Voodoo In West Africa

When you read The Bonus, you can judge for yourself whether the priestess, Satouma, was a fraud or had some power to which we in America don't relate. Is it possible that the outcome of The Bonus was seriously influenced by the rituals she performed on behalf of Rabunto and Shinto (Chapter 14) or was it just a lot of hokus pokus? After all, nobody believes in voodoo anymore.

Thirty million people in West Africa practicing the ancient religion of Vodun would not agree that no one believes in voodoo anymore. In fact many believe that touching a voodoo dancer while he or she is in a trance could kill you and it has been common practice for thousands of years for African sorcerers called botono to be hired to put a hex on someone's adversaries. You'd think after thousands of years such foolishness would have been abandoned as a fraud.

"But the pull of voodoo is so powerful," says a retired Catholic priest in Togo ,"it seems imbedded in the earth of West Africa." Even to this day it would not be too difficult to find people in Louisiana practicing Vodun as ardently as any of the millions practicing it in West Africa. Could there be something to it?