Ouidah holds two things that are usually kept apart in writing about Africa, and holds them within four kilometres of each other: a living religion, and the point at which people were put onto ships.
The Vodun town. Ouidah is the principal Vodun centre of Benin. The Temple of the Pythons keeps and handles snakes sacred to Dangbe, and stands directly opposite the Catholic basilica, a juxtaposition photographed constantly and generally misread as irony, when the ordinary local position is that both are simply there. The Sacred Forest of Kpasse holds shrines to the founding king of the town, understood to have transformed into a tree rather than to have died. Benin officially recognised Vodun in 1996 and made 10 January a national holiday for it, reversing a long period of state and mission suppression, and the January festival has grown into an event that brings practitioners together with descendants from across the Americas.
The slaving port. Dahomey took Ouidah in 1727 and made it the kingdom's outlet to the Atlantic. Portuguese, French, English and Dutch forts operated there. Very large numbers of people were shipped from this stretch of coast, the majority to Brazil and the Caribbean, and the town was for a period among the busiest slave ports in West Africa.
The Route des Esclaves traces the walk from the auction ground to the water. Along it stand the Tree of Forgetfulness, which captives were made to circle so that they would lose their memory of home and their will to return, and the Tree of Return, circled so that the spirit at least would come back. At the beach stands the Door of No Return, a memorial arch raised in 1992 as part of an international programme on the slave route. It faces the sea and it is empty.
The two facts are one fact. Vodun went to the Americas on those ships. Candomble in Bahia, Vodou in Haiti and Lucumi in Cuba are recognisably related to what is practised in Ouidah, because the people who carried them left from here. That is why Ouidah functions now as a place of return: people come from Brazil, Haiti, Cuba and the United States to a town their ancestors were removed from, and the religion is the thread that survived the crossing intact enough to be recognised at both ends.
A note on this entry's judgement. Benin promotes Ouidah as a destination and invites diaspora visitors deliberately, which is a real argument that a visitor economy is welcome here. This site is nonetheless recorded as inappropriate for commercial advertising placement, because the Door of No Return is a memorial to a mass atrocity and the beach is where it was carried out. Encouraging people to come is not the same as selling advertising space against the memorial.