Akodessawa: what is actually for sale at Lomé's fetish market

You smell Akodessawa before you reach it. That is the first honest thing to say about
it, and most accounts of the place skip straight past it to the photographs.

It is an open yard on the edge of Lomé, laid out in rows like any other market, and
what is on the tables is animal: dried heads, skins, whole birds, bones, things I could
not identify. It is billed as the largest market of its kind in the world and I have no
way of checking that, but it is certainly not small.

Around three in ten people in Togo follow the traditional religions, and this is where
the raw materials of that practice are bought. You do not use what is on the table as
it is. You take it to a priest, who makes it into something specific to you and to what
you need, and it is the priest's work rather than the object that people are paying
for. You can also be treated here: a practitioner will prepare a protection against an
illness, which was explained to us as a kind of inoculation.

I found it hard going. The smell is genuinely bad and the tables are difficult to look
at for long, and I was glad to leave and glad of the disinfectant afterwards. That is
my reaction and I am not going to dress it up as anything more considered.

But the thing that stayed with me is that the people around us were not visitors. They
were locals, buying, asking questions, spending real money on something they believed
in. Whatever else it is, this is not a display put on for people like me. It is a
working market for a working religion, and we were the strange ones in it.

We did not buy anything.