The Akodessewa Fetish Market, in a neighbourhood in northeast Lomé, is one of the most unusual and striking places in West Africa. It is known as the largest 'marché des féticheurs' in the world: an open-air depot piled with monkey heads, stuffed crocodiles, leopard skins, skulls, bones, feathers, cowrie shells, figurines and herbs. It is not macabre staging for tourists, but the raw material that voodoo priests and healers work with.
Voodoo ('vodún') was born in this stretch of the Gulf of Guinea —between Togo, Benin and southwest Nigeria— and is still a living religion for millions of people, as well as the root of the Afro-American cults of the Caribbean and Brazil. Akodessewa is its great supply centre: féticheurs from all over the region come here to buy the ingredients for their remedies, protections and rituals. That is why it is best visited with respectful curiosity, more as an anthropological site than as a fairground attraction.
This guide explains what Akodessewa really is, how to visit it with one of the market's own guides, what to expect from a consultation with a vodún priest, how much it costs and how to behave respectfully (especially with photos). It is a short but intense visit, ideal to add to a day in Lomé and to understand a spiritual dimension that runs through all of life in Togo, from the coast to Togoville.
For decades the market has been run by an association of traditional priests and healers from the region, linked to the Ewe and Guin-Mina peoples of the coast and to the great voodoo centres of neighbouring Benin. Akodessewa concentrates the wholesale trade in ritual supplies that used to be scattered across many markets, and today it supplies féticheurs from several countries. It is at once a business, a religious institution and a window onto the vodún worldview, which survived German and French colonisation and the spread of Christianity and Islam. The history of voodoo and of this market is told on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The 56 km strip of beach that was the Slave Coast and the cradle of vodun: this is where Germany founded its colony, and where a lakeside village, Togoville, gave the country its name.
Read the history of Lomé and the coast (Maritime Region) →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
To understand Akodessewa, you first need to understand voodoo, or more precisely 'vodun', the religion the market helps supply. Vodun was born along this stretch of the Gulf of Guinea, in the lands of the Ewe, Fon, Guin-Mina and Yoruba peoples, who today live across southern Togo, Benin and south-western Nigeria. In the Fon-Ewe language, the word 'vodun' means something like 'spirit' or 'divinity'.
Far from the 'dolls stuck with pins' caricature spread by cinema, vodun is a complex and coherent religious system. It recognises a distant creator god (Mawu or Mahou) and a vast pantheon of intermediary deities, the 'vodun', who govern nature, health, fertility, thunder, the sea, the earth and war. These deities are honoured with offerings, songs, dances and sacrifices, and they are called upon through specialised priests to protect, heal or guide people.
Vodun also exists alongside ancestor worship and a highly developed traditional medicine, based on knowledge of plants, animals and minerals. This spiritual and botanical medicine is exactly what needs the supplies sold at Akodessewa. In Benin, vodun is even an officially recognised religion, with its big national festival every 10 January.
The Akodessewa Fetish Market, in a neighbourhood in north-east Lomé near the port, is the great wholesale store for the raw materials of vodun and West African traditional medicine. 'Féticheurs' (priests and healers) from Togo, Benin, Ghana and Nigeria come here to stock up on the ingredients they use to prepare their fetishes, talismans and remedies.
Its tables and shelves are piled with the heads and bodies of dried animals, skins, bones, feathers, cowrie shells, wooden statuettes, and a huge variety of barks, roots, leaves and plant powders. Each item has a precise ritual or therapeutic use: they are combined according to the ailment or request (health, fertility, protection, luck in business, love), following knowledge passed down from generation to generation. It is, quite literally, a 'pharmacy' for the traditional religion.
The market is run by an association of traditional priests and healers, who also offer consultations to anyone who asks. Over time it also became a point of interest for travellers from all over the world, drawn by how unusual the place is. That added a second role, tourism, to its original purpose as a centre for ritual supplies.
The history of vodun and of markets like Akodessewa is also a history of cultural resistance. During the German and later French colonial periods, the authorities and Christian missions viewed traditional religions with suspicion or open hostility, often dismissing them as 'fetishism' or 'paganism'. The same happened as Islam spread in the north and Christianity in the south.
Yet vodun never disappeared. In many cases it carried on alongside the new religions in a practical coexistence: it is not unusual for the same person or family to call themselves Catholic or Muslim while also turning to the 'vodun' and traditional medicine for matters of health, luck or protection. This syncretism is plain to see in places like Togoville, where the animist shrine and the Catholic cathedral stand a few metres apart.
Vodun also travelled far beyond Africa. With the transatlantic slave trade, which played out on the Togolese coast itself at ports such as Aného and Agbodrafo, the beliefs of the Gulf of Guinea crossed the ocean and gave rise to Afro-American religions such as Haitian Vodou, Brazilian Candomblé and Cuban Santería. In a way, Akodessewa is one of the living 'roots' of that whole spiritual world of the Atlantic.
Today Akodessewa plays two roles at once. On one hand, it is still a fully working religious and commercial centre, where féticheurs from several countries come to buy their supplies and where believers consult the priests about specific problems. On the other, it has become one of the best-known sights in Lomé for travellers, who come drawn by its unusual shelves.
This double nature creates a delicate balance. For visitors, the key is respect: understand that this is not a fairground attraction but a living religion, follow your guide's instructions, ask permission before taking photos and avoid a morbid attitude. Done well, the visit is a unique window into one of Africa's major spiritual traditions and its ancestral medicine.
Akodessewