When you do that voodoo

I found the Virgin Mary at the foot of a rock in central Benin. Just her statue, not her appearing for me in the blue-and-white-frocked person, but she still wasn't the kind of attraction I'd have expected Isidore to swerve off the road for, talking her up as an essential Beninois cultural icon.Still, why not? She'd been to the trouble of startling a local farmer with her presence on the rock in 1972. She could have gone anywhere that evening, but she picked small-town Benin. I don't know if it's significant that she picked the same year as the secular People's Republic of Benin was launched.

I found the Virgin Mary at the foot of a rock in central Benin. Just her statue, not her appearing for me in the blue-and-white-frocked person, but she still wasn't the kind of attraction I'd have expected Isidore to swerve off the road for, talking her up as an essential Beninois cultural icon.Still, why not? She'd been to the trouble of startling a local farmer with her presence on the rock in 1972. She could have gone anywhere that evening, but she picked small-town Benin. I don't know if it's significant that she picked the same year as the secular People's Republic of Benin was launched.

Why hadn't she chosen to appear 20 miles down the road at the fortuitously named town of Save? Perhaps she'd been embarrassed by the round and almost identical humps on the horizon behind the town, known as the "Bosoms of Save". In her chosen location, at rugged Dassa Zoume, she was right next door to one of the most ancient and significant vodou shrines in West Africa. Fighting talk, surely. But Isidore was unimpressed when I chimed in, "It says in the guide book there's a very important vodou site here."

Apparently some people can do that thing where you hire a taxi driver and you're in charge of things. I'm sure I've done it myself on a number of occasions, but not with Isidore.

With Isidore, I paid him, but if I proved to be unable to meet the standards he required of a passenger, I could find myself put out at a roadside anywhere in Benin's 113,000 square kilometres. Isidore told me what time he'd collect me, where I'd be going, what to learn from the journey... He told me what to eat, when to eat it and how much water to drink. If I didn't eat enough, or drink the right gallonage of water, I'd be firmly scolded. And my flicks through the guide book were a profound insult.

Being Irish, I'm fairly well acquainted with the Virgin Mary and her notions to appear on

rocks to solitary devotees, usually in a remote region with a disastrously meagre source of revenue. But the odd thing about the peaches-and-cream complexioned Dassa Zoume Virgin – apart from looking more like she'd say "Top of the morning" to you than greet you in the local Yoruba dialect – was that she was set in scenery that suddenly looked like northwestern Ireland. Grey rock and green trees around her, while red dust and scrub grass lay outside her immediate radius – the start of the very dry season in central and northern Benin.

I approached the Virgin Mary with plenty of cautious respect. Apparently quite a few approaches were made – for a mile around, her craggy rock was fenced by what looked like cattle pens, for holding crowds on pilgrimage, Isidore explained; thousands came from all over Africa and even the Pope had come once. I nodded, working hard to maintain an "I might be praying" demeanour. I was soon distracted from this as Isidore clambered up the rock and slapped the granite slabs around the Virgin without a shred of divinity-respecting inhibition.

All through the trees was a stony, wandering path, bordered by the stations of the cross. I tried to look at the steep ascent of these numbered metal crosses with reverential piety, but Isidore was dangling above me, hands pressed out against the sides of a cleft in the rock: "Look! Take a photo! I look like I'm holding these apart before they squash me! Quick, I'm slipping now!"

I took a photo, and that was about it for the Virgin – we didn't even light a candle by her little yovo [white] feet. We passed on quickly, north-west of the Virgin, entering what even the short spell of dry weather had turned into red, dust-bowl territory. "Now," Isidore announced "we will be typical Beninois. We will go from the Virgin Mary to a very powerful vodou fetish. Ask the fetish what you want – so many requests come true here it's incredible. Incredible."

Fetish – or fetiche – was the French name for a vodou divinity. Vodou was the Fon – Isidore's language – word for a divinity and its material representation. So really, he was saying "divinity" twice when he said "vodou fetish". Voodoo, vodu, vodun, or vodou, as Isidore spelt it, were also the various spellings for the system of religious worship traditional in this part of Africa. Literally translated from Fon, in its most academically correct spelling, vodu, "vo" meant introspection and "du" meant the unknown. So vodou meant an actual object, the spirit in the object, a religion, and summarized the motivation behind all the religions of the world.

In the vodou districts of Benin every village had colourful shrines; every home had statues; every street was roamed on some day of the week by men dressed like kaleidoscopic hedgerows, followed by face-painted boys playing drums, and women in high head-wraps, dancing themselves to the verge of a trance or collapse. From roadside glimpses so far, I'd dismissed all horror-film notions of vodou. It seemed to be a jumping carnival of a religion. So when Isidore drove me miles off the beaten track to pay homage at a powerful shrine, I expected dancing, bright costumes, a bit of a party... But this was the kind of vodou shrine that brought to mind Papa Doc Duvalier, zombies, people dying of fright in the darkness... One look at it and the blood-drenched downside of vodou took hold of my imagination and froze it stone-still in the middle of the thought: Get out of here now.

