bight of Benin,3 hosted large communities of liberated slaves, while transnational merchants known as ‘Brazilians’ progressively emerged as an economic elite, albeit one fully integrated within the larger society (Law, 2004; Matory, 2005; Sinou, 1995; Verger, 1953). A number of Brazilians were involved in the slave trade as intermediaries, while others engaged in the palm oil plantation economy, which was developing under French colonial rule (Verger, 1953; Sinou, 1995).

The mythical character of Dom Francisco Félix Chacha de Souza, a poor Brazilian runaway adventurer, half Portuguese and half Brazilian Indian, who arrived in Dahomey at the end of the eighteenth century and settled in Ouidah in the 1820s, is an example of such intense transatlantic circulation. He became the official commercial delegate of the tenth Dahomeyan king, Guézo, achieving the honorific title of ‘Viceroy of Ouidah’. As viceroy, he controlled the slave trade and relationships with European and Brazilian merchants on the king’s behalf. He had numerous African wives, resulting in a huge progeny that to this day stretches all over the coastal region of the Bight of Benin, from Togo to Nigeria.

Under French colonial rule, Dahomey redirected its productions and exportations toward Europe, particularly France. The end of the slave trade installed a progressive change in the configurations of global economy, and the period from World War I to independence was characterised by a suspension of trade between the Americas and West Africa (Matory, 2005). Whereas discourses of ‘origins’ and ‘traditions’ in reference to Africa were already being produced within the Atlantic perimeter since the nineteenth century, they achieved a larger recognition after the 1940s with the development of African American Studies.4 Academic research on cultural productions in both the Americas and Africa introduced new concepts – such as cultural



survivals, rupture and persistence, and degrees of acculturation – drawing continuities between Africa and the New World (Matory, 1999; 2005; Clarke, 2004).

Within this academic context, Pierre Verger, photographer and unconventional ethnographer, emerges as a cornerstone of the recent history of Benin, because he engaged in retracing connections during a period in which movements across the Atlantic Ocean were rather limited (Matory, 2005: 169). In 1948, during one of his first trips to Salvador de Bahia in Brazil, Verger was introduced to the Candomblé,5 and began the intellectual and personal project that earned him the epithet of ‘the messenger’. Travelling across Nigeria and Dahomey, Verger explored the existing similarities between Dahomeyan Vodun6 and Brazilian Candomblé cults, comparing rituals and liturgies. In his historical research on the Atlantic slave trade, he retraces connections between pre-colonial Africa and the Americas (Brazil in particular), following ships’ routes and tracing commercial documents. Vodun cults, conceived as a preserved ancestral memory, as well as historical archives, played a crucial role in his reconstruction of linkages between the African continent and the New World.

After independence was achieved in 1960, the Republic of Dahomey underwent a period of political instability. In 1972, Mathieu Kérékou became President and, proclaiming the birth of the République Populaire du Bénin, established a Marxist-Leninist regime that lasted until the end of the 1980s. In the late 1980s, the growing economic crisis along with popular insurrections and student protests in the streets forced the President to resign (Banégas, 1995: 31). In 1990, the Conférence des forces vives de la nation (‘Conference of civil society’) gave birth to a temporary government until the election of Nicéphore Soglo as the President of the Republic of Benin in March 1991. The democratisation process of the 1990s is often cited as an exemplary model of political transition in the African continent because of its peaceful character, its engagement with civil society and its long-term results (Mayrargue, 1997; Banégas, 2003). Following guidelines from the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, the economy was restructured according to neo-liberal patterns allowing the opening of the country to foreign capital and investments; equally, the establishment of the tourism industry was strongly encouraged. President Soglo launched a cultural policy that aspired to promote ‘traditional national cultures’ with the organisation of a series



of events across the country (Mayrargue, 1997: 142; Tall, 1995: 200).7 The international festival Ouidah 92 was the centrepiece of this project. Through commemorating the Atlantic slave trade and celebrating the diaspora, the objective of the festival was to restore and renew ancient bonds and establish Benin as a homeland of the African diaspora.

