Voodoo in Benin

Eric and I are going back to Klouekanme today after spending a few days in Cotonou with Eric's brother, who was visiting us. We had a really fun day yesterday going to see the Voodoo festival in Ouidah, a city along the coast. As you know voodoo is really important to Beninese culture and Benin is one of the main countries where you can find voodoo still in practice as an important religion. The festival had a lot of different things going on- traditional dancing, lots of food, and of course lots of voodoo spectacles on the beach of Ouidah. One spectacle is the zangbeto, which is a big haystack-looking "spirit" that dances and spins around, trying to touch people. Of course there is a person under this but the spirit handlers will lift up the zangbeto to show us that there is nobody in there and that it is indeed a spirit. Another spectacle is the revenants (this means ghost in French- I think they're called egun or something like that in Fon) who dress up in extremely intricate sequined costumes and who dance around. They too are "spirits" and not real people, and they demand money and bless people. There was also a crazy guy breathing fire and rolling around among the spectators, including a cop which he accidentally tackled and felled to the ground.
So we had a really good time and it was worth it for us all to go, even for me and Eric who have already seen a lot of these things in our town and around Benin. It was great too that there were so many Beninese people there and not just tourists (though there were a lot of them too).
I'll leave off there so we can go catch our taxi!