In Benin, Voodoo's birthplace, believers bemoan steady shrinkage of forests they revere as sacred

PORTO-NOVO, Benin — For many people in Benin, the forests empowered them before they were born, or in the first months of their lives.

Benin is home to thousands of sacred forests, which believers say are vital to a religion rooted in nature. They see the forests as homes for spirits, which priests pray to and seek guidance from. “When brought roads to our region and we had to stop everything in the sacred forest, people started getting sick and having all kinds of problems,” said Benoit Sonou, a Voodoo priest who witnessed the destruction of his community’s forest as a young man.

Gatherings don’t begin without dropping water on the ground, a ritual that pays respect to ancestors. Initiation into Voodoo takes many years. And with few exceptions, only those initiated are allowed to enter the sacred forests. Many of the parks ban women, due to beliefs they’ll go mad if they enter. The men must enter naked.

Only certain priests can communicate with the spirits, doing so through chants, prayers or making noise like ringing a bell. Losing these forests eliminates places for experimentation and innovation, he said. “When we lose spaces demarcated for spiritual practices, these are spaces where people come together and try to understand how they’re going to respond to new challenges and new difficulties.”

Urbanization and desertification shrank the forests, but the biggest factor was agricultural expansion driven by poverty, said Bienvenu Bossou, the group’s executive director. Benin’s economy depends on agriculture exports, notably cotton and cashew nuts, and Bossou says many people — unable to afford fertilizer — expanded their farms into the forest to use its rich soil.

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