Vodun Days

From 10 January to the Vodun Days

Vodun honours the balance between the visible and invisible worlds. Its pantheon includes the Vodun of the elements — Sakpata for the earth, Xɛvioso for cosmic fire and lightning, Tɔxɔsu for water and Dan for the air — as well as masked Vodun such as Egungun and Zangbétɔ. Carried across the Atlantic by the slave trade, it shaped traditions in the Americas such as Santería in Cuba, Vodou in Haiti and Candomblé in Brazil.

A national Vodun festival was introduced in the 1990s under President Nicéphore Soglo and celebrated every 10 January across the country, above all in Ouidah. In 2024 it was transformed into the Vodun Days, which President Patrice Talon hoped would “deconstruct the negative images” of Vodun and present it as art and culture as well as religion. The first edition, on 9 and 10 January 2024, drew nearly 100,000 visitors; the second, from 9 to 11 January 2025, more than 435,000. The same year a new law set the annual festival of traditional religions on the second Friday of January.

Masks, convents and the great ceremony

During the festival the faithful come out of the Vodun convents to fill the squares of the historic centre and the beach: the Place Maro, founded in 1812 by freed captives who had returned from Brazil, the esplanade of the French fort, the Temple of Pythons, where the sacred pythons live freely as divine messengers, and the sacred forest of Kpassè. There are Vodun Hounvè dances and a procession in honour of the divinities. The Zangbétɔ — the name means “night guardian” — appears by day as a tall straw costume; at night, followers say, it patrols the neighbourhood as an invisible guardian against wrongdoers. The Egungun, whose name means “the one who has died and returns”, embodies an ancestor made visible, and its masked appearance is both worship and spectacle.

Near the Door of No Return, the monument to the slave trade by the beach, the Arène de Ouidah hosts Egungun dances, and a temporary Mami Dan temple honours Mami Wata, the Vodun of the ocean. The high point is the Grande Cérémonie Vodun in the presence of the high dignitaries, where the bokɔnɔ, priests of the Fá divination system, read the sign for the year — in 2025 it was Fu-Yeku, associated with protection and prosperity. In the evenings there are open-air concerts of Beninese and international artists by the sea.