Legba

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At the gate of a Fon compound, just inside the wall where the footpath from the road gives onto the swept yard of the household, sits a low mound of red laterite earth, knee-high, studded with cowrie shells and darkened at the crown with old palm oil and the residue of many libations. Each morning, before the head of the household turns to any greater power, before a single word is carried to the vodun who govern the sky and the earth and the iron and the pox, water or oil is poured here first. The mound is not a sign that points to the god. It is the god, present in the earth of the threshold. This is Legba, and in the order of the Fon world nothing passes him unopened.

The last-born given every tongue

In the Fongbe speech of the old Kingdom of Dahomey, in the land that is now the Republic of Benin, he is Legba, and also Alegba. The vodunon — the priests who keep the shrines and recite the descent of the powers — set him at the very end of the lineage of the vodun. Behind everything stands Nana Buluku, the primordial and androgynous source; from Nana Buluku came the dual creator Mawu-Lisa, moon and sun, female and male, who between them made the world and portioned it out among their children. Legba is the last of those children — the youngest, and by every account of the Fon and Ewe the most indulged, the one Mawu kept nearest and spoiled most.

His genealogy is, before it is anything else, a story about language. When the creator apportioned the world among the children — to one the thunderbolt, to one the waters, to Gu the iron and the smith’s edge, to Sakpata the earth and the diseases it carries, to Dan the serpent’s coil that girds the whole — each ruling power received a realm and, with the realm, a speech of its own. The youngest received no realm. In place of a kingdom he was given something no sibling possessed: he alone learned every language the others spoke, and, uniquely, the tongue of Mawu herself. So it came about that the gods could no longer address their mother, or make themselves understood to one another across the boundaries of their separate speech, except through Legba. He holds no country because he holds the words of all countries. The one set over no single domain is the one who keeps the passage between them all.

He reaches the documentary record along two roads at once, and they must be told apart. The first is the living tradition itself — the shrines still tended at the gates of Benin and Togo, the vodunon who recite the descent of the powers, the offering still poured at the mound at first light. This is the source that speaks from within, and it is the one to privilege for what Legba means to those who serve him. The second road is the anthropology that transcribed the tradition from outside. Melville J. Herskovits set down the Fon material in his two-volume Dahomey: An Ancient West African Kingdom (1938), where he named Legba the “linguist” or interpreter of the pantheon; with Frances Herskovits he preserved the cycle of tales in Dahomean Narrative (1958), the stories in which Legba’s mischief sets the vodun quarreling and his appetite is never once appeased. The shrine objects that embody him — the cowry-studded lateritic mounds and the carved, often phallic bocio figures driven into the earth at the compound gate — were read a generation later by the art historian Suzanne Preston Blier in African Vodun: Art, Psychology, and Power (1995), from fieldwork in and around the old royal city of Abomey. Where the record runs instead through the eyes of colonial administrators and missionaries, it must be marked as theirs, for those outsiders most often misread him, mistaking the horned and virile doorkeeper for the adversary of their own scripture.

The Fon count him their own. His exact relation to the trickster-linguist whom the Yoruba to the east know as Eshu, or Elegba, is contested, and is taken up below; and he is the acknowledged ancestor of the diaspora’s Papa Legba. But at the gate of the Fon compound he is none of those distant cousins. He is simply Legba, the last-born of the creator, who kept no kingdom and learned every word.

A Vodun Legba at a locality of the town of Savalou, Benin, standing where the paths cross. Ahya Atindehou, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0.

The one honored first

Everything in the ritual life of the Fon of Benin, and of the Ewe of Togo and Ghana, the Aja of the old cradle-country, and the Gun of the coast who share the world of the vodun, turns on a single rule of precedence. No prayer reaches Mawu-Lisa. No offering, no sacrifice, reaches any other vodun — not the iron, not the serpent, not the earth-king — until Legba has first opened the road. Call him at the outset of a rite and the gate swings wide; neglect him and it stays barred, and the powers within cannot be reached however loudly they are named. This is why the mound of earth and cowries at the doorway takes the household’s first libation each day before anyone turns to the greater vodun deeper in the compound. He is not the destination of the prayer. He is the door it must go through, and the door is honored before the room.

He is honored first because he is the great translator. Legba carries the words of men up to the vodun and brings the vodun’s answers back down; he renders the speech of gods and the speech of humans into one another, the sole interpreter at the meeting of two orders that would otherwise have no common tongue. The office is exact. A supplicant does not, strictly, pray to Legba; a supplicant prays through him, and everything said passes across his threshold in both directions. To hold that office he must stand wherever one world touches another, and so the Fon set him at every such seam: he is the guardian of the crossroads and the fork of the road, of gates and doorways and thresholds, of the house, the village, and the market — the places where paths, or peoples, or purposes intersect. His mound at the compound entrance and his figure at the edge of the village are the same power in two postures, watching the two openings by which anything, human or divine, comes in or goes out. The Duke collection of Black Atlantic sacred arts names him plainly the guardian of the crossroads, the gates, and human communication itself.

The forms he takes in the ground are as precise as the office. The commonest is the mound: a heap of the red laterite earth of the country, sometimes worked into a rough head or a squat body, its surface set with cowrie shells — the old currency, the shells that once bought and were bought — and fed until it shines with palm oil and the poured drink of the household. Elsewhere he stands as a bocio, a carved wooden figure with a pointed base so that it can be driven down into the earth from which, in the reading of the shrine, his power rises; and often the figure is unmistakably male, the phallus declared rather than hidden. Neither the mound nor the bocio is a portrait of an absent god. The material thing is where the vodun sits, and to feed the earth at the gate is to feed Legba himself, which is why the feeding is daily and why it comes before the rest. From Allada and the old cradle-kingdoms of the coast to the humblest compound of a single family, the same low presence keeps the same door.

