rooting for the future Meet Appolinaire Oussou Lio of the African Earth Jurisprudence Collective, who is working with communities to restore the sacred groves that once rooted people to place in Benin.

Words originally published by Where The Leaves Fall

A long time ago, when our great, great grandparents migrated from Togo to Benin, they chose to settle in the forests here and make them their home. In those days the forests were very big, with a diversity of animals and plants. Our people built up a knowledge of these forests, for example of the kinds of sacred and medicinal plants that exist here. They found ways to live in the forests without destroying them.

Everyone in the community had several totems. For example, I am not allowed to cut certain types of tree because they are my totems and I am forbidden to damage them. The same goes for many of the animals in the forest. There are principles and rules we must follow because the forest is our home, our living and sacred home.

Where I live in Avrankou, in the past each family and community would have had its own sacred groves within these forests that they were responsible for taking care of. These sacred groves were places to connect with spirits and ancestors, to conduct initiations and to go and seek medicinal plants when sickness struck.

Our houses were built near these groves, and the groves are all connected to our rivers, where we would go to wash and purify ourselves. In our case that is the Zekpon River, which we are working to restore now. This is a very powerful river whose water is used to reconnect people and for rituals of protection.

In Benin, our ancestral religion is Vodun, or what other people call Voodoo. It has been portrayed as a bad thing; an evil religion. But Vodun is a spiritual understanding and practice that focuses on air, earth, fire and water. It is a religion of the Earth. Each element has significance to us, and all of our beliefs ultimately go back to the sacred forests where we have lived, prayed and cured ourselves for generations.

These forests have protected us during the worst times in our history. Benin was a prominent slave port in Africa. When the white slavers would come to the villages near the coast, the elders would tell the young people: “Run to the forest! Go!”

The forests were so large and dense that the slavers didn’t know how to enter them. They didn’t know the ways through the forest. People would stay in the forests until the slavers had gone. They knew that if they went back home, they would be captured.

When the white men realised that they couldn’t navigate the forests, they would try to hire local men to do the job. On many occasions we are told that these men refused to enter the sacred forests. They were afraid, because we know that if you are not initiated into that forest, even if you are strong, if you enter that place and violate it, you can get lost and disorientated. So these forests were a very good way to protect ourselves when the slavers came.

We have now lost so much of our forests in Benin. There are a lot of reasons for that but one of the first and most important is the religious colonisation that has happened here. Christianity came to Benin with the Portuguese more than 500 years ago. People who had been converted were told that in the sacred forest people practise witchcraft. They said that to stop this, the forests had to be destroyed. In the place of our old sacred groves, they built churches.

A lot of people fought hard against this. They still do. But more and more people these days belong to other religions and they no longer see our remaining forests as sacred. And when you don’t see something as sacred, you don’t protect it in the same way.

Our forests were already dwindling when Benin went through a communist revolution in 1972 and our country became known as the People’s Republic of Benin. At that time, the government told us anything you cannot distribute is bad for the revolution. They also said that they were against what they called witchcraft. Both of these things had a bad effect on our forests and the communities who were their custodians, as did the corruption and human rights abuses of that time. Many of our oldest sacred trees and groves were destroyed. I was born in 1972, the year the revolution began, and since then we have lost more than 48% of our forests.

Benin’s communist period ended in 1990. But today we still have one of the highest deforestation rates anywhere in the world. Nowadays, a lot of the deforestation is caused by agricultural practices that are eating up more and more land. In my village, until recently, our sacred grove was just half a hectare in size. That’s half the size of a football pitch. This grove is connected to five other small surviving areas of forest along the Zèkpon and Black River in Avrankou. Our urgent task is now to try and restore, expand and reconnect these sacred groves.

We have been working to do this for many years. I started an organisation called GRABE-BENIN which was part of efforts to convince our government to adopt a new ‘Sacred Forest Law’. When this was passed in 2012, it became a legal first in Africa, recognising that our sacred forests should be protected and that communities like mine are the rightful custodians of these special places.

Since then we have been walking a long road towards restoring both our forests and the communities that should be looking after them. We have to heal both at the same time, because it was once humans who cared for these forests, and then it was humans who destroyed them.

I am grateful to our partner, The Gaia Foundation, for accompanying us on this journey. Through them I have become an Earth Jurisprudence Practitioner and learned how to hold elder-centred community dialogues. I am now a founding member of the African Earth Jurisprudence Collective, a community of practitioners across Africa that accompany local and indigenous communities in reviving and enhancing their deep ecological knowledge, practices and governance systems.

In Avrankou we are now holding elder-centred community dialogues around many of our sacred groves as a way to remember the old ways and rituals, and to help the communities bring back the memory of traditional ways of living in harmony with the forests.

I am a Chief in my region and I can say that the dialogues have helped solve a lot of problems in the communities I am working with. Through these processes we have negotiated how to increase the size of our sacred groves. Between us we have started indigenous tree nurseries so that we have a supply of trees to replant and expand the groves. We also use these trees to plant natural fences that protect the groves from encroachment while we work to expand them. We are promoting forest agro-ecology instead of bad agriculture that uses lots of chemicals and encourages people to cut down trees. This is also good for all the insects and also for the river and the wetlands near where people farm.

There are still conflicts, but we are helping people to see why they should respect the groves and the people who go there. Lots of people in our communities still go to church so we are working so they understand why and how our forests are sacred places for men, women, young people and elders. This makes them less afraid.

Meanwhile, for those who still follow, and want to follow our traditional ways, we are bringing back the memories of how we would go to our sacred groves and how we would treat the forests. A good example is the python. The python is a very sacred animal for us. We believe pythons are our ancestors. But people sometimes go into the forests and kill them because they are afraid or they want to eat them. Through our dialogues with knowledgeable elders, we educate ourselves about what significance the python has for us, what it provides, why it is sacred. It is the same with the trees, the insects, the medicinal plants. In the dialogues we learn how we must change the way we have been treating these beings.