Tchamba

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Tchamba (also tsamba, tsaba, tsemba and tseba ) is an possession cult of the Mina and Anlo- Ewe mainly in the south of Togo and further in the south of Benin , with the descendants of earlier slaves and slave owners from the spirit of a slave abducted from a region further north be infested. Tchamba is also the name of the group of spirits venerated in the cult, which was named after the ethnic group of the same name in the Tchamba prefecture in central Togo. The foreign spirits, however, come from different ethnic groups; they are more often female than male because the households employed many female slaves.

The veneration of Tchamba, also in the figure of Mama (n) Tchamba ("mother / grandmother slave spirit") as the mother of a slave spirit , represents a ritual form of remembrance of the time of slavery from the 17th to the 17th, belonging to the voodoo belief 19th century. The spirits of a population group that was oppressed and marginalized at that time symbolize a repressed part of Mina and Ewe social history through their revenge and their desire for homage.

Cultural environment

The phenomenon of possession is discussed for Africa as an explanation for a physical or mental illness, as an indication of a social conflict or as a method of maintaining power in a social group. Obsession means that a ghost or a strange personality has entered a person and has completely taken over the control of his organism and his psyche. The affected person falls into a state of trance or ecstasy . When such an afflictive obsession is diagnosed in a sick person, certain rituals are required, in some cases to drive away the possessive spirit or, more often, to find a way to get along with it and placate it so that it ceases to cause harm. Corresponding African cults of possession in the Christian environment are Mashawe and Vimbuza in southern Africa. There is also the idea that certain spirits - for example of deceased family members - want to attract attention and only penetrate a person as a kind of spiritual pathogen without attacking their personality. A meditative obsession is when a medium, in his role as a healer or fortune teller, promises to use the magical powers of a spirit dwelling in him.

Obsession cults are often described in the context of social power relations. Some marginalized groups practice obsessional cults that are underestimated by the dominant majority society as a means of self-identification in a domestic setting. Within Islamic societies this applies above all to cults of women, for example the tsar cult of women in Egypt and Sudan, Stambali in Tunisia, Derdeba in Morocco, Dodo and Bori in Nigeria, and Pepo on the East African coast. The Nya cult in southern Mali is an example of a non-affective cult of possession that serves men from a dominant social class to maintain their position of power . Furthermore, from a historical perspective, cults of possession are considered to be an expression of social insecurities that are associated in Africa with the need to adapt to the economic and cultural changes during the colonial period. Aspects of obsession cults have become part of Christian and Islamic folk beliefs , and symbols of the established religions are in turn found in African cults.

A related cult of possession that appeared in northern Ghana in the 1920s and 1930s and is now widespread among the Ewe in south-east Ghana, on the coast in south Togo and in south-west Benin is called Gorovodu (" Kolanuss Voodoo"). Like Tchamba, Gorovodu emerged as an indigenous response to the influence of colonialism and the slave trade. Like the veneration of Mami Wata and Yewevodu among the Ewe and the Orishas among the Yoruba, both belong to the syncretistic cults, which are so called because they contain cult elements from different regions and religions. Gorovodu and Tchamba come from the colonial slave cult Atikevodu ("medicine spirit"), which the colonialists called " fetish worship". The different religious voodoo cults are always related to the given political conditions.

Time of slavery

A slave gains his freedom. Aquatint by Alexander Rippingille (1796-1858), 1836.

The intra-African slave trade practiced in different regional forms was a prerequisite for the transatlantic slave trade of the Europeans, which began at the beginning of the 16th century and was forbidden by law around the middle of the 19th century. The Trans-Saharan trade , the slave trade with the countries of the Orient via the Red Sea and the slave trade via the Indian Ocean were much older . Most often, a village or a state carried out a raid on the hostile population in the neighborhood. Most of the slaves were therefore prisoners of war. Slavery is seen as one of the reasons for the formation and demarcation of small ethnic groups, which is typical in Africa. The Europeans supplied rifles in the 18th century to continue the disputes and the rifles could be purchased in exchange for slaves. This created a vicious circle that forced the African ethnic groups to continue acquiring weapons for self-protection or to hunt slaves, with even individual groups abducting people from their own community into slavery, making societies as a whole more unstable. It is estimated that around a quarter of the population in French West Africa was enslaved by the end of the 19th century .

