Night Like Buffalo

Images from Lome's fetish market popped up during my very first Google Image search of Togo. I saw hundreds of dusty animal skulls on my MacBook screen back in Washington D.C. and said, "Heeelz NO are we bidding that place!"

But here we are. And today we saw said dusty animal skulls in person.

A group of us piled into an armored embassy van and drove to the outskirts of town to the infamous market in the hopes of meeting the voodoo chief. We met his Supposed Son instead, although our Togolese driver said the guides and S.Son were speaking a native tongue of Benin. Hmm.

On our tour, we discovered the cure for asthma: 16 porcupine needles, 5-7 skulls of cat, dog, mouse, snake, and whatever else the chief requires, all ground up in a turtle shell, burnt to a black powder, mixed into local honey, then eaten.

We saw hyena skins, shark jaws, crocodile tails, horse manes, and snake spines scattered around on tables - all intended for traditional healing purposes.

The finale came in the form of an invitation, as special guests, into S.Son's lair: a shack with a tin roof, mud walls, and air hazy from the white dust of burnt skeletons.

Squished in the room inside the room inside the shack was a disappointingly normal looking guy with lots of disappointingly normal looking trinkets. But the stories that followed made up for it. We received our initiation into the Supposedly Six important fetish objects for every man and household:

1. Little Wooden Man with Hole in Mouth to ensure safe travels of the one you tell the Little Wooden Man to keep safe.

2. Ebony Seed to ensure safe thoughts and good dreams to the one who kisses it 3 times, dunks it in water, and makes a cross sign with it on his forehead.

3. 21 Herb Talisman Pouch with conch shells to ensure good luck in general to the one who wears it around his neck.

4. Seal of Love Mini Raft to ensure devotion and passion between the one who drops perfume onto it and the other who holds it between his palm.

5. Little Clay Man with Holes in Eyes to ensure protection to your home if you light a cigarette and let it burn all the way down from one empty eye hole. Beware future burglar: blindness will befall if you strike!

6. Buffalo Stick to ensure a "night like buffalo" to the man who shaves bits of it into a glass of whiskey and lets it sit for 2 days, then takes a woman to his bed.

For those who chose to take their powers with them, it would go like this: you'd place what you wanted in the turtle shell on the ground and the S. Son would take it, rock it, pick it up, put it down, and rock some more until he received word of how much it would cost you.

Joe and I weren't interested in purchasing our magic items, so we were dismissed as to not taint the powers of others' choices. We went outside to watch the monkey (alive, for now) instead.

All fun aside, I'm intrigued by the history of voodoo. What we saw today was the cheesy tourist version of it, but I know it has a strong hold on Togolese history, culture and life behind the scenes. It'd be fascinating to better understand it.

http://picasaweb.google.com/jen.a.watts/FetishMarket#