Ouidah 92: Remembering the Slave Trade, Performing VodunAcross history, Atlantic networks reveal entanglements of narratives, transnational politics and economic and social processes. Within such contexts, as Matory suggests, ‘what is often called cultural memory or tradition in both the African diaspora and at home is, in truth, always a function of power, negotiation and strategic re-creation’ (1999: 97). Following these ideas, I analyse how the reestablishment of ancestral linkages with the New World, more than three centuries after the deportation of slaves, took place through a strategic ‘renewing’ of meanings, belongings and narratives. Because of its multiple significances, both locally and globally grounded, the Ouidah 92 festival provides an interesting case in which to examine how diaspora is reinvented and experienced, and how an ancestral homeland is constructed. As the event commemorated the Atlantic slave trade, this analysis offers insights on how memory, ‘origins’ and cultures are subject to changing political conditions and contemporary agendas, and how historical reconstructions imply the ‘silencing’ of the past (cf. Trouillot, 2002).

Planned for 1992, but delayed until the following year for logistical reasons, the new government launched Ouidah 92: Retrouvailles Afrique-Amérique (‘African-American Reunion’) in February 1993. Billed as ‘The First International Festival of Vodun Arts and Cultures’, and supported by UNESCO and the French Embassy, the festival aimed to restore transatlantic connections by commemorating the Atlantic slave trade and celebrating diasporic cultures. During the festival, different cultural events were organised throughout the country over a period of ten days (Tall, 1995: 200). The well-attended opening ceremony took place at the beach of Ouidah, a highly symbolic location for both the Atlantic slave trade, as the place of departure for the New World, and Vodun cosmology, as many deities inhabit the ocean. Delegates from Haiti, Cuba, Trinidad and Tobago, Brazil, the United States and from different European countries were invited to take part in the celebrations (Rush, 2001: 33).8



At the local level, this cultural event also solemnised the new religious freedom allowed by the democratic transition. The democratisation process is said to be characterised by a ‘re-traditionalisation’ of the public sphere due to the re-emergence of traditional and religious authorities in the political arena; these became prominent agents, invested with renewed political powers within the framework of the modern, democratic state (Mayrargue, 1997; Banégas, 2003). In opposition to the former Marxist-Leninist regime, which fought traditional, ‘feudal’ structures – mainly religious institutions and the monarchy – that were considered obstacles to the project of modernisation,9 the new government of the Democratic Renewal (DR), the ruling party from 1991 to 1996, reactivated kings and Vodun chiefs as intermediaries because of their locally grounded authority and influence in mobilising the electorate base. The festival, therefore, represented a unique occasion to perform also the political changes the country was experiencing at the time. Each cult’s community participated in the event, receiving government allowances in order to contribute music and dance performances. This is why the event holds a very special place in the Beninese collective memory today. It is remembered nostalgically as the period when the government was truly committed to cultural issues and when funds were available for artists and for the Vodun religious community.

The festival presented the slave trade in striking ways: notably, it commemorated the trade as a foundational moment for diasporic cultures, rather than as a dreadful episode of world history. Beninese responsibility in the Atlantic slave trade was acknowledged, but repentances that evoked ancient, although customised, memories were encompassed by discourses emphasising the importance of the contemporary reestablishment of transatlantic connections. The return to ancestral land and the subsequent welcome ‘home’ were suggested as restorative and healing paths, both for Beninese and diasporic people. The unity of black people, due to the shared trauma of slavery, and established through narratives of oppression and the commonality of Vodun religion and cultures, became the major focus of the event. Because Vodun cults, as well as the Orisha cults from the Yoruba tradition, travelled to the New World through the Atlantic slave trade, they were considered a ‘root’ from which the different American ‘branches’ – Brazilian Candomblé, Umbanda, Xangô and Batuque; Haitian Vaudou; Cuban Santeria, Ocha and Palo Mayombe; Shango cults in Trinidad and



Recife; and so on – had sprung. Celebrating Vodun cultures, as a national heritage and diasporic commonality, was then a future-oriented means of commemorating the slave trade, indirectly contributing to the development of the tourism industry (Sutherland, 1999: 199; 2002: 75).

