How Do People Believe This?

Look up Benin in any book or website and one of the first things you’re likely to see is that it is the birthplace of Voodoo (Vodun). While I don’t really like to play up or write about this aspect of Beninese life (I think it’s hard to do it in a way that doesn’t come across as treating it as novelty, which isn’t really fair), traditional beliefs play a large role in life here.

The last week or so I’ve had a couple of encounters with traditional beliefs that I’d like to share with you. In particular, the part of it I have a hard time understanding is how fairly educated people will on the one hand say that some of these beliefs have no basis in fact and are a physical impossibility, while at the same time being steadfast and adamant in supporting some of these traditional beliefs.

People quite literally believe that these things are true when you are physically on African land, but that if you are in America or anywhere else in the world then it is not true, that the occult simply does not occur there.

Anyways, my first example comes from a department meeting at the school last week. So all of the English teachers, four in total, gather up and sit down to talk about teaching English and about our experiences in the classroom and whatnot. Before we get started, though, one of the teachers stops us to say that he wants to share a dream he had the night before.

The dream went something like this; the teacher was in the classroom and was getting ready to punish a student, when he decided instead to take the student to the surveillant (dean). As they were approaching the surveillant’s office, the surveillant shut the door. The teacher then looked at the student, who asked “do you know why the surveillant shut the door?”

The teacher said that no, he did not, and then the student told him, “it’s because I am Mami Wata.”

I’m sort of used to hearing things like this, so I just kind of nodded along, After this teacher shared the story, however, another teacher chimed in that this story raised a really good point. Apparently, you must be very careful in punishing students, because some of them are not students; they are evil spirits who will put a curse on you.

I was then told, and it was me specifically who was being told this, that since we are all good Christians we must pray for God to protect us from evil spirits in the classroom. For the record, I do not believe that any of my students are spirits (although I have had students try to tell me they are).

Another quick example, at school they have started having an inter-class soccer tournament. So classes at my school are like American primary school classes, the students stay the same for every course and it’s just the teacher that changes. The interclass tournament is a competition where every one of these classes puts together a soccer team, and then we see who is the best.

So I was watching one of these games and talking with another teacher at one of these games. It was still the first half of a zero-zero game, when one team was awarded a penalty kick. The shot wound up flying way over the net. The other teacher then leaned to me and said that he suspected that the teams had put a secret chemical on the goal line that prevents the ball from going into the net.

This, he explained, is why Benin was banned from international soccer competitions (99% sure they were never banned) for many years, because they would use secret chemicals on the field that physically stop the ball from going in the net.

In general these are people with university degrees who are forcefully sharing these beliefs with me. Of course it is not everyone, there are many people who would say these things are not literally so, but a surprising number of educated people literally believe these things, almost unquestioningly.

On the one hand I suppose it is a sort of Kierkegaardian faith that I shouldn’t be surprised by, many people believe things without any shred of real evidence to support it. And I really don’t mean to say that a lot of the traditional beliefs or practices here are absurd or backwards or some such thing. In fact, I think a lot of them make a lot of sense and are perfectly reasonable, but it’s this element of the occult that generally confuses me.

To be fair it’s not as if these sorts of beliefs are unique to Africa or to societies with traditional religions, we have them in America and the West too (fun fact, Malaria comes from the Italian mala aria, as people believed it was caused by bad air), and I’m sure people here would be just as confused about them as I am with spirits occupying students’ bodies. Talk of black cats, broken mirrors, and stepping on cracks would be incomprehensible to people here.

On a different note, I have a question for all of you. How many continents are there? If you’re like me, you would say that there are seven, North America, South America, Europe, Africa, Asia, Australia and Antarctica. In my experience people in Benin are generally taught that there are either five or six continents.

Many people here lump South and North America together (what, what, Darien Gap). That is understandable, even if they are different tectonic plates and it was relatively recently (in the grand scheme of things) that Panama pushed up out of the ocean and cut off the Atlantic and Pacific.

The other groupings I’ve heard, however, make a lot less sense. In general it seems that people don’t know what to do with Australia, and they sometimes forget about Antarctica. I’ve been told that Australia is basically an Asian Madagascar. Which I sort of liked because it highlighted how different Madagascar is from the rest of Africa (it’s ecologically distinct and Malagasy, the main language on Madagascar, is more closely related to Malay and Indonesian than any language in Africa), but on the other hand I didn’t at all like because Australia and Asia have virtually nothing in common geologically, ecologically, historically, and culturally.

Well that’s about all I’ve got; I’m going to try and update my blog here more frequently, but probably with shorter, more rambling posts. Only other news, my first grant, to purchase equipment for the girls’ sports thing, has officially been approved. Took less than 24 hours from when I pushed send to get an email informing me that had been received, reviewed, and approved by everyone who needs to approve these things, so I probably should not get used to grants being processed so quickly.