สถานที่ตลาดเครื่องรางอาโกเดสซาวาAkodessawa fetish marketMarché des Féticheurs

Vodun is long established in Togo, and the route it took is a loop rather than a line. Enslaved people carried Yoruba gods to the Caribbean and South America; there the gods were joined to Catholic saints and church symbols and changed meaning; when freed people and their families came back to West Africa, they built a Vodun practice in the country their families had left.

The word in the market's French name is the difficult one. A fetish here is comparable to an orisha: it may be a god, or a person, a plant, an animal or a material, depending on the rite and the situation, and in the rite it is activated and strengthened. Some are held to have been particular people.

This atlas does not print rite detail. What a practitioner does with a material bought at these tables is the practitioner's to publish, and the sources read for this record do not publish it. What is on the record is the trade: a district, a named market, sellers, stock, and customers who come for a specific thing.

Inference — the market is photographed more than it is documented. This project found no published price list, no seller interview and no survey it could cite; the record therefore stays with what the encyclopedia states and says plainly that the rest is missing rather than filling it from a travel column.

In trade, on the published account this project has read. No day is marked open or closed below, and no prices are recorded, because none were read.