The trade balance with slaves on the Gold Coast varied widely. From Togo, only a fraction of slaves were exported across the Atlantic compared to the areas of the present-day states of Ghana and Nigeria . Over a million slaves were shipped from the Portuguese settlement and fortress of Ouidah in Benin from the 1670s to the 1860s. This was around ten percent of the total transatlantic slave trade. The height of the slave trade was between 1700 and 1713, when around 15,000 slaves annually left Ouidah by ship.

Ewe are the largest ethnic group in Togo who live in the south and, depending on how they are counted, make up a third or more of the population. The second largest ethnic group are the Kabiyé in the north of the country. The Anlo are considered a subgroup of the Ewe, also the Mina, who on the other hand, as Gen or Gbe speakers, are differentiated from the Ewe. In the 18th century, English and French reports generally referred to the residents of the Gold Coast as "Mina". Today's Mina center in Togo is the coastal town of Aného , which was founded in the 1650s by migrants from Elmina (now in Ghana) who had come along the coast by boat. At the end of the 17th century the Mina society consisted of Fanti and Ga , who had immigrated from Ghana, as well as Adja , Oatchi, Peda and other groups in Togo, as well as descendants of Portuguese and Brazilian traders. In the 18th century, Aného grew mainly through the ivory trade and became the political and religious center of the Mina. The slave trade was of lesser importance. European demand made palm oil the main export product of Togo during the 19th century .

The Mina established a certain degree of rule over numerous villages in southeastern Togo. Their territory was framed by the more powerful domains of the Ashanti in the west and Dahomey in the east. There were no larger settlement units than villages in the south of Togo, apart from Aného, ​​in contrast to the Islamic principalities in the north around the capitals Sokodé and Sansanné-Mango . Their slaves got the Mina through trade, raids or as prisoners of war. They were captured a few kilometers north of the coast from places near the Mono River. The Mina called the area adonko , land of "slaves". The merchants from the coast exchanged slaves for salt, guns, ammunition, cloth or money. The slaves belonged to a variety of ethnicities, most notably Kabiyé and Tchamba, some belonging to the Ntcham , Taberma and Tem . As the wars were being waged against neighboring groups, it was not advisable to keep the slaves captured in this way, as they would have escaped at the first opportunity. As a result, the slaves were resold to African middlemen or Europeans as quickly as possible. The Brazilian slave trader Francisco Félix de Souza (1754–1849), commander of the Ouidah fortress, founded a trading post in Aného in 1806 and soon acquired a monopoly on the transatlantic slave trade in the region.

Slaves intended for employment in their own households were brought in from more distant areas in the north of Togo. This turned the slaves into strangers, increasing the social distance to their owners and reducing the risk of escape. The linguist Diedrich Westermann (1876–1956) presents in Die Glidyi-Ewe in Togo (1935) with the notes of his author Bonifatius Foli der Mina ("Glidyi-Ewe") a positive picture of the treatment of slaves. According to his information, owning a slave could be compared with a growing bank account, because his later children also worked in the house and in the fields for their masters. In homicide crimes, the perpetrator had to hand over slaves to the victim's family as compensation. In order not to be completely at the mercy of his owner, a slave who felt badly treated could seek refuge in one of the religious cult groups.

The slaves lived in the homestead of their master or mistress; in some cases they were grouped together and settled in separate areas outside the village. From there they worked four days a week in their owners' fields, harvesting and pressing palm oil; the rest of the time they worked elsewhere for themselves. Slaves were used by traders as porters and by chiefs as servants and soldiers. A slave could attain freedom if he paid his owner the selling price of two slaves. After the public rally that the slave had ransomed, he was automatically accepted into the clan of his former owner. He had thereby become a clan member ( ablodeto ) and enjoyed the usual civil rights. In addition to the free citizens ( ablodeto ) and the slaves ( adonko or adoko ) there was a third class of dependents. These were mostly refugees from other ethnic groups who had placed themselves under the protection of the Mina. The other members of this social group belonged to their own community, but through their indebtedness had become slave laborers who lived in bondage . In general, debt bondage to secure a loan was widespread in West Africa and supported the European slave trade. The descendants of dependents could relatively easily gain the status of free clan member, while the descendants remained dependent on slaves and had to work for their masters most of the time. This also applied to the children of a male slave and a Mina woman. The children of a slave and a Mina man, however, were free. In addition to the more descriptive adonko ( adoko ), there were more direct terms for slaves, including: ame peple ( amefle , "the person bought"), ame kluvi ("the person in chains") and ame gato ("the iron person") . Their social status is also evident in the indirect linguistic images nekekevi (“child of the day”) and ngdogbevi (“child of the midday heat ”), because human children are normally not bought during the day, but rather conceived at night. After several generations of marriages between family members of former slaves and slave owners, the lineages are now very mixed. The reference to their origin is associated with a certain shame for both sides.

