traditionsWest African charm craftbǒ

Start with the words, because they belong to different peoples and get used interchangeably in English.

Bǒ is Fon, and translates as charm. Bǒ are amulets made from zoological and botanical material, activated with secret incantations in a language called bǒgbé, 'bǒ's language'. Families and individuals keep their recipes closely guarded, on a widespread belief that anyone who learns the exact ingredients gains power over the maker. Many Francophone Beninese call them gris gris. They are sold: tourists buy them for love, for wealth, or for protection while travelling, and a diviner — a bokónó — charges a rate that varies with who the client is, less for family, more for a tourist or a middle-class Beninese client.

Gris-gris is Mande, and the line behind it is Muslim and scholarly. Mande speakers such as the Dyula distributed Islamic charms under that name; the Dagomba wrote extensive Arabic manuscripts with formulae and prescriptions for preparing amulets. The craft has a curriculum: Karamokobara, divided into seli, prayer, and siri, path. Seli produces karamokos, scholars of Qur'anic law; siri produces marabouts, scholars of the written charms. The tools of the siri side are spoken prayers, numerical squares called katemi, and written Qur'anic inscriptions. Islam shows up inside non-Islamic practice too — Vodún charms occasionally use Islamic script.

Juju is from Hausa, where it means evil spirit; some derive it instead from the French joujou, a plaything. In its general English use it covers magical properties to do with luck of either kind, and it has been applied to West African traditional religions broadly. A juju man is a man vetted by local tradition and versed in traditional spiritual medicines; the practice is most often used for treating physical and spiritual ailments, and is also used to enforce a contract or ensure compliance, with the practitioner paid for the service. The same word gets attached to serious crime: the source records that crimes have been committed using the practice, human trafficking being the most extreme and prominent example, and that nineteenth-century traders and travellers in the Niger Delta and Benin published accounts of a list of practices they said they had witnessed. Inference — those nineteenth-century accounts were written by men with commercial and colonial interests in the region, and this atlas reports that they exist and who wrote them rather than treating them as a neutral inventory.

Cowries run through all of it as a fourth strand. They are cast in divination among the Yoruba, in Ifá, and in the annual customs of Dahomey in Benin, and in Brazil the same shells are thrown to consult the Orixás — a direct line out of this coast.

And there is a market with an address. The Akodessawa Fetish Market, Marché des Féticheurs, in the Akodessawa district of Lomé, Togo, sells the materials used in vodún practice: monkey heads, skulls, dead birds, crocodiles, skins and other products of dead animals. It is described as the largest such market in the world. Tradition holds — what is sold there is raw material for a specialist, not a finished charm for a buyer.

By specialist and by rule, and the rules are not the same from one strand to the next. A marabout writes; a bokónó divines and then supplies; a bǒ-maker assembles plant and animal matter and speaks over it in bǒgbé; a diviner casts cowries and reads what falls. Payment is normal and openly discussed in the sources: fees scale with the client.

Living, commercial and mixed with other religions rather than sealed off from them. Many people in West Africa draw on traditional religion, Christianity and Islam at once to deal with a problem, and a Vodún practitioner may read Jesus as a vodún. Since the 1990s there have been growing efforts to bring foreign visitors to West Africa to be initiated into Vodún, which puts the tourist inside the practice rather than outside it — an argument this atlas reports and does not settle. As of 2026 no figure has been read here for what any of this is worth.