Golden hour settles over a village in Ouidah, Benin, deepening the red of the dusty earth beneath my feet. I sit on a bench and watch a towering conical structure layered with raffia and dried leaves of pink and blue spin on its axis. These moving leaves are chased by male villagers to the soundtrack of maracas and a pulsing drum. They dart forward to tap the spinning form before backing away again, teasingly as if testing its limits.
I am watching a Zangbeto ceremony, and the haystack-like figure is understood as the literal embodiment of a Vodun spirit, the “night watchman” who wards off ill will by patrolling communities. Practiced for centuries among Ogu and Yoruba communities in Benin and Nigeria, the ritual holds both spiritual and social power. I am privy to it on a trip that feels both meticulously organised and deeply personal: a 15-day journey through Benin, Togo, and Ghana, and my first time in West Africa. As the drum continues to pulse, we are invited to peer inside the structure (to prove no one is inside, although I suspect someone is hiding among the leaves), I realise I stand somewhere between observer and returnee, trying to understand what it means to witness something that my own ancestors may have practiced.
Voodoo, or Vodun, as it is known here, is a polytheistic religion originating in West Africa, among the Fon, Ewe, and Yoruba peoples in Benin, Togo, Ghana, and Nigeria. It focuses on the worship of deities and has long been maligned by the West. Yet it is less about animal sacrifice and more a way of life; a spiritual and communal practice that shapes daily existence. My presence in West Africa also carries a significance deeper than journalistic curiosity, there is a pull that feels almost cellular. After growing up in a white family, I took a series of DNA tests 10 years ago and learned that half of my ancestry traces back to Nigeria, Benin, and Togo, a fact that was not disclosed to me by my parents, who chose not to address my mother’s affair until my dad who raised me, passed away in 2015 from cancer.
Now, I am standing in Benin, a place which holds a part of my heritage, watching the rhythm of the crowd and the invocation of spirits, and thinking of the father who raised me—and also the other who doesn’t know of my existence.
My dad, Jim, was a man of multitudes: playful but reserved, ever-present but also emotionally avoidant. Happiest with a pint in his hand and a sausage on his plate at a family BBQ, he never made it beyond Europe for leisure travel, but encouraged the travel bug in me as I began my career. At home, he was a man of action: relentless with DIY, patient as he taught me how to read, write, and how to reverse into tight spaces without panicking. His illness didn’t prompt a family-wide discussion about my parentage. The fact that my yearning to travel was likely born from a curiosity to find the truth in the visible differences between us remained unspoken. And yet I feel his encouragement when I scale Ghana’s highest mountain, Mount Afadja, at 6:30 a.m. during my trip, the yolk-yellow sun breaking over pale green hills as I reach the summit. The air is warm, the climb short but steep, and I imagine my dad, a perpetual early-riser, approving of my out-of-character early start. I hear his voice clearly, when I travel around Ghana, alone, for three weeks, his gentle chidings when I mess up the currency exchange, his warnings to be careful alone.
I take a shared taxi from Accra to Takoradi, myself and six strangers folded into sticky leather seats for 140 cedis ($30), and then onward to the coastal village of Busua. As a travel writer who has visited more than 40 countries solo, Accra feels hectic but easy to navigate. But once I go beyond the capital by road, things get complicated. There are potholes the size of craters, the roads lack order. Lanes merge without warning and I witness the remnants of two crashes over the Christmas period. My journey to Busua, which should take five hours, stretches into almost 12, after my second taxi to the Ghanian-owned eco resort, Afro Beach, breaks down on a mud road in a rainstorm near the Ivory Coast border.
Purple fork lightning splits the sky as my driver revs in a pond-like hole. We are stuck. I look up and pray but there is no choice but to get out and push. Mud swallows my Salomons whole, suctioning to the soles like glue. In my head, I hear my Dad’s voice: Be careful. Whether it was an ancestral guardian, sheer luck, or my father watching from somewhere I cannot see, a local family in a small truck pulls over. They help the driver coax the car back into motion, and 20 minutes later I reach my accommodation, where I spend two blissful weeks writing on golden sands. I am reminded of the kindness of strangers, and also my own stupidness in leaving Accra late without checking my route.
Back in Accra, I interview Eric Kpakpo Adotey, a fantasy coffin maker on the outskirts of the capital. I’m reminded of how grief can take many forms. Eric, from the Ga community, makes ostentatious hand-painted coffins based on the professions of those who passed. In his workshop, I see a giant pepper for the local pepper-seller, and a Coca-Cola can to represent someone with a fizzy drink habit. He has even carved a penis for a sex worker. Among the Ga, funerals are public, prolonged, and deeply performative. Death is less an ending than a transition into ancestorhood. Coffins, known as abebuu adekai, or “proverb coffins,” signal identity, status, and biography, and international collectsors now pay upwards of £3,000 for them, transforming a local ritual practice into global art. But here, in Eric’s yard, they remain intimate and practical. He tells me his work lightens the mood at funerals. “People laugh,” he says, grinning. My own father’s funeral was a Catholic affair. A sunny day with a reception in a south London pub. I did the eulogy. As I watch Eric sand down a coffin and tell me about the weeks-long funerals and professional mourners that are common in Ghana, I find comfort in it. There is an idea that the dead do not disappear quietly, that they remain present in another form.
I’d be lying if I said West Africa felt immediately familiar, as if I touched down and settled into a whole new identity after a childhood spent on the sleepy green border between Surrey and South London. For the last few decades, I’ve dealt with the distance and disconnect around my black heritage through therapy, research, and writing (my memoir Raceless was published in 2021). I formed an identity on my own terms, one that transcends DNA test results. A cultural identity is passed down through osmosis, and without family to guide me, I don’t know if I will ever feel truly connected to Nigeria, Benin, or Togo in the way my friends with family connections are.
But the way I am received on my trip certainly eases my worries. I notice how my body adapts quickly to the blistering heat of Lomé Grand Market in Togo on my tour. The sense of quiet that settles over me as I swim in Wlli Falls, in Ghana’s Volta Region, the cascade thundering down ancient rock while mist cools my skin. I notice, too, how my stomach calmly absorbs the sharp kick of shito pepper sauce, a ubiquitous green condiment I find beside so many dishes in Ghana. Maybe these are memories my body holds without ever having been taught; maybe, as a friend says when I return, I’m just adept at finding home in many places around the world. I think about what I have been left with: fracture, ambiguity, unanswered questions, but how this has also given me a certain malleability in recent years, a willingness to belong without needing ownership, to fearlessness to move, unrestrained.
I expect to wear a cloak of constant vigilance as I move around Ghana alone, as I have done in places like Brazil, Colombia, and Jamaica, and of course, exercising caution for solo female travellers is advised. But the warmth and generosity with which I am received helps me shed an outer layer. Conversations stretch easily, and invitations appear without suspicion. I spend Christmas Day and New Year’s in Accra at the art-filled Tea Baa, a three-storey rooftop bar and restaurant suspended above Accra’s frenetic energy. Strangers fold me into their celebrations as fireworks dance above the city, and I feel held in unexpected ways.
I didn’t go looking for healing or answers in West Africa, but it’s partially what I got. I learned how, in some ancestral practices, loss coexists with continuity—and between that, there is meaning.