Walking on the Slave RouteSimilarly to other West African locations, the issue of slavery in Benin raises many questions about which stories should be told, which meanings should be conveyed and exhibited and which interpretations and representations should be produced (cf. Bruner, 1996). Remembering the dreadful past of the Atlantic slave trade opens up a field in which economic interests, particularly related to the tourism industry, directly challenge conceptualisations of the African diaspora, redefining its significance and ambiguously reconfiguring transatlantic belongings.

Today Ouidah, or Gléhoué,10 is a small town with a population roughly estimated at 25,000 inhabitants, situated along the coast of Benin 42 kilometres from the capital city, Cotonou. Under the rule of the kings of Dahomey, who had broadened their territory beyond the Abomey’s borders and conquered the strategically important coastal territory since 1727, the slave trade economy flourished and developed. In 1892, Dahomey became a French colony and Ouidah began its economic decline. Under the colonial administration, the capital city was established in Porto-Novo and, in 1902, the new harbour of Cotonou, the emergent economic centre, was finished, marking the final closure of the Ouidah docks. The governmental cultural policies of the early 1990s, particularly the Ouidah 92 festival and the national participation in international projects, such as the UNESCO’s ‘Slave Route’ and ‘World Heritage’ projects, constituted a unique opportunity for the town, which had been economically and politically marginalised since French colonial times, but which was aspiring toward a cultural and economic ‘renaissance’.

In this context, the town of Ouidah underwent a process of architectural reconfiguration in order to stage the tangible memory of the Atlantic slave trade. Under the sponsorship of UNESCO, the Prevention in the Museums of Africa (PREMA) programme of the International Centre for the Study of the Preservation and Restoration of Cultural Property (ICCROM) and the Getty Institute,11 the urban setting was rearticulated to represent the



slaves’ journeys. A few locations were chosen as the most significant for slavery storytelling: the ancient Portuguese Fort was transformed into a historical museum; the mass grave areas were marked by commemorative monuments, such as the Zingbodji memorial; the Sacred Forest, a very important local spiritual site, opened its doors to visitors; the sandy route to the ocean became The Slave Route; a colonial building named the Maison du Brazil, in which slaves were apparently held before being shipped, was reconverted into a contemporary art museum; the Tree of Forgetting, located in the Chacha square nearby the De Souza compound, recalled the use of such spaces for slave auctions. Local as well as Haitian, Cuban and Brazilian artists were commissioned to create works for this event, drawing inspiration from Vodun manifestations across the world, the Atlantic slave trade and Beninese history.12 These works were exhibited during the event, and today they still decorate the town, conceived as an ‘open-air museum’ (Rush, 2001: 32). UNESCO built a memorial named ‘The Door of No Return’ on the beach by the sea, at the very final departure point. Representations of Egungun masks,13 placed at the base of the monument, suggest the slaves’ return to Africa in bodiless form, marking the continuity between Africa and the Americas.

The main purpose of such urban reconstruction, specifically addressed to foreign audiences, was to create an emotional experience related both to the memory of slavery and to the renewing of diasporic connections. As Paulla Ebron suggests in her analysis of the experience of African American tourists from the United States at Gorée Island in Senegal, ‘A sense of the past was created by the interplay of already-familiar images of slavery and those material, objects, views, and stories that bring these to life as memory’ (2002: 202). The aim of such ‘historical’ reconstruction is not focused on facts, but rather on the capacity of places and natural landscapes to suggest ancient stories and to inspire sensory perceptions. The overall result at Ouidah 92 was a very particular construction of Beninese history, presenting an evocative, timeless and de-contextualised slave journey and omitting certain elements, for instance, the fact that at least half of Ouidah’s population are descendants of slave merchants.



