Bridging the gap
Long before ecology became a trend, the Fon and Ewe peoples lived in deep relationship with the living world. In Vodun, you do not worship nature. You are part of it.
By Blackness Team
Long before ecology became a trend, the Fon and Ewe peoples of Dahomey already lived in deep relationship with the living world. In Vodun, you do not worship nature. You are part of it.
Far from the clichés of sorcery and spells that the Western imagination pinned on it, Vodun is first and foremost a spirituality whose purpose is to protect life and maintain community discipline. As Beninese speaker Bienvenu Akoha reminds us in a TEDx talk, it is a tradition inherited from the ancestors, built around the four fundamental elements: air, water, fire and earth.
The poet Antonin Artaud had grasped it: what sets African cosmologies1 apart from Western thought is "this effort not to think as men, to keep in touch with the whole of creation, that is, with divinity."
In the Vodun tradition, born among the Fon and Ewe peoples of what is today Benin, Togo and Ghana, this contact is not a spiritual stance. It is an architecture of the world. The vodun are direct emanations of the forces of nature. The sacred forest is not a symbol. It is a presence. The river is not a resource. It is an entity with which one keeps a relationship.
Professor Honoré Aguessy, the father of sociology in Benin, puts it plainly: "to put man back at the center of his natural system, to aim for a certain environmental balance." (quoted in Philippe Charlier, Vaudou, 2020)
Fa, the divination system at the heart of the Fon tradition, embodies this logic every day. One of its practitioners asks the fundamental question: "how should man, who is a natural creature, an animal creature, a creature of the natural order of things, just like stones, plants and animals, find the place that is his own?" (Philippe Charlier, Vaudou, 2020)
No hierarchy. No domination. A place. His own.
Simon Akpona, quoted in Philippe Charlier, Vaudou, 2020
This closeness to the living world was not only spiritual. It took the form of concrete acts, passed down from generation to generation. Professor Bienvenu Akoha documents it precisely: every village had to keep a protected sacred forest, a true sanctuary that actively helped preserve local ecosystems. Likewise, access to certain ponds was forbidden at specific times, officially for fear of a vodun's anger. Scientifically, these bans protected young fish and gave them time to breed, ensuring better catches in the future. Long before environmental science, Vodun was already managing the living world.
With the deportation of Africans to the Americas, the practice of Vodun was banned, and this bond with the living world was threatened. Yet it crossed the Atlantic. In Haiti, Brazil, Cuba and Louisiana, the descendants of the deported kept, often in secret, this way of inhabiting the world. The names sometimes changed, the rituals adapted, but the relationship with the living world remained.
This article opens our series on the invisible: what Afro-descendant spiritualities see beyond the visible. We will go to meet Hevioso, the vodun of thunder, then Dangbé, the sacred python of Ouidah. Two figures who say the same thing as the forest and the river: the sacred is not far from us. It lives all around us.
We are blackness.
1 Cosmology: the way a culture explains how the world is organized, who belongs where and how everything is connected. It is not just a religious belief, it is a complete system that says: this is how the world works, this is where humans stand in it, this is how they should behave toward what surrounds them. In Vodun cosmology, humans are not separate from nature; they are part of it, just like stones, plants and animals.
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