The chaotic streets of Cotonou greet daybreak with serious moped frenzy and imposing Brazilian and Chinese skyscrapers shading the Dantonkpá market. This marché among other things trades francs for voudun artifacts. If you’ve done your homework, you know that zombies are an invention but that it is here where its myth can trace its roots. While Benin is often visited for being the birthplace of voudun spirituality, it is also host of Diasporic peoples seeking perhaps answers, perhaps closure, perhaps something else entirely. For well over a decade now, African Americans have visited the roads of the Ouidah 92, inaugurated along with Haiti and other Caribbean nations to make tangible the memory of the past.
I walk it in tandem with my guide, reflecting on how – centuries ago – it may have been (or not) the very same surface Cuban poet Georgina Herrera’s ancestors walked, ancestors...
