Voodoo priests recommend voodoo to stop covid-19

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“WE DON’T DO black magic here,” says Zanzan Zinho as he lifts a giant calabash adorned with goat skulls. The shrine of the Vodun (voodoo) priest is in a courtyard in Ouidah, the spiritual home of the religion, in southern Benin. All around are fetishes: dried snakes, twins made of wood and a baby-girl doll into whose mouth the priest inserts a cigarette. “To help her breathe,” explains Mr Zinho. Before your correspondent has a chance to probe, he is given a dram of moonshine from the calabash, of the sort that makes one forget one’s questions.

Roughly 12% of Beninese are adherents of Vodun. Many more, Muslims and Christians alike, incorporate elements of the animist, polytheistic religion in their practice. Suppressed under French rule and then during the Marxist dictatorship of Mathieu Kérékou, Vodun revived after the shift to democracy in the 1990s. In 1996 it was recognised as an official religion. Today tourists from all over visit...