He is a trickster, and the word must be taken in its exact and dignified sense, not its diminished one. In the shrine art he is rendered young, small, quick, and insatiable, frequently horned and emphatically phallic — a power of fertility and of the sudden, unlooked-for opening. The trickster’s gift is not malice but motion. The Fon say that the pathways Legba opens run always along the edge of chaos, because it is he, and no other vodun, who introduces accident and indeterminacy into a world that would otherwise be fixed and closed. Without him the order set by Mawu-Lisa would be perfect and dead. With him it breathes: a way appears where there was none, a word crosses where none could, the unexpected arrives. He is the mobile principle, the hinge on which a settled world can still turn.

That mobility gives him his place in divination. In the Fa — the Fon form of the great Ifa system, read by the diviner the Fon call the bokonon — a person’s destiny is spelled out in the figures cast and interpreted at the shrine. Fa ordains; but what is ordained must still be unlocked and set in motion, and that is Legba’s work. He is destiny’s necessary companion, the agent who opens the sealed decree and lets it act in a life. Where Fa is the fixed word, Legba is the key that turns in it. The two belong together: the oracle that names a fate and the doorkeeper who lets the fate through the door.

To take him, on the strength of the horns and the phallus and the trickery, for a devil is to mistake the doorkeeper for an enemy. He bars and he opens; he mocks the vodun and then carries their messages faithfully; he sows the disorder without which nothing new could happen and then keeps the very channel by which order is maintained. His office, for all its unruliness, is the upkeep of communication between the visible world and the vodun who govern it. A gate is not a threat because it can be shut. Legba is the god who decides, at every seam of the world, whether the way is open — and among the Fon that decision is honored before all others, every morning, at the mound by the wall.

Papa Legba and the far shore

Legba was carried across the Middle Passage. Ouidah, on the Fon coast, was among the largest embarkation ports of the whole Atlantic slave trade, and when the enslaved were marched down the Route des Esclaves and out through the Door of No Return, the vodun and the neighboring orisha went with them in memory and in practice, held in the one place no manifest could inventory. On the far shore of the ocean the youngest child of Mawu-Lisa surfaced again, changed and unmistakable.

In Haitian Vodou he is Papa Legba, and the office survived the crossing intact even as the figure aged. He is invoked first at the start of every ceremony, the keeper of the spiritual crossroads who gives or withholds the permission to speak with the spirits at all; the drums do not find the lwa until the song has asked him to open the barrier. But where the African Legba is a hot and virile youth, the Haitian one is figured as an old man leaning on a cane or crutch, a broad-brimmed straw hat on his head and a pipe between his teeth, the dog sacred to him and a walking cane set into the cross of his ritual sign. In the layered devotion of the New World, where the enslaved were baptized by force and learned to serve their own powers beside the images of the Church, Papa Legba is syncretized with Saint Peter, who holds the keys of heaven’s gate, and with Saint Lazarus and Saint Anthony. The gatekeeper found, in the keeper of the keys, a Catholic double who fit his office exactly.

In Cuban Lucumí and Santería the cognate power of the crossroads is Eleggua, the same figure the Yoruba call Eshu or Elegba — a multilingual mediator between humanity and the supreme god, opener of the way, honored at the start. Here the record grows genuinely contested, and it should be reported as contested rather than resolved. Fon Legba and Yoruba Eshu are the classic difficult case in the scholarship of these neighboring traditions: the parallels are unmistakably close — both are quick, both are phallic, both stand at the crossroads, both are the interpreter through whom gods and men reach one another — and yet they are not simply one deity wearing two names, and the direction of any borrowing between the Fon and the Yoruba world is unsettled. Some read Legba as a Fon reception of Eshu; others insist he is the Fon’s own, older than any contact. The honest account leaves the two side by side, cousins whose kinship is certain and whose descent is not.

Against all of this stands the great distortion. Over the twentieth century, in the colonial imagination and then in Hollywood, the doorkeeper-god of an ordered religion was ground down into a grinning devil. That figure is a fiction of the plantation slander, the pulp novel, and the film reel — a datable invention and a problem in the historical record, to be named as such and set aside, not a fact about Legba or about the faith he opens. Vodun is not the “voodoo” of the caricature. It is a coherent religion with a supreme creator, a priesthood, an oracle that reads a life, and a cosmology of balance and delegation, and its doorkeeper is the least demonic of powers — the one whose whole business is to keep the lines of speech between earth and heaven open.

The religion is living, and it is recognized. After the long suppression that followed independence, the government of Benin declared vodun an official religion in 1996, under President Nicéphore Soglo, and set aside the tenth of January as the national Fête du Vodoun — the Vodun Days now kept across the country and most spectacularly at Ouidah, where the coast that sent the vodun into exile now gathers the crowds who never lost them. Herskovits and Blier remain the indispensable witnesses from outside, and they are best read critically and always beside the testimony of the vodunon themselves, who have never needed a book to know who stands at the gate.

So the household pours the first water at the mound of red earth by the wall, before it says anything to the powers within, and the road to them lies open because he has kept it open. He was given no country because he was given every tongue; and a god who holds no kingdom, only the doorway of each one, is the god greeted before all the rest.

→ Related: Mawu Lisa · Gu · Dan · Sakpata · Ouidah · Abomey · Allada · Dankoli · The Ewe · The Aja · The Gun