His majesty MITO DAHO KPASSÈNON, king of Ouidah and supreme head of the voodoo cult, sitting in the Audience hall, Royal Palace.

Mito Daho Kpassenon is a member of one of the oldest families of Benin, heir and descendant of King Kpassé, the first one to make business with the Europeans, particularly through the slave trade, when the Portuguese arrived in the Benin Bay around 1580. “According to the oral tradition, KPaté, one of the king’s servants, was fishing crabs on the shore when he saw white people on the beach. He took them to King KPASSE, and from that day they started trading,” tells King Kpassenon. In the early 1990s, relying on the cultural and religious exchanges established during the period of the Atlantic slave trade, and in parallel with the debates aimed at developing the Slave Route Project, he joined the project “Ouidah 92”, the world festival of voodoo culture. Like the president Songlo, by promoting the Vodun religion and the exchanges between Africa and the Americas, he presented slavery and the Atlantic slave trade not as a rupture between generations, families, and traditions but as events that produced continuity across the Atlantic. Ouidah, Benin.