“Our grandparents had bought people”: The Tchamba Cult in Togo and Bénin

The aim of my contribution is to discuss the Tchamba or Mami Tchamba cult, usually called the “slave vodun”, that shows the ambiguous way the  people on the former “Slave Coast” remember slavery. Its practise is widespread among the Ewe-Mina of Togo, but the cult is found elsewhere along the coast from Ghana to Nigeria.  During ceremonies, the spirits of  deceased slaves possess the bodies of the adepts of vodun who, ironically, are the descendents of the former slave masters. Memory is materialised in the bodies of the adepts, in ritual objects, in the setting of altars, and in music. Thenarrative of slavery imagines a foreign north from where the slaves are thought to have come. The historical context of the Tchamba worshippers reveals ambiguity and contradictions: they claim to belong to the merchant élite, but they often recount that a female ancestor was a former slave. They border a double identity – slave and master - with different levels of consciousness. The cult tries to find a solution to the social drama lived by the slaves who died away from their homeland, their ancestors and their gods, and therefore are condemned to oblivion. For the people involved in the cult, slavery is then the drama of solitude and uprooting. They transform slaves into gods to give them a new land to come back to, but also to prevent them from becoming a threat. In fact, those who suffered death through violence and the dead who were not given the proper funerary ceremonies are considered angry spirits looking for revenge that can inflicted on the living.