Category: African History

When October arrives, Halloween in the United States is usually presented as a celebration of everything frightening about death. Graveyards become decorations. Skeletons hang from porches. Ghost stories fill television screens, and the dead become costumes, props, and monsters. But within Haitian Vodou, the Gede tradition approaches death from a very different direction. The dead…

Along the historic Slave Route in Ouidah, Benin, stands a site associated with one of the most haunting traditions of the transatlantic slave trade. It was known as L’Arbre de l’Oubli—the Tree of Forgetfulness. According to the oral history preserved in Ouidah, captives marching toward the coast were forced to complete a ritual around the…