All I could see around the car were angry clamouring people in burnt, blackened rag-clothes – faces twisted, sweating, hands at the windows. Behind the door-pulling damned was a smoking pyre, about 10-feet high. Thick branches protruding from it were hung with the skulls of animals – jaw-bared sheep and goats. There were singed feathers everywhere, a scatter of shattered bones and a stench of boiled fat. The thumping on the windows and sides of the car intensified, faces pressed closer. I knew Isidore had made a terrible mistake. These people didn't want me here.

"Hurry up. Out you get." He grinned at me like we'd arrived at the seaside.

"Isidore, is it all right for me to be here?" I asked, not reaching for my door handle.

"Why not?" He grinned again and breezed out into the grimy, pawing crowd.

As I got out I felt the strange, frenzied energy the people were giving off. Women were clutching my arms. Tiny children hugged my legs. I looked a red-eyed man in the red eyes and realized he was laughing. There was a sharp smell cutting through the heavy, fat-laden air. Several of the men brandished bottles of clear liquid. Home-brew rum. Everyone was laughing – what had looked like grimaces were grins. They weren't angry. They were loony drunk on the gut-rotting, eye-gouging tipple the women were stewing up in the lean-tos, a rum known as sodadi. The spokesman, the middle-aged red-eyed man, as ragged as the crowd around him, began a short, frantic negotiation with Isidore in Fon. Isidore told me to give Red Eye some money – not too much, just a couple of pounds. In return I was handed a rough-hewn wooden stake, sharp at one end, about six inches long; Isidore was given a small bottle of red-palm oil and another smeary bottle, full of rum.

Red Eye spoke earnestly to Isidore again, glancing at me as he spoke, passing on instructions for translation.

"Now, Annie, he says you must do exactly as he says – do you understand? He is the feticheur, or priest. The vodounon. He is very serious."

We moved nearer to the central mound – I was going to call it a pyre again but there were no embers, nothing was actually burning. On closer examination, the mound was entirely composed of greasy short wooden stakes, like the one I had in my hand. They'd been driven into the ground, one beside the other, until they'd rotted into each other and the earth; then other layers had been pummelled on top of those, stake upon stake, to eventually create the high Guy Fawkes bonfire hillock in front of me.

I wondered if the blackened, greasy surface was from the cooking of animals on the mound; but none of the stakes were charred...

"It's not burnt," Isidore said. "It's the red-palm oil. In the sun it goes black."

The red-eyed man, the vodounon, handed me a mallet and indicated that I should hammer my stake into the mound. Isidore told me I had to do this while saying aloud to the stake what I wanted from the vodou, telling it what I would give as thanks for my request being granted.

"Promise something like a sheep or a chicken. That's normal. It depends on your circumstances and what you want."

I decided to go for broke; I wildly pledged a sheep and a big meaty cow if I could get half a million to buy a house in central London, preferably Bloomsbury.

The red-eyed man nodded approval, but I spoke to my stake in English so I don't think he understood what he was approving. I wasn't done with my stake yet. I had to take a mouthful of rum and then spit the mouthful on to the stake, somehow managing to repeat my requests and promises at the same time. I spat fast, feeling half my teeth dissolve on contact with the rum.

Now came the pricey part: to put the seal on my wish package. I had to fold a wad of money – about 10 pounds, Isidore suggested, any less would have been mean from a yovo. I folded the money as small as possible according to the gesticulations of the vodounon, then pushed it in beside my stake, and drenched it with the last of the oil and rum. The vodounon was agitated. This time I had extra lines to say. I had to put my hand on my greasy stake and money, asking the vodou to protect me from my enemies. Not just enemies I knew, there were enemies that I didn't know I had. But the vodou knew all of them. The vodou would deal with them. This made me change my mind about what I was doing. I felt properly serious.

Isidore had decided he would do himself some good with the vodou, seeing as he was there.

"I've seen the sweet Virgin today. Now I will be typical Beninois – Bible in one hand, fetish in the other." He drove in a stake, folded a small-denomination note beside it, poured on the liquids and muttered in Fon. The vodounon had a last urgent discussion with Isidore before we reversed out of the den.

We drove in silence, Isidore frowning thoughtfully. Then he said: "I've driven tourists before, you know. Plenty. But I never thought of bringing tourists to places like this – to the Virgin's shrine, the plain village vodou, all the places I think of taking you... I wake up with an idea... And each place in my idea is a place that brings blessings. So I ask myself, what luck do you bring? What special kind of luck do you bring?"

I wasn't used to being an object of mystical speculation. And it was a troubling responsibility. Special luck can be good or bad. Investments in your passenger may go up or down.

Extracted from 'Show Me the Magic: Travels Round Benin by Taxi' by Annie Caulfield, published by Viking at £12.99. © Annie Caulfield, 2002. www.penguin.co.uk

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