Ouidah: “The Route of Slaves”
Nicole and I visited Ouidah, the birthplace of Voodun, which came to the United States and adapted as Voodoo. We went to the Voodoo Museum: no photos allowed. The Museum was housed in a former Portuguese Slavers fortress. While we were there we hired a man to guide us on The Route of Slaves. This is a path from the castle to the coast, where countless enslaved men, women, and children were led from their homeland to death or enslavement overseas in the Americas.
This was a really somber walk, as you can imagine. Along the way there were different works of art marking the enslavement of people.
The guide pointed out a tree (who knows if it were the original, though it hardly matters) called the “Tree of Forgetting.” The enslaved people being marched to the coast would circle it three times to forget everything about their lives before being marched to the fortress at the ocean to be held before being loaded onto ships.
The monument at the beach, “The Door of No Return,” was massive, heartbreaking, and beautiful. The statues flanking the monument, I was told, represented four of the major tribes of Benin.
The frieze captured the monumental scale of the horrors of slavery.
This was a difficult but necessary part of the trip that to this day I remember.
Roberta Flack visited a similar fortress in Ghana: jump to 9:42 (or better yet, watch the whole damn clip because it is amazing).