Zangbeto: Get to Know Voodoo’s Whirling Spirit Dance

In western Africa, different communities practice the religion of Voodoo, a belief system based on the idea that their ancestors co-exist with the living, serving as protectors and granters of favors. Voodoo rituals involve music, dance, and gestures, sometimes including masquerades. One such masquerade is Zangbeto, a dance performed by local communities’ unofficial policemen consisting of a swirling stack of dried palm leaves that seems to be moved by an invisible spirit.

Voodoo (also Vodun and Voudou) is a religion practiced by almost 60,000,000 people today in West Africa and Haiti. On the African continent, believers are largely part of the Aja, Ewe, and Fon communities of Benin, Togo, Ghana, and Nigeria, representing 60% of all West Africans. Its origins can be traced to 6,000 years ago in what is now Benin, the geographical heart of Voodoo, where it was declared the official religion in 1990. Voodoo’s principal practitioners are the Fon people, the largest ethnic group in the country, who are also present in Nigeria and Togo, with a total population of approximately 3,500,000.

The Voodoo religion has historically been subject to many misconceptions and misinterpretations, most propagated by Western media, portraying it as associated with devil worship and black magic. Voodoo is embodied in a cosmological structure that includes philosophical and medicinal practices and beliefs. Voodoo includes the belief in both maleficent and benevolent spirits assigned to varying forces on Earth, which have a specific hierarchy and, in some cases, can represent different tribes or nations.

One of the primary tenets of Voodoo is that in the afterlife, the dead pass to another realm of reality, becoming ancestors that co-exist with the living. They can grant protection and favors to the living in exchange for offerings and sacrifices. Despite the belief in different entities and spirits, Voodoo is a monotheistic religion, a structure that facilitated a syncretism with Roman Catholicism, driven by the slave trade from West Africa to the Caribbean and the Americas. Syncretic forms of Voodoo are practiced today in Haiti and the United States and also significantly influence religions like Cuban Santería and Brazilian Candomblé.

The ritualistic dimension of Voodoo involves serving the spirits by offering prayers and performing different rites to ask for favors or protection. The rituals often include complex dances with different costumes and ornaments and can be accompanied by praying, chanting, and drumming. The dances frequently involve spirits possessing the dancers, who reach states of trance and ecstasy and are believed to embody the very essence of the spirits that manifest, ensuring a balance between the living and the invisible. Apart from the Zangbeto, other West African dances incorporate similar characteristics, such as the de Zaouli dance of the Guro people in Côte d’Ivoire and the Kumpo dance of the Diola people in Senegal and Gambia.

One of the most popular Voodoo dances is the Zangbeto masquerade of the Ogu people, an ethnic group of Nigeria and Benin. It is performed by a community’s non-official police force, which oversees the safety and protection of the people and also denounces and punishes criminals. Rather than using violence to control crime, Zangbeto uses dance as a power display that becomes an effective mechanism of policing and securing the community at night. Zangbeto is an Ogu term that translates to “night-watchmen,” believed to be spirits that may include the community’s ancestors.

Zangbeto ceremonies are designed to invoke the ancestors’ spirits and allow them to manifest in the material world. Dancers are disguised in a heavy cover made of dried palm leaves or hay layered over a structure made of sticks or wood, resembling haystacks. The leaves are sometimes dyed in different colors that have symbolic representations in the community. This structure may be topped with a mask, which is common among many masquerade dances in this part of Africa.

Before a Zangbeto starts to dance by turning and swirling on its vertical axis, the cover is opened to show the audience that no human is hiding inside. When the Zangbeto is ready, it starts to swirl and move through a field surrounded by the astonished and shouting audience. The Zangbeto creates an outstanding visual illusion that awes and amazes everyone watching: it appears that the invisible spirit is the one dancing.

This illusion is attributed to the trance dancers fall into, thanks to the effect of constant swirling, which enables them to be possessed by invisible spirits. While turning, the hay cover expands and shrinks depending on the turning speed, giving an illusion that the entity is growing in size and power. The Zangbeto might stop turning at different times during the ceremony to allow the watchmen accompanying the spirit to lift or tilt the hay cover to show the audience that there’s no trickery involved. In response to audience suspicions, the men may even dismount the structure and place it upside down so everyone can see the empty interior of the Zangbeto. When Zangbeto dancers perform, they create great fear among the residents, who believe they embody the power of the spirits and even the spirits themselves. This practice is believed to cleanse the community and grant protection from evil spirits.

The Zangbeto are also known to be able to swallow pieces of glass without harming themselves, to walk on water, or to transform water into wine. All these beliefs are manifested in the ceremonies. They are also said to be able to become tiny and dance inside a bottle. Some performances include “giving birth” to smaller Zangbeto, who emerge from inside the bigger one and are revealed to the audience when the other men lift the Zangbeto “parent.” In addition to creating a great sense of euphoria in the audience, this demonstrates that Zangbeto are not gendered and function simultaneously as both male and female.

Zangbeto originated in Ghana, Togo, and Benin centuries ago, when an Ogu man was being pursued by enemies and needed to escape from his hometown unnoticed at night. He used supernatural powers to disguise himself by covering his body with dried leaves and making animal sounds with a horn. An alternate history tells that Zangbeto came from a group of men who aimed to protect their coastal community from neighboring kingdoms that wanted to attack and invade them.

One of the most significant events in the region gathering Voodoo dancers, including Zangbeto, is the Vodun Festival, an event celebrated every year on January 10, a national holiday in Benin (Fête du Vodoun), in Ouidah. The Festival unites different communities to celebrate their religion as well as commemorate people who lost their land, lives, and freedom during the slave trade. The Festival features various masquerades representing numerous Voodoo deities from different regional communities. The festival has also gained the attention of many tourists from different countries worldwide, as well as the African diaspora, who come to the festival to get closer to their cultural and ethnic roots.

Historically, the Western world has dismissed Voodoo as an exaggerated and diabolical practice. In the United States, for example, the practice of maligning Voodoo can be traced back to at least the 1860s, when public newspapers used prejudices against such religious practices to deny African Americans citizenship or the right to vote. Accusations of Voodoo involving torture or murder served as justifications for the US colonization of Caribbean countries with large Black populations. The prejudices have gone so far that even after the 2010 earthquake and cholera epidemic in Haiti, foreigners blamed religion as the cause of the tragedy.

Similar examples can be found even earlier, after the Haitian Revolution (1791-1804), when many countries feared African religious practices, which were banned and their practitioners persecuted, specifically in the countries that relied on slavery as a means of production. Although Voodoo culture has been heavily judged by non-African people, Western media and cinematography have also appropriated it, and it is now being affected by intensive touristification, causing some practices to be changed to improve foreigners’ experience.

As with many other Voodoo practices, Zangbeto has also been unfairly accused of involving witchcraft or black magic. In reality, this performance is part of a religious structure, and an integral part of people’s lives and belief systems, no different than Islam is for Muslims or Christianity is for Catholics. Ultimately, it does not matter whether Zangbetos have a real person inside or not. What this entrancing dance makes clear is the need to pay more attention to traditional knowledge and cultural practices that have been wrongly judged and condemned, ignoring their importance to practitioners and believers. In the meantime, Voodoo dance remains one of the most fascinating practices in West Africa.

Bibliography:

Okunola, R. A., & Ojo, M. O. D. (2013). Zangbeto: The Traditional Way of Policing and Securing the Community among the Ogu (Egun) People in Badagry, Nigeria. Etnoantropološki problemi/Issues in Ethnology and Anthropology, 8(1), 199-220.