Vodun Cults: Culture, Folklore, TraditionAs a means of encompassing slavery issues and reestablishing connections, Vodun cults were placed at the core of Ouidah 92 celebrations. At the opening of the festival, the newly elected President Soglo proclaimed the unity of black people across the world, defining diasporic ‘culture’ as a unique entity, even as it revealed itself through distinctive forms. Hence, such culture, grounded in Vodun and Orisha worship, in its diverse manifestations – plastic arts, literature, theatre and music – and its different locations, was established as a commonality, a means to return to the ancestral land and a ‘decisive contribution’ made by the African continent to the modern world (Soglo, 1993: n.p.).

In the early 1990s, the Vodun community was experiencing several transformations. Largely under government decree, religious chiefs engaged in a modernisation project that focused on creating a formal institution, gathering together the different worship communities and updating ritual practices considered to be obsolete and unsuitable for present-day life.14 Likewise, religious leaders claimed to recognise Vodun as a religion tout-court, and of equal standing to Catholicism or Islam. Celebrating diasporic cultures, the festival supported the assertions of the cults’ universal character (Mayrargue, 1997: 141). Emphasising the difference between cults and primitive animistic practices, Ouidah 92 strongly disassociated the Vodun religion from common stereotypes of sorcery, Voodoo dolls and wild trances. The cults’ image, performed during such events, conveyed particular innovative meanings: Vodun was represented as a philosophical, forward-looking world religion concerned with the universal human condition, ethical issues and values.

The historical conjuncture of the early 1990s and the opening of the country to an international audience have added new meanings and significances to this ‘traditional’ religious practice. The numerous cultural events organised during this period and the heritage projects sponsored by international agencies have transformed Vodun into a cultural artefact, a national heritage and a tourist commodity.15 As a means of indirectly taking account of slavery and displacing atonement, Vodun was recast as the main theme in the renewing of transatlantic bonds. Despite the cultural variety and the different traditions within the national territory, Vodun served as a representation of Benin for international audiences. Under the external gaze



of tourists, African Americans searching for roots, travellers and international agencies, Vodun underwent an externally-oriented, transformative process: today the cults represent not only religious practice, but also the Beninese national heritage, as well as a diasporic commonality.

Building Connections, Discovering AncestryResponding to African American claims for cultural belonging, diasporic homecoming has developed and transformed over a nine-year period, to the point of becoming an ‘institutionalised’ practice. A trip to Benin means not only learning about the past of slavery, but also making it come to life by experiencing Vodun. Public ceremonies and intimate rituals provide tourists with a profound sense of renewal that ‘materialises’ their ties to the homeland and establishes spiritual ancestries. Ouidah 92 constitutes, in this sense, the opening of a new path that enables black Americans to ‘return’ to Africa. Presenting two contemporary examples of African American return in the town of Ouidah – a cultural event organised by the NGO PRO.ME.TRA16 gathering delegates from different diasporic locations and the touristic tracing of ancestry practiced mainly by African Americans from the United States – I analyse the new forms that diasporic homecoming has recently assumed, moving towards more intimate, individual and religious experiences, albeit mainly related to the tourism industry.

