Travelling Gods, Ritual Memory, and Slavery in Contemporary Benin

Abstract

For more than two centuries the Bight of Benin participated in the Atlantic trade. Today, along the same coastal region, it is possible to encounter Tchamba, the spirits of foreign slaves from the northern savannah. Tchamba ritual practice, part and parcel of the Vodun religion, narrates peculiar stories of domestic slavery and the Atlantic trade, of struggles for emancipation, love and trade, women and men, slaves and masters. Most of all, the worship of Tchamba questions the notion of memory in both discursive and embodied forms, and the ways in which we create linkages between practices, narration, history, and the experience of time.