West African Vodun

West African Vodun

Vodun or Vudun (spirit in the Fon and Ewe languages, with a nasal high-tone u; also spelled Vodon, Vodoun, Voudou, Voodoo etc.) is an indigenous organized religion of coastal West Africa from Togo to Nigeria. Vodun is practised by the Ewe people, Kabye people, Mina people and Fon people of southern and central Togo, southern and central Benin and (under a different name) the Yoruba of southwestern Nigeria.

It is distinct from the various traditional animistic religions in the interiors of these same countries and is the main origin for religions of similar name found among the African Diaspora in the New World such as Haitian Vodou, the Vudu of Puerto Rico, Candomblé Jejé in Brazil (which uses the term Vodum), Louisiana Voodoo and Santería in Cuba and the Dominican Republic. All these are syncretized with Christianity and the traditional religions of the Kongo people of Congo and Angola.

Read more about West African Vodun:  Theology and Practice, Relationship To Bò, Demographics

Famous quotes containing the words west and/or african:

    There are acacias, a graceful species amusingly devitalized by sentimentality, this kind drooping its leaves with the grace of a young widow bowed in controllable grief, this one obscuring them with a smooth silver as of placid tears. They please, like the minor French novelists of the eighteenth century, by suggesting a universe in which nothing cuts deep.
    —Rebecca West (1892–1983)

    If your buttocks burn, you know you have done wrong.
    —White South African proverb.