In January 2001, PRO.ME.TRA launched a project named Les voies du souvenir – Ways of Remembering, which sought to celebrate the African diaspora once again. Promoting traditional medicine and knowledge, this Pan-African organisation actively collaborates with several Vodun priests and healers by arranging voyages, conferences and cultural events. On the morning of 9 January 2001, a new monument and a museum were inaugurated at the beach of Ouidah a few miles from ‘The Door of No Return’: ‘The Door of Return’. While the former UNESCO arch focuses on slavery, marking the definitive departure of slaves from their ancestral lands, the iconography of the latter suggests a temporal shift towards contemporary experiences of diasporic homecoming. The statues adorning this second gate, explicitly named ‘Mother Africa welcomes her returning children’, represent the diasporic offspring returning to their ‘mother’. At its inauguration, all participants were invited to pass through the ‘door’, as a ritual enactment of homecoming. This invitation was not only addressed to



‘African descendants’, but also to all people, regardless of race or provenance, as Africa was defined as the birthplace of humankind.

Visitors also were encouraged to visit the newly constructed museum dedicated to slavery, exhibiting works by Nigerian artist Benjamin Mafort, the creator of the statues adorning ‘The Door of Return’, and to take a moment of recollection in an empty room in order to silently commemorate ancestors who could not return physically to their motherland. The empty room was conceived in order to engage visitors in the memory construction process. The NGO coordinators asked participants to bring photos, objects and letters of their beloved ancestors in order to fill this vacant space, transforming the room into a memorial. At the nearby, newly-constructed shrine, a Vodun ritual offering with an animal sacrifice was performed to ask for the gods’ blessings and guidance.

The event was explicitly conceived as an intimate journey, a sensory and imaginative moment supposed to bring the Middle Passage to life through the factual and public acknowledgment of the return, which was supposed to relieve and heal the trauma of slavery. The empty room of the new museum, gathering fragments of lives, figures as a ritual space. It enables subjects to put together different spatialities and temporalities in order to forge new narratives of redemption (Clarke, 2004: 239). Actualising the past of the Atlantic trade and encompassing slavery’s themes, Vodun has become a ‘way of remembering’ that recreates meaningful transatlantic connections.

Root Divination: Building Ancestry, Renewing ConnectionsAfrican American tourists from the United States are particularly interested in rituals and ceremonies as crucial experiences of their ‘return’ journeys to Africa.17 While official performances are very popular and suggestive, other paths to reestablish linkages have been explored as responses to the demands of the tourism market. In order to answer to claims for cultural belongings, rituals are adapted, invented and crafted. In these trajectories of liturgy creation, personal motivations and narratives of travellers are intimately affected by local economic constraints and the hardships of everyday Beninese life. Presenting here a new ritual invented for African Americans, along with the life story of its creator, I analyse further the process of constructing ancestry as it is experienced in Benin. This example shows how new ritual practices emerge from encounters between African Americans



and their homeland, generating new meanings and narratives. While such creations result from tourist regimes of consumption, they cannot be reduced to artificial and fictive practices, since they constitute important spaces in which diasporic subjectivities are negotiated and produced.

Martine de Souza is one of two ‘official’ tour guides of Ouidah, affiliated to the historical museum of the town. She started to work in the tourism industry at the beginning of the 1990s; a lucky encounter with an African American woman, who had come to Benin to find her roots and to start a spiritual journey, changed her life. This experience constituted Martine’s basic job training while she found a way to sustain her family. Through that informal, but very motivating, first experience, Martine started her successful career: today she is not only a tour guide, but also an ingenious entrepreneur. As Martine speaks fluent English, a rarity in this francophone area, she usually works with North Americans travelling in West Africa, providing all-inclusive trips.

Two aspects of her life story set Martine apart from other tourist operators. Firstly, she does not consider herself a ‘normal’ guide, but rather a spiritual one. She is proud of welcoming and accompanying African Americans on their voyages back to their homeland. She engages in making the trip an emotionally intense and life-changing experience: the voyages she offers are not impersonal, leisure activities, but special, intimate journeys. In order to make the trip a unique encounter, she carefully organises meetings with local priests, providing a full range of spiritual experiences. Secondly, Martine is not a regular ‘Ouidahner’; she is also a descendent of Dom Francisco Chacha de Souza, one of the most widely-known nineteenth-century slave traders. Her uncomfortable genealogy complicates her personal mission, while deeply motivating it. Sometimes she hides her origins, as she feels awkward and guilty welcoming slave descendants. But at the same time, she cannot deny the importance of her almost mythical ancestor and her family, which is one of the largest and most well-known along all the Bight of Benin.