Ghost ideas

In the cosmogony of the Ewe, the otherworldly world under the high god Mawu is populated by numerous lower deities and spirits, including Legba and the earth deities Trowo (singular tro ). The Mina make the fundamental distinction in the spirit world, which changes over time, between personal spirits ( dzodzome-vodu ) and spirits of the clan ( kota-vodu ). Both have an identity-creating effect, for the individual within his clan or for the clan within society as a whole. Another classification of spirits is based on the world in which they live. Then there are, among other things, heavenly spirits ( dzime-vodu ), water spirits ( tome-vodu ) and savanna spirits ( gbeme-vodu ). The spirits of the hunters and blacksmiths belong first to the professional spirits. The social structure ends after various animal spirits with the strange spirits, which include the slave spirits and the wildly roaming spirits of the dead who were not properly buried. Deceased slaves were buried in the wilderness outside the villages without the usual rituals.

It is a feature of black African beliefs that the ghosts of neglected or forgotten dead, that is, of the deceased of their own clan who were not buried with the required rites, and clan members who died a violent death or abroad, haunt people and become ill cause. The avenging spirits of the dead must generally be moved to leave the sick person through a sacrifice or a dance ceremony. Foreign spirits imported from other ethnic groups, for example in the East African Pepo cult, can have a similarly possessive and disease-causing effect . The hunters of the Mina protect themselves against the spirits of animals that they have killed through special shrines ( adee ) in which they store and venerate animal bones, especially the lower jaws of animals. Wild animals and slaves alike were brought into the outside world by forcible invasion, and so their spirits show a similar tendency towards revenge. Although only some of the slaves belonged to the Tchamba language group (in today's Tchamba Prefecture, Central Region ), the name was nevertheless transferred to all slave spirits, regardless of the actual ethnic origin of the slaves at the time. Furthermore, the spirits present in the beliefs of the slaves themselves were called Tchamba. The Mina did not linguistically distinguish between their own spirits of the slaves and the spirits that the slaves have, because the release of a slave and his entry into the Mina society also meant that a transition of the spirits was possible.

Cult practice

Tchamba spirits are worshiped in obsession cults, at village shrines, house altars and in the sacred groves of other voodoo communities. Followers of the Tchamba cult usually participate in other voodoo cults such as Gorovodu, Yewevodu or Sakpata . A tchamba can be a male or female spirit, but the address Mama Tchamba ("mother / grandmother slave") refers to the meaning of the female slaves as wives. The Tchamba, venerated in communal ceremonies, are the spirits of all slaves here or in distant lands. These include the ghosts of slaves kept as wives who were killed for a base motive. During the ceremonies, the spirits of deceased masters and of slaves meet in the body of the possessed patient. Although the spirits are generally called Tchamba, a fortune teller can find out whether the sick person is afflicted by a spirit of a slave of the Kabiyé, Mossi , Hausa , Tchamba or another ethnic group. As elsewhere in Africa, as soon as their origin is known, the alien spirits receive the appropriate range of food and drinks as an offering. The cult participants are confronted with the behavior of their ancestors as slaves and as slave owners.

shrine

Typical voodoo shrine. Abomey in Benin

As soon as a sick person has learned that he is possessed by a tchamba, he erects an altar in his honor and procures two chains ( tchambagan, from tchamba and gan, "metal", "something metallic "), which according to Tobias Wendl (1999) made of red and yellow painted iron wire and are a symbol of slavery. This does not mean iron chains with which slaves were tied, but anklets or anklets that were used to identify them. After the death of a slave, the owner removed the chain and placed it in a shrine to honor his family for the lifelong merits of the deceased. Should a farmer find a tchambagan in his field or someone digging on his property today, he learns from this that his ancestors kept slaves. The family now feels compelled to make a sacrifice for the deceased slaves and - if a fortune teller insists - hold a tchamba ceremony as a request for forgiveness for the previous neglect of the slaves.

