Inside Vodun Days: What It’s Really Like To Experience Benin’s Most Important Cultural Festival

I grew up in Malawi with Sunday school teachers who treated anything linked to “voodoo” as danger in capital letters. African shrines sat in the same mental folder as horror films, even though I lived on a continent full of discussions of altars, spirits, and rituals with long lineages.

Years later, based in Europe and writing about travel, I realised how far that fear had pushed me from my own continent’s spiritual history. So, when an invitation arrived for Vodun Days in Benin, a multi-day festival wrapped around the country’s national Vodun holiday on January 10, I decided to do the opposite of what my childhood instincts wanted. I accepted the invite, packed a checked bag, and told myself this trip would be an experiment in curiosity rather than avoidance.

Vodun Days turns Ouidah, a small city on Benin’s Atlantic coast, into a living classroom where religion, memory, and tourism share one stage. The festival grows out of Fête du Vodoun, the national Vodun holiday that Benin recognized in the 1990s when it officially acknowledged Vodun as a religion and granted it a public holiday on January 10. Since 2024, that single day has expanded into Vodun Days, a three-day program of ceremonies, concerts, and conversations that draw visitors from across West Africa, South America, Europe, and the diaspora.

I arrived in Benin as a Malawian raised in Christian doctrine, a Black African woman who absorbed scary stories about “African traditional religion” from pulpits and foreign media, then moved to Europe, where those stories are often repeated with a different accent. Vodun Days gave me a chance to see what Benin actually says about its own spirit world, on its own terms.

Why Vodun Days In Benin Matter For African Spirituality

Benin treats Vodun as heritage, religion, and soft power, all at once. Government recognition in the 1990s followed decades in which many practitioners quietly maintained shrines, even though Vodun shaped daily life for a large share of the population. The national holiday on January 10 signaled that Vodun belongs in civic life, alongside church processions and mosque loudspeakers. Vodun Days builds on that by turning Ouidah into a museum-city for three days. The official program moves visitors through key sites: Egungun masquerades at Place Maro, Zangbeto guardians on the esplanade of the old French fort, a walk along the historic Slave Route to the Door of No Return, ceremonies in the Sacred Forest of Kpassè, and Mami Wata rites at the beach temple.

Every stop along that route carries a specific intention. Ouidah once served as a major port for the Transatlantic Slave Trade; UNESCO’s Slave Route memorial links the old Portuguese fort to the ocean through a series of sculptures and the Door of No Return arch on the sand. The same city now hosts a festival that centers on the religion many enslaved people carried to the Americas, where it evolved into Haitian Vodou, Brazilian Candomblé, and other traditions.

For Benin, Vodun Days signals a willingness to face history, to honor a religion that survived both missionary campaigns and colonial dismissals, and to welcome Black visitors from across the Atlantic who want to reconnect with spiritual practices that often received demonizing coverage abroad.

The festival also supports a growing cultural and creative economy: art galleries in Ouidah and Cotonou exhibit works by artists such as Zinkpé and Charly d’Almeida, whose sculptures and paintings take Vodun symbols seriously as contemporary language. As an African from a different corner of the continent, I felt that ambition clearly. Vodun Days invites the diaspora, yet it also invites Africans from places where conversations about ancestral religion stay hushed. The message feels simple: this faith deserves daylight too.

What Vodun Days Actually Feels Like On The Ground In Ouidah

On the first festival morning, Egungun masqueraders sweep into Place Maro in layered costumes that transform each dancer into a moving tower of fabric. Egungun represents ancestral spirits returning to visit the living in Yoruba communities across Benin and Nigeria, with each family lineage responsible for particular masks and songs. Children watch from the edges, half thrilled and half cautious, while drummers build rhythms that pulse in the ribs. I grew up with Sunday sermons that painted “ancestral spirits” as danger; here, families celebrate them as part of community life.

Later that day, Zangbeto masqueraders arrive on the seafront. These straw-covered guardians of the night belong to Ogu and related communities along the coast. They spin, lean, and surge through the sand, guided by unseen handlers, as elders sing and spectators clap in time. The crowd feels relaxed, excited, and yet careful. Everyone understands where to stand, how close to approach, and when to give space. The energy matches a concert, yet the structure follows rules that feel older than any stage.

Vodun Days places ceremonies in a sequence that reveals the religion as a network rather than a single image. In the Sacred Forest of Kpassè, acolytes point out altars dedicated to deities associated with earth, thunder, or particular lineages, and explain that each shrine belongs to a family or convent with its own responsibilities. At the Mami-Plage Temple on the beach, devotees bring perfumes, bottles, cloth, and mirrors to honor Mami Wata and Dan, the serpent spirit, with prayer and song while waves roll behind them.

The Slave Route walk ties everything together. The path from the old Portuguese fort to the Door of No Return runs past memorial sculptures and symbolic “stations,” from the auction square to a tree where captives once circled to sever ties with home. During Vodun Days, that walk includes processions of priests in white, flag bearers, and musicians. At the beach, the Grand Vodun Ceremony gathers delegations from across Benin in a swirl of color. A sacrifice for the spirits takes place, drums roll, praise singers call out lineages, and the festival slides into a concert that lasts well into the night.

How Vodun Days Reframed My Own African Faith Journey

As a Malawian raised in a Christian home, I carried two stories about African spirituality. One came from church halls where drumbeats outside the gate signaled danger. The other came from Western pop culture, where “voodoo” appeared mainly as a plot device. Neither story had much room for nuance. Vodun Days cut straight through that. Listening to officials and priests describe Vodun as a “system built on respect, reciprocity, and accountability,” I recognized patterns that exist in many African cultures: honoring ancestors, caring for rivers and forests, and accepting that life has visible and invisible layers.

I felt a similar shift while watching young Beninese artists link Vodun to contemporary art practice. In conversations with painters and sculptors in Ouidah, the religion appeared as an intellectual resource, with motifs that speak to land rights, gender, mental health, and diaspora memory. The festival created space for that dialogue, rather than hiding Vodun in a corner while visitors tour palaces and forts.

For an African traveler based outside the continent, this matters. It is easy to consume Africa through safaris, food tours, and heritage walks that flatten complexity. A festival like Vodun Days refuses that flattening. It invites you to sit with a religion that colonial authorities tried to erase, that Christian and Muslim leaders often framed as an enemy, yet that continues to shape everyday life from Cotonou to Port-au-Prince.

Personally, the trip felt like a small act of rebellion and repair. I arrived in Benin with years of inherited anxiety about African spirits; I left with a notebook full of names, dates, and conversations that placed those spirits within a long, thoughtful tradition. I still pray in ways my family would recognize, yet Vodun Days added another layer to my understanding of what African faith can look like. Vodun Days did not ask me to convert or abandon my background. It asked me to look, listen, and acknowledge that African spirituality carries depth, structure, and beauty that deserve more than whispers and stereotypes. For a Malawian who once flinched at the word “voodoo,” that felt like a lesson worth crossing a continent for.

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