Gris-gris and twins

So, for the past nine months or so that I’ve spent at my post, I’ve passed many afternoons sitting with my landlady and her sister in the corner of the local market where they sell sodabi.  Over behind their stalls, there’s a quiet little area of the market that I’d never visited.  All I could see of it was a pile of pottery, so I figured it was the pottery corner of the market.  Yesterday, though, I was a bit bored and wondered over, and guess what?  It’s actually the gris-gris center.  (You’ll be much more impressed when you read the next paragraph.)

Benin is famous for being the world center of Voodoo, and there’s also widespread practice of gris-gris.  Gris-gris and Voodoo are often used as synonyms by foreigners, but while Voodoo is an actual religion with a pantheon of gods, gris-gris is a more general form of animism.  A minority of the population (mostly in the South) follows Voodoo, but just about everyone believes in gris-gris regardless of whether they’re Christian, Muslim, etc.  Gris-gris includes most of the practices that Americans think of when we talk about Voodoo: spells and charms both helpful and harmful.  (Sorry, no dolls stuck with pins.)  A couple of the men selling the gris-gris objects spoke French and were happy to explain to me what the various items were for: charms against bad bosses and neighbors, luck charms, memory charms, charms to counteract sorcery being done against you, traditional medicines, and more.  The charms themselves were preserved animal skins, various jawbones, dried plants and roots, and even a few halfway-preserved birds of prey.  I thanked the sellers and promised to come back if I ever needed some supernatural help. 

This just goes to show that I can look around in Benin all I want, but most of the time, I have no idea what I’m looking at.

Speaking of traditional beliefs, someone I know at my post just recently had twins.  In this region of Africa, twins are considered a huge blessing and bring a lot of prestige to the parents.  My friend at post is very proud and told me that because his two new sons are twins, they’ll be expected to give their parents advice in important decisions, starting when they’re very young.  Traditionally, twins are believed to be very spiritually close.  If one of them dies, people say don’t say they’re deceased; they say he/she has gone to the forest to wait for his/her twin, and the surviving twin is required to carry around a small doll representing the lost twin until he/she too passes away.