Word: dahomey
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Dahomey, the birthplace of voodoo, undergoes a peculiar seasonal ritual. Ever since it gained independence from France in 1960, the tiny country of 2,300,000 people has regularly tossed out its government during the pre-Christmas season in odd-numbered years. Usually, the man who has served as chief bouncer is a general named Christophe Soglo, 58. Last week, right on schedule, Dahomey had its fourth coup in seven years. This time, it was a total surprise to Soglo, who was himself thrown out as President by a junta of his younger army subordinates...
Once ruled by powerful ancient kings, Dahomey is the cradle of the Haitian voodoo gods that African slaves brought with them to the Caribbean. While many a Dahoman politician still consults his feticheur as he would a staff aide, General Soglo's own particular fetishes were not of the traditional kind. He lately had taken to pinching real dolls rather than wooden ones, including an overripe Elizabeth Taylor when she was in Dahomey early this year to film The Comedians. The sturdy strongman also had a habit of belching rather loudly at state banquets, at times has urged...
...Haitian government would not allow the moviemakers in. When he learned the locale was to be Dahomey, Africa, the Duvalier representative protested formally. Yet French Photographer Henri Decae's location shots offer a remarkable re-creation of a land where images of voodoo gods and the Virgin Mary are worshiped at the same rituals. The cast of supporting villains and victims-led by Peter Ustinov-is uniformly excellent. As a fading beauty with a German accent, Taylor is reasonably effective, but Burton, playing an exhausted anti-hero in the same style as his memorable The Spy Who Came...
...African regions are divided neatly by a boundary running northeast through Ghana, Togo, Dahomey, Upper Volta, Niger, Mali, and into Algeria (see map). To the east of the boundary lies the Pan-African region, dated as 550 million years old. West of it is the 2-billion-year-old Eburnean area. According to Bullard, if the South American bulge had once fitted under the bulge of Africa, the continuance of the delineation between the two rock regions would be found running southwest through Brazil from a point near the city of Sao Luis 2,070 miles north...
...that. Messages come with poignant regularity from shore-bound mariners needing loans or new pickup trucks, who cable a likely description of the sailor. She is compelled to answer as if to the call of sirens, but scarcely cares when instead of her beloved she finds a swindler in Dahomey or a filling-station attendant in Sete. The same indifference is adopted by her new lover, the young Parisian, who comes to realize that their only true bond is their endless quixotic search. The reader sticks with them both, if only to drink the whiskies, hear the conversation...