Sodabi: Benin's Sacred Spirit and the Memory of the Ancestors

Libation¹ is millennia old. Sodabi is barely a century old. Yet sodabi is what gets poured for the ancestors today. This is how that happened.

Sodabi, stripped of the cliché

In 1951, a colonial newspaper in Cotonou ran the headline “sodabi, calamity number one in Dahomey.” The outside gaze still makes it a makeshift liquor, something you distil for want of anything better. Sodabi is something else: a palm wine spirit, born in Benin. And it is first of all a liquid of relation. You do not drink it first, you pour it first. A few drops on the ground, for those who came before.

A birth, a wedding, a funeral, a visitor you welcome: sodabi is there. In the dowry, it is part of the protocol. In an agreement between two families, it stands in for a signature. A study run in Lomé by the researchers at RAPAA measures it: two thirds of those surveyed link it to religious and family ceremonies. You do not toast with sodabi. You commit with it.

In the team, we know where it lives: in the suitcase coming back from Cotonou, wedged between the clothes. Sodabi is not a holiday souvenir. It is a piece of home we carry with us.

The gesture is older than the bottle

While we were preparing this collection, a question stopped us. Sodabi is born in the 1920s. Libation has been practised for millennia. Why does a drink this young hold a place this old?

The answer starts with the palm tree. Long before distillation, people poured palm wine, atan in Fon, drawn from the same tree. Sodabi arrives with Bonou Kiti Sodabi, a Dahomean tirailleur back from the First World War. He had watched the stills of the French countryside. With his brother Gbèhalaton, in the village of Sèdjè Houégoudo, he first distils fermented banana. In 1926, the two brothers apply the technique to palm wine. A barrel, a copper pipe, a jar. Ten litres of wine for one litre of spirit.

Neighbouring villages come to buy the Sodabi brothers' drink. In Fon it is called sodabihan: Mister Sodabi's drink. Usage shortened the word. Sodabi is what remains.

Vodun did not wait for sodabi. Sodabi earned its place in Vodun. It took over from atan: stronger, longer lasting, distilled in the village. Not a relic. A relay.

“By the 1940s, akpeteshie had emerged as an important symbol of African grievances under colonial rule”

Emmanuel Akyeampong, Ghanaian historian, professor at Harvard, 1996

Akpeteshie is sodabi’s Ghanaian cousin: a locally distilled gin, banned in its turn by the British administration. When duties on imported gin rise in 1930, workers can no longer afford it. They turn to akpeteshie. That threatens the colonial revenue drawn from imported liquor. The same economic mechanism as in Dahomey, under a different flag. Its legalisation becomes one of the first acts of independent Ghana, in 1957. What Professor Akyeampong documents in Ghana lights up what played out in Benin. Wherever a local spirit competed with imported liquor, the colony banned it. Everywhere independence lifted it back.

Forty-four years of prohibition, not one year of interruption

In 1931, the French colonial administration bans sodabi. Production, owning a still, trade: all of it becomes an offence. Fines and prison follow.

The official reason speaks of protecting the palm groves. The archives say otherwise. You search them in vain for public health arguments. Sodabi threatened palm oil and imported liquor, which the Marseille trading houses lived on. In 1937, the administration’s own botanist finds that the palm groves had grown: peasants were planting more palms than before. The ecological argument was false, and known to be false.

It is worth saying what peasant life was at that moment. The crisis of the 1930s collapses palm oil prices, while the colonial tax does not fall. Distilling becomes the only income that holds. Peasants did not distil out of whim. They distilled to stay standing.

The repression was real. Hundreds of trials through the 1930s. In 1950, the courts hand down four hundred years of prison in total. Among those convicted, women: distillers, traders. This was not a health policy. It was a commercial policy, enforced by the courts.

And still, for forty-four years, sodabi never stopped flowing. In the courtyards, at night, at weddings, at funerals, before the vodun. The ban falls in 1975. That same year, Dahomey becomes Benin.

This collection

It does not claim to fit a century of history into a garment. It wants to recall what that century proves: a heritage is not preserved, it is continued. With the tree we have, the technique we brought back, the gesture we never let go of.

The design that carries it says it in one line: “The first glass is for them.” The first share is theirs. To wear these pieces is to carry that gesture. Not like a costume. Like something obvious, found again.

¹ Libation: the gesture of pouring a few drops of a drink onto the ground before drinking it, to share it with the ancestors and the deities. It is not a loss. It is an address: you give the first share to those who came before, the way you serve an elder first at the table.