According to Dana Rush (2011), the chains are composed of wires in three different colors, which, according to some informants, correspond to the skin color of three different ethnic groups from the north. The black wire made of iron is called boublou ("stranger") and stands for an easily excitable, aggressive spirit that is associated with iron, thunder and fire. The white wire made of silver ( anohi ) symbolizes a calm, balanced spirit of the Hausa, which is connected to the rainbow. A red wire made of copper or bronze represents the spirit yendi, which is named after the city of Yendi in northern Ghana and has healing powers. In the three spirits supposedly coming from the north, however, deities from southern voodoo can be recognized: the thunder god Heviosso (Xevioso), the rainbow snake Ayida (Dan Ayda Wedo), who belongs to the spirit beings ( loa ) in voodoo , and the pox goddess who causes illness Sakpata, which belongs to the earth beings.

The second object with which the new altar will be fitted is a wooden chair ( tchambazikpe ), which has two meanings. For one thing, the possessed person is asking the ghost to come over and sit in the chair. On the other hand, the chair is a symbol of slavery and represents the chair that the slave previously had to carry for his owner. In a village shrine, the type of chair, the number of chair legs and the wood to be used are specified by the respective tchamba of the ancestors of the responsible sacrificial priest. Next, cowries are placed on the altar because they served as a pre- coinage means of payment (alongside manillas ) at the time of the slave trade and refer to the commodity character of the slaves. In the early colonial days, the price for a slave was between 400,000 and 1,200,000 cowries. In addition, there are objects that indicate the origin of the slaves from the savannah areas in the north, such as kola nuts, utensils for making tea, long dresses and turban-like headgear. In the course of time, the foreign culture of the north is presented in a kind of ethnographic collection in its entire range from household items and clothing to religious cult items. To meet the strange spirits in this way and also to serve them their presumed favorite dishes of the north, should free the possessed person from them at least for a certain time. The ghosts should not be driven away, but housed in a place of well-being.

A sign of the otherness or strangeness of the slaves were vertical, stripe-shaped scars on the face, which in the north are considered an ornament by some ethnic groups (including Bariba , Logba , Dendi , " Nyantroukou "). The scar strips are reproduced on murals to identify the figuratively depicted Tchamba. Occasionally the Tchamba shrines are decorated with such murals on the outer walls. They show a male slave, often accompanied by a female figure (Maman Tchamba) who is believed to be his wife or mother. Apart from the stripes on the face, the ghost figures can be recognized by the same objects and pieces of clothing with which the shrine is equipped. In the dance ritual, the possessed are painted with chalk stripes on their faces to imitate an origin from the north. The clothing of the Tchambas indicates that they belong to the Islamic culture that predominates in the north. However, most of the slaves were not Muslim, the iconography is based solely on the memory of the appearance of Muslim Hausa who traded on the coast in the early 20th century. While clothing and kola nuts - a typical sign for Muslims in the north - refer to strangeness in a neutral way, the Mina and Ewe feel a deep dislike for the scarring, which they consider barbaric and uncivilized.

A new kind of Tchamba is worshiped together with the water spirit Mami Wata . Since Mami Wata is associated with prosperity and growth, the spirit of slaves seems to fit in for some, since in the past, wealthy families could afford slaves. This idea makes Tchamba a symbol of wealth. The voodoo cult, which is open to all influences, makes it possible to worship Tchamba in a Mami-Wata shrine. In the city of Godomey in Benin, Tchamba is worshiped in a color print that shows Hindu gods and hangs framed behind glass on the wall. Such colorful pictures, rich in motifs, which are supposed to represent “Indian spirits”, are not unusual in the voodoo cult, because they can be related to many stories and motifs of voodoo with imagination - without going into the actual content. So they became sacred objects that represent voodoo spirits. The prints are cheap, widely available, and easy to transport. The same Hindu god image can appear with different names in different voodoo cults.

