I healed my broken heart with voodoo, sacrifices and gin

The romance was as intense as it was brief. She was a French infectious diseases specialist and medical researcher — intelligent, beautiful and kind — who left Senegal, where we both lived, to work in a Paris hospital.

Nursing a broken heart and a longstanding interest in pre-colonial religions, I headed to the birthplace of voodoo for answers, eventually gliding across the dark waters of Ganvie, a lake village in Benin known as the Venice of Africa. A voodoo priest called Adjayifindé established a community in Ganvie in the 18th century to help locals escape raids by European slave traders.

Legend has it that he transported people from the mainland on the backs of an enormous crocodile and a giant eagle.

There is no eagle to assist the journey to the village for an audience with Houédanou Agbomadokan, a spiritualist known locally as Vava. Instead, visitors dodge children as young as four paddling small wooden pirogues. Like more than half the people who come to see Agbomadokan, I had come for advice about my love life.

A wiry sixty-something with cloudy eyes, he beckons clients towards the door of his temple, asking them to remove their shoes and purify themselves with a herbal potion at the entrance. Animal skins, drums and axes adorn the interior.

After exchanging pleasantries, he periodically rattles a small metal bell against the concrete floor, beckoning the Fâ, an ephemeral force through which the voodoo deities, or Vodun, communicate.

Only specialists can receive messages directly from the Fâ, Agbomadoka says. Some visit him for help with fertility, court cases or business opportunities but most are nursing lost love.

Agbomadokan explains that a consultation will cost 10,000 West African francs (about £13) and he requests a further 5,000 to buy two small bottles of gin.

He spits into his hat and pours a selection of shells, stones and bones on to the floor before passing clients a small baobab seed. He tells them to wrap the 10,000-franc note around the seed, hold it to their mouth and silently tell it what is on their mind.

After a few minutes of chanting, clapping and manipulating a string of voodoo charms with his hands, Vava begins to address me directly. “Your father is like a king in your home country. He has saved a lot of lives and has great wisdom,” he says, before eventually changing the subject from my father, a doctor.

“This woman regrets leaving and wants to come back to you,” he says. “It is possible that she will. But if you end up together, she will die first and it will destroy you. The Fâ doesn’t want you to be with her.”

To rectify this, Agbomadokan suggests, a sacrifice will be required. To be precise, he adds, we need a lamb, a chicken, some red beans and more gin.

It’s time for a second opinion. A voodoo priestess called Martine de Souza Gandjaï Mabegbé offers more practical advice. “Go slowly,” she says after interpreting messages from a band of woven sticks possessed by a forest spirit called Cleviti. “You must be patient and gentle with her if you want to be together.”

No voodoo quest to Benin is complete without a visit to the coastal town of Ouidah, where more than a million African slaves were shipped to the New World, effectively spreading the religion to the Americas; large numbers of believers can still be found in Brazil, the Caribbean and the United States.

In recent years the Beninese government has tried to promote voodoo in an attempt to boost tourist numbers and cast off its reputation as black magic. It is in the process of building an international voodoo museum and developing a voodoo convent tour that will traverse the country. In January it hosted a two-day festival called Voodoo Days in which nearly 100,000 people attended ceremonies and concerts in Ouidah.

Désiré Kpassénon is custodian of a sacred forest on the outskirts of the city, where King Kpassé I, a 16th-century ruler, is said to have transformed himself into a tree in order to prevent capture by troops from a neighbouring kingdom. When the soldiers came looking for him, locals tell you they were attacked by pythons. The King’s metamorphosis earned him a place as a Vodun.

“If you make an offering and touch the tree with your left hand, you can ask for anything you want,” explains Kpassénon, who says he is a descendant of Kpassé. Benin’s forests have long been seen as places of hope for believers of the religion but urbanisation means they are under growing threat.

Between 2005 and 2015 the total area of forests decreased more than 20 per cent, with the rate of deforestation continuing at more than 2 per cent a year, according to the World Bank.

Locals in Ouidah say the spirits have been fighting back. They cite the example of a petrol station in what was formerly forest that never turned a profit. Legend has it that when people filled cars the petrol turned to water.

“People have come here and been cured of cancer, diabetes and high blood pressure,” says Kpassénon. “Others come because they want to be able to have children. Some come to boost their business. Some come seeking love.”

Alas, there is no miracle to report, so far. But Mabegbé’s words have proved prophetic. Time is the great healer. Sometimes it just takes travelling into the heart of voodoo country to discover that. And no gin sacrifice has been required since.