The banks and delta of the Mono River in Benin are home to mangrove swamps which harbour fish and rare wild birds — and some are deemed sacred.
The government has tried to protect them by imposing bans on overfishing and felling for firewood.
But it has discovered that voodoo is more powerful than threats and is now seeking to co-opt traditional elders into its conservation plans.
In the southern village of Gogotinkpon, which lives off fishing in Lake Aheme, locals regularly turn to the deities to help mark off stretches of mangroves as sacred areas.
To the rhythm of drums and gongs, they swirl and dance before voodoo masks in ceremonies to honour Zangbeto, the guardian of the night.
“This will allow the fish to multiply in peace and allow us to survive too,” said Antoinette Gnanlandjo, 70, who took part in one such ritual in a large square on the shores of the Aheme, Benin’s second largest lake.
She is a follower of voodoo, an animist practice based on respect for nature, ancestors and invisible forces.
Such ceremonies are common in villages in the 346,000-hectare (around 850,000-acre) Mono Biosphere Reserve on either side of the Mono River, which marks the border between Benin and Togo and is a magnet for nature-loving tourists.
Mangroves are tropical trees that have the unusual ability of thriving in brackish or salty water. They suck up planet-heating carbon and their underwater roots stop the land washing away.
In Benin, this precious and fragile ecosystem is threatened by deforestation, coastal urbanisation, pollution, overfishing and climate change, according to local communities and NGOs.
So the villagers turn to invisible powers for assistance.
During the ceremony Gnanlandjo attended, they fashioned two fetishes out of raffia, which a delegation of dignitaries — traditional leader Wilfreid Mesah, three villagers initiated into voodoo, two researchers and a red mask representing thunder — then took into the mangrove swamp by canoe.
Chanting traditional songs, they tied the fetishes to the branches to ward off intruders intent on fishing or cutting into the mangroves for firewood.
“If someone tries to cut these branches, the vodun will whistle and stop them immediately. They’ll be stuck here. Then we voodoo dignitaries will come to find out what’s going on,” Mesah told AFP.
He said Zangbeto had stopped intrusions by four people in the past two decades, which showed it was effective.
Anyone caught red-handed has to make offerings to the deity.
That could mean “a sheep, a pig, red oil, cash worth 50,000 CFA francs (about 77 euros, $81), palm wine or many other things,” Mesah said.
“Otherwise, you risk losing your life,” he warned ominously.
Fear of divine punishment is more effective in protecting mangroves in the Mono nature reserve than any government bans, according to Juste Djagoun of environmental charity Eco-Benin.
So the government plans to strengthen the role of traditional elders in the national plan to save the country’s mangroves and the wildlife they harbour.
This could also help preserve ancient voodoo rites, which are not written down but are transmitted orally from one generation to the next, according to Senankpon Tcheton, a Beninese researcher in social and environmental sciences at the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa.
The traditions are in danger of disappearing as their initiates die off or migrate and society is influenced by other religions, he said.