The color print in Godomey shows a scene from the Hindu textbook Bhagavad Gita , in which God Krishna (here with four arms as an exception) gives philosophical instruction to the hero Arjuna kneeling in front of him . The insignia of Krishna ( corresponding to those of Vishnu ), club ( gada ), snail horn ( shankha ), throwing disc ( chakra ) and lotus ( padma ) are venerated in this tchamba cult because they are considered "Indian" and therefore particularly prestigious. The horse in the background of the picture localizes the scene in the savannah in the north for the Tchamba admirers, as there are hardly any horses on the coast. On closer inspection you can see kola nuts and other northern foods in the picture. A wooden figure of Tchamba, a knife and a trident are placed on the altar. The latter is a symbol of Shiva , not Vishnu, and is called apia in the Mami-Wata cult. The usual Tchamba objects, chains and chairs are missing here.

Dance ceremony

Dancers at a voodoo ceremony in Lomé

For a follower of the Tchamba cult, it is of central importance to know where their ancestors come from and how they lived. Ignorance of this can result in illness or even death. When someone comes to a tchamba healer as a patient, he finds out through an Afa divination that it is a slave spirit who asks for attention. The healer tells the patient what kind of tchamba it is and who enslaved whom for what reason. Appropriately for the particular tchamba, the healer explains how the ceremony should take place, which songs and which drum rhythms are appropriate for the mind. In the gods of the Ewe, Afa belongs to the Trowo, i.e. to the lower deities who act below the creator god Mawu. Afa is the younger brother of the thunder god Yewe. He is the divinity of divination, corresponds in his function to the Ifa in the religion of the Yoruba and comes from Ile-Ife . Afa fortune tellers have to go through a special initiation . Afa and Afa divination play an important role in the beliefs of the Ewe. The fortune teller uses a special chain ( agumaga ) which he throws on a mat and derives answers to questions asked from the shape of the chain. The first answer sign is called kpoli and names an animal, a plant, a food ban or a certain song. All divination includes 256 kpoliwo , so that it gives an accurate profile of the mind and needs of the patient.

Vannier and Montgomery describe a tchamba ceremony observed in 2013 at a shrine outside the village of Gbedala. The village, a few kilometers east of the state capital Lomé on the coast, has around 1,600 inhabitants who belong to the Anlo-Ewe. The priest ( Tchamba-hounon ) wears a white cloth ( Ewe pagne ) around his waist , a blue and white strip of fabric wrapped around his head and a chain of white pearls ( dzonu ) around his neck. At the beginning of the outdoor ceremony in front of the shrine, a musician strikes the hourglass drum adodo, another with an iron stick the elongated iron simple bell that looks like a pea pod atoke a dozen young men clap their hands rhythmically and a woman rattle a calabash complements an offbeat . A group of women responded to the priest's chant in a call and response style (a kind of alternating chant). The priest sings phrases of homage to Mama Tchamba, which are reinforced and continued by the women's choir after each line. At some point, while the priest continues to sing, he and the woman who is shaking the calabash rattle begin to dance to a fast rhythm with extensive arm movements. Other people present dance at will on the edge of the action.

Suddenly, a woman gets into an ecstatic state and begins to turn clockwise. This is considered a sign that the possessive mind has taken control. Those present make room for security and expand the circle. Three women surround the possessed and make sure that she does not hurt herself and thus also take care of the well-being of the spirit. They act as companions and guides ( senterua ) of the possessed as long as they are in a trance. Followers of the Tchamba cult, who never go into a trance themselves, can become ritual assistants, i.e. senterua . Because the possessed person has absorbed a Muslim spirit, the senterua have colorful vessels ready which contain medicinal water ( amatsi ) made by the priest . Guided by her mind, the possessed person carries out the ritual ablution of Muslims (Arabic wudū ' ). In the role of a Muslim woman, she first cleans her hands, then her face and finally her neck. Prepared in this way and guided by a senterua , the possessed woman finds the entrance to the shrine with her eyes closed. Imitating the Muslim prayer posture, she kneels briefly in front of the altar, gets up slowly, takes the hand of the senterua and speaks. Since she is controlled by a spirit from the north, she utters fragments of sentences in Hausa and Arabic in a kind of tongues . Back outside, she joins the group of dancers inconspicuously. After the possessed woman has shaken hands with the other participants, who are sitting in a row, one of the women congratulates her on her successful return home. It is possible that other women will subsequently become possessed by a different spirit and act more or less violently and uncontrollably. A woman possessed by a ghost of the Mossi wears a reddish brown wrap skirt and when she falls into a trance, a senterua puts a red fez on her head. Instead of the medicinal water, the senterua pours brandy from a bottle over the neck and bare back of the woman.