Root Divination, often called the ‘naming ceremony’, which Martine provides exclusively in Ouidah with the involvement of a few priest-diviners (the bokono), is a newly invented ceremony targeted at an African American audience. This ritual constitutes a very intense moment, during which slaves’ descendants construct their own ancestry, discovering their ‘African names’ (i.e., the Vodun divinity which is supposed to mark and influence their lives



and to whom they should address their worship). The ceremony performed for African Americans is a revised and shorter version of a common Fa divination reading, although its name, ‘Root Divination’, is imported by tourists, referring to a religious liturgy practiced in the United States.18 The ceremony is a collective one, which is usually performed in the evening at the Sacred Forest of Ouidah: each participant goes through a single consultation standing in front of the diviner who, interrogating Fa, the god of divination, will deliver the proper answers. After the very short ceremony, which is not too expensive (about $30 per person), but profitable for the priest, the diviner can advise certain participants individually, proposing additional ceremonies to solve their private problems and answering any further questions.

The larger and more complex Fa Oracle ceremony allows a person to discover him/herself and his/her personality though a complex series of rituals over several days. By applying this divination method it is possible to determine the Du, the sign under which the person is born. This ceremony provides the foundation for the creation of new belonging through the establishment of a ‘fictitious’ ancestry. Discovering the ‘African name’ by identifying one’s Vodun divinity generates an emotional connection. Root reading works by establishing a bond between the individual and the motherland and, as in the empty room ceremony of the PRO.ME.TRA project, the enactment is experienced not only on a symbolic or intellectual level. Physical enactments transform the homecoming into a real, emotively intense, shared practice.

While I am not arguing for the ‘authenticity’ or ‘truthfulness’ of Root Divination, which is also commonly practiced, under a different name, by white people, the ritual stands as a legitimising and redemptive moment for African Americans (Clarke, 2004: 255). Its results, the identification of a divinity, become the proof of the existence of a linkage to Africa, even three centuries after the Atlantic slave trade. Going through Vodun rituals enacts transforming voyages and intimate journeys, activating a process of self-creation and self-discovery and allowing the reconstruction and performance of personal narratives.

✤ ✤ ✤ The early 1990s figure as a particular moment of political and social transformation in the recent history of Benin. I have argued that the cultural



effervescence of such years represents a crucial element for both the reestablishment of transatlantic linkages and the construction of cultural national identity. Celebrating the African diaspora has been, of course, a way to reestablish connections. It has also constituted a crucial consideration of what defines Beninese cultural heritage and memory. New cultural practices, idioms and imagery of the African diaspora were created, and today are internationally exported, while the country has been re-signified as a homeland and ‘the cradle of Vodun’. The celebration of the African diaspora and the commemoration of slavery constitute essential prerequisites for the insertion of the country into broader consumption circuits, mainly associated with global tourism markets. The Vodun religion became the core element of this renewal: a ‘way of remembering’, a mythical inheritance, the trace of an ancient and shared past and, especially, a means to reconnect dispersed populations and craft new belongings.

Festivities, public ceremonies and intimate rituals today figure as ‘commodities’ supplying international demands for authentic and exotic Vodun rituals and ‘roots’, while diaspora has redefined itself as a growing market enabling the redistribution of economic possibilities for local agents. However, encounters between African Americans and Africa must also be considered as crucial moments in which new cultural forms emerge (Tsing, 2005), and disaporic subjectivities and transnational belongings are forged and negotiated (Clarke and Thomas, 2006). They also reveal how transnational connections work in shaping local everyday life, drawing trajectories of social change and opening spaces for individual and collective agency and creativity (Tsing, 2005; Matory, 1999). Despite the contradictions and the ambiguities of the touristic regimes of religious consumption, rituals still demonstrate their ability to craft unusual realities, even if temporally and spatially bounded (Kapferer, 2004). Reorganising individual life-space, Vodun ceremonies transform a vacation into a unique, sacred journey and create original ancestries across the ocean and over time.

Jung Ran Forte completed her Ph.D. in Social Anthropology at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris, France in 2007. She currently is a PSHA Postdoctoral Fellow at the Centre for Humanities Research, University of the Western Cape, South Africa. Email: [email protected]



Notes

1 I use the cultural category of ‘African American’ (Clarke, 2004: xiv) to emphasise the acknowledgment of African origins as a crucial element in the construction of black, individual and collective, subjectivities in the Americas and among the descendents of Atlantic slavery. Under this term, I gather different diasporic experiences from the American continent (i.e., I use the phase to designate not only peoples of African ori-gin in the United States, but also those in South America and the Caribbean). While recognising cleavages resulting from specific historical conjunctures and locations, my aim in using this encompassing term is to highlight how ideas of African heritage and legacy have emerged from different diasporic experiences following Atlantic slavery.

2 The data presented in this paper was collected during 12 months of fieldwork in Benin, from 2001 to 2004, as part of my Ph.D. research. The analysis of the Ouidah 92 performance is based on interviews, bibliographic materials and visual productions, and I participated in the second ceremony presented in the paper. The reconstruc-tion of Martine de Souza’s life history was made possible through several interviews over a three year period and through my intensive participation in Ouidah’s everyday life.

3 For instance: Lagos, Porto-Novo, Grand Popo and Petit Popo (Aneho) (Matory, 2005: 80).

4 I refer to the work of scholars such as Raimudo Nina Rodrigues, Artur Ramos, Edison Carnero, Fernando Ortiz, Melville Herskovits, Lydia Cabrera, Alfred Métraux, Pierre Verger, Jean Price-Mars, Maya Darren, Roger Bastide and William Bascom (cf. Matory, 1999: 73; 2005: 12). Attendant developments in African American Studies in the United States since the 1960s are presented extensively by Kamari Maxine Clarke (2004).

5 Matory explicates Candomblé as follows: ‘Candomblé is an Afro-Brazilian religion of divination, sacrifice, healing, music, dance and spirit possession. […] Though this religion is headquartered in the coastal Brazilian state of Bahia, it has counter-parts and offshoots all over urban Brazil. Believers attribute miraculous power and exemplary flaws to gods known variously as orixás, voduns, inquices, and caboclos, depending on the Candomblé denominations. The adventures, personalities and kin-ship relations of these superhuman beings are described in an extensive mythology and body of oracular wisdom, which also serve to explain the personalities and fates of their human worshippers, as well as worldly relations among those worshippers. Through blood sacrifice and lavish ceremonies of spirit possession, the gods are



persuaded to intervene beneficently in the lives of their worshippers and to keep the foes of those worshippers at bay’ (2005: 1).

6 The term ‘Vodun’ is polysemic as it simultaneously indicates a set of cults dedicated to different divinities belonging to the same pantheon and supernatural beings – gods, spirits, natural forces and ancestors in both embodied, fetish and immaterial forms. The specificity of Vodun worship resides in sacrificial rites to ‘feed’ gods, in possessions and in its organisation, which is based on esoteric knowledge, priest-hood hierarchies and initiation admission. The relevance of the Vodun religion must be understood in light of the crucial and complex role it played in the history of the country, particularly during the pre-colonial period in which the political kingdom’s structure was deeply intertwined with the cults’ system, often defined as a sort of state-religion.

7 These events include: the Regional Gani Festival, Nikki (North of Benin); the Biennale of Popular and Religious Dances, Abomey; the Glédé Masks’ Festival, Porto- Novo; the Yéké Yéké Regional Festival, Mono (Tall, 1995: 200).

8 The international audience was quite heterogeneous and included religious practi-tioners, government officials, artists, tourists and scholars. According to the local press, Stevie Wonder and Gilberto Gil were invited, but they could not come as they received their flight tickets too late (L’Humanité, 1993). Pierre Verger and Mama Lola, the famous Haitian Vodun Priestess based in the Unites States whose life story is presented in Karen McCarthy Brown’s Mama Lola (1991), were also invited as special guests.

9 The former Marxist-Leninist oriented regime, established in the 1970s by Matthieu Kérékou, imposed a secular state in which Vodun cults were considered to be a regressive force, equated to sorcery and obstructing the development of the coun-try. However, while Vodun was officially illegal, the regime maintained ambiguous and discontinuous relationships with the religious community (Mayrargue, 1997; Sulikowski, 1993).

10 The name ‘Gléhoué’, or ‘Gléxwé’, (‘the farmhouse’) is a local denomination that refers back to the sixteenth century, when the town was a territory of the Xwéda Kingdom of Savi, a small inland village located between Ouidah and Abomey. Conversely, the appellation ‘Ouidah’, or ‘Whydah’ in English, dating from the same historical period, is associated with the Portuguese designation ‘Ajuda’.

11 These international agencies, including the Italian, French and Swedish Ministries of Foreign Affairs, carried a series of patrimonialisation projects during that



period, particularly concerning the historical towns of Ouidah, Porto-Novo, and Abomey. The PREMA program engages different countries of the African continent (Benin, Ethiopia, Ghana, Guinea, Ivory Coast, Madagascar, Malawi, Zambia and Zimbabwe).

12 The Beninese contemporary artists whose work was exhibited in the context of Ouidah 92 were Cyprien Tokoudagba, Calixte and Theodore Dakpogan, Simonet Biokou, Dominique Kouas, Romuald Hazoumé and Yves Apollinaire Pede. The com-missioned diasporic artists were Edouard Duval-Carrié (Haiti), Jose Claudio (Brazil) and Manuel Mendive (Cuba) (Rush, 2001: 36).

13 Egungun masks from the Yoruba tradition – in Benin particularly widespread in the area of Ouidah and Porto-Novo – are manifestations of ancestors’ spirits; they are related to a complex system of ritual practices and to male secret initiation-based societies.

14 The modernisation project of the Vodun religion was launched by the creation of CNCVB, the Beninese National Community of Vodun Cults, an institution that unites all the main priests of the country and which organised a Symposium in 1991 (Mayrargue, 1997: 139).

15 I refer here to a particular process, in which ‘Culture as product, thing, substance is culture disembodied from experience. It is culture neutralized and turned into objects of consumption’ (Friedman, 1994: vi).

16 The international organisation for the preservation and restoration of the ancient arts of traditional medicine, PRO.ME.TRA International, was founded in 1996 in Senegal. Today PRO.ME.TRA is a transnational, African NGO, associating physi-cians, researchers and traditional healers with one another in order to work together on the recognition of traditional medicine and especially on HIV/AIDS information campaigns.

17 In this section of the article, following the empirical data I collected during my fieldwork, I refer specifically to the experiences in Benin of United States-born black Americans under the broader cultural category of ‘African American’. In this specific context, homecoming practices should be related to the emergence of black social memories in the United States since the 1990s (Clarke, 2004: 140-41). Such con-structions contributed to the reinforcement and exportation of narratives of slavery, redemption and ‘African nobility’ (ibid: 118), which, while contributing to the eman-



cipation of black communities, have also strengthened the notion of heritage as an essential basis for the definition of race and ethnicity according to cultural patterns.

18 In the North American context, ‘Root Divination’ refers to ‘divinatory rites with which priests in their community consult the oracle to determine the nature of their African roots, […] the generality of ancestry’ (Clarke, 2004: xvii).

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