While the drum music and the alternating singing in the open air continue under the guidance of another cantor ( ehadzito ), a new section of the ceremony begins. The previous priest and others who have joined them gather in the shrine in front of the altar. Under the guidance of the first priest, who is seated on a chair in the middle, they worship the altar, kiss the ground and touch it with their foreheads. When they stand up again, they worship the tchambas in alternating chant, accompanied by clapping their hands. After three repetitions, the priest, in front of whom an opened liquor bottle is, calls the different Tchambas one after the other with their names, that is, he names cities in the savannah from which the slaves came. For ancestors and gods, whom he also calls by name, he fills a sip of schnapps into a metal bowl so that all gods and spirits can drink from it. All priests kneel together in front of the bowl, which has meanwhile been filled with schnapps, praising and honoring the spirits and asking for a blessing for those present, including the donors of the offerings. The ceremony in the shrine is over and the dances continue outside.

function

Obsession cults often meet several medical, psychological and social requirements at the same time. This sometimes makes the interpretation of the connections so difficult that when viewed analytically, opposing effects appear to be achieved. In relation to the function in society, the spectrum ranges from subcultural obsession, which typically gives women of the lower classes a freedom to develop in a male-dominated society, to forms of a dominant "religion of obsession", which is used by socially superior groups to consolidate their position of power. For the former, “peripheral” obsession, the mentioned tsar cult in Sudan and Egypt stands, for the latter the Nya cult of men in southern Mali.

A social aspect of the Tchamba cult is that the Ewe and Mina call back a dark part of their history that cannot be permanently suppressed. The deceased slaves were then buried in the wilderness outside the villages, now they return in the form of the spirits of the dead in shrines and altars in the middle of the villages and to the houses. Just as the slave story cannot be forgotten, the ghosts cannot be chased away once and for all. The cults of obsession that are regularly necessary reflect the return of the repressed.

The universal pairs of opposites “wild” - “tamed” and “uncivilized” - “civilized” are condensed and united in the Tchamba cult to “bought people” (slaves) - “people of their own house”. On a political level, the cult counteracts the ethnic tensions between the Kabiyé in the north and the Ewe in the south, caused by President Gnassingbé Eyadéma , who ruled dictatorially from 1967 until his death in 2005 , who belonged to the Kabiyé and his son and successor Faure Gnassingbé as well as on the other side of the suppressed opposition of the Ewe were promoted. Even in times of particular tension, Ewe could become possessed by a Kabiyé spirit and experience the admiration of those present when they danced in the colorful costumes of the North and spoke in a trance in Kabiyé or in other northern languages.

The obsession with slave spirits is a special aspect of the afflictive obsession widespread in sub-Saharan Africa by the nature of good ancestral spirits that cause disease to attract attention.

literature

  • Eric Montgomery: Slavery, Spirit Possession, and Mimesis amongst the Ewe of Ghana and Togo. Wayne State University, 2011, pp. 1-49
  • Judy Rosenthal: The Signifying Crab. In: Cultural Anthropology, Vol. 10, No. 4, November 1995, pp. 581-586
  • Dana Rush: In Remembrance of Slavery: Tchamba Vodun. In: African Diaspora Archeology Newsletter, Vol. 14, No. 2, June 2011, pp. 1–23
  • Christian Vannier, Eric James Montgomery: Sacred Slaves: Tchamba Vodu in Southern Togo. In: Journal of Africana Religions, Vol. 4, No. 1, 2016, pp. 104–127
  • Tobias Wendl: Slavery, Spirit Possession & Ritual Consciousnenn. The Tchamba Cult among the Mina of Togo. In: Heike Behrend, Ute Luig (ed.): Spirit Possession. Modernity & Power in Africa. James Currey, Oxford 1999, pp. 111-123

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Beatrix Heintze : Obsession phenomena in the middle Bantu area. Franz Steiner, Wiesbaden 1970, p. 134
  2. ^ Heike Behrend, Ute Luig: Introduction. In: Heike Behrend, Ute Luig (ed.): Spirit Possession. Modernity & Power in Africa. James Currey, Oxford 1999, p. Xv
  3. ↑ Eric James Montgomery: Syncretism in Vodu and Orisha. An Anthropological Analysis. In: Journal of Religion and Society, Vol. 18, 2016, pp. 1–23, here p. 5
  4. ^ Judy Rosenthal: Trance against the State. In: Carol J. Greenhouse, Elizabeth Mertz, Kay B. Warren: Ethography in Unstable Places. Everyday Lives in Contexts of Dramatic Political Change. Duke University Press, Durham / London 2002, p. 318
  5. ↑ Tobias Wendl, 1999, p. 112
  6. ^ Nathan Nunn: The Long-Term Effects of Africa's Slave Trades. In: The Quarterly Journal of Economics , Vol. 123, No. 1, February 2008, pp. 139–176, here pp. 142f.
  7. ^ Dana Rush, 2011, p. 2
  8. ^ Robin Law: Ethnicities of Enslaved Africans in the Diaspora: On the Meanings of "Mina" (Again). In: History in Africa , Vol. 32, 2005, pp. 247–267, here p. 252
  9. ↑ Leo de Haan: The colonial development of the German protected area Togo in spatial perspective. In: Erdkunde, Vol. 37, No. 2, 1983, pp. 127-137, here p. 129
  10. ↑ Diedrich Westermann: The Glidiyi-Ewe in Togo. Traits from their social life. (Announcements from the seminar for Oriental languages ​​at the University of Berlin, volume 38) Berlin 1935, pp. 125–127
  11. ↑ See Paul E. Lovejoy, David Richardson: The Business of Slaving: Pawnship in Western Africa, c. 1600-1810. In: The Journal of African History , Vol. 42, No. 1, 2001, pp. 67-89
  12. ^ Judy Rosenthal, 1995, p. 582
  13. ↑ Tobias Wendl, 1999, pp. 112-114
  14. ^ Dana Rush, 2011, p. 5
  15. ↑ See Beatrix Heintze: Obsession phenomena in the central Bantu area. Franz Steiner, Wiesbaden 1970, pp. 134-168
  16. ↑ Tobias Wendl, 1999, p. 115f.
  17. ↑ Christian Vannier, Eric James Montgomery, 2016, p. 106
  18. ↑ Tobias Wendl, 1999, p. 116
  19. ^ Dana Rush, 2011, pp. 6f.
  20. ↑ "... between 400,000 and 1,200,000 cowries, Which corresponded at time did Roughly to a sum of between 100 and 300 German marks." Tobias Wendl, 1999, p 116
  21. ↑ Tobias Wendl, 1999, p. 116f.
  22. ^ Dana Rush, 2011, p. 10
  23. ^ Dana Rush, 2011, pp. 9f.
  24. ↑ Dana Rush: Eternal Potential Chromolithographs in Vodunland. In: African Arts, Vol. 32, No. 4, Winter 1999, pp. 60-75, 94-96, here p. 63
  25. ^ Dana Rush, 2011, pp. 16-19
  26. ↑ Christian Vannier, Eric James Montgomery, 2016, p. 108
  27. ↑ Ama Mazama: Ewe. In: Molefi Kete Asante, Ama Mazama (Ed.): Encyclopedia Of African Religion. Sage, Los Angeles 2009, p. 250
  28. ^ Christian N. Vannier, Eric J. Montgomery: The Materia Medica of Vodu Practitioners in Southern Togo. In: The Applied Anthropologist , Vol. 35, No. 1, 2015, pp. 31-38, here p. 33
  29. ↑ Atoke . music.africamuseum.be
  30. ^ Judy Rosenthal: Possession, Ecstasy, and Law in Ewe Voodoo . University of Virginia Press, Charlottesville 1998, p. 43
  31. ↑ Christian Vannier, Eric James Montgomery, 2016, pp. 109–116
  32. ↑ See Ioan Myrddin Lewis: Ecstatic Religion: An Anthropological Study of Spirit Possession and Shamanism. (Pelican Anthropology Library) Penguin Books, Harmondsworth 1971
  33. ↑ Emma Cohen: What is Spirit Possession? Defining, Comparing, and Explaining Two Possession Forms. In: Ethnos, Vol. 73, No. 1, March 2008, pp. 1–25, here p. 7
  34. ^ Tobias Wendl, 1999, p. 120
  35. ↑ Judy Rosenthal, 1995, p. 584. Such a gain in prestige is usually limited to the period of active possession and the person concerned then becomes a normal member of the community again. See Beatrix Heintze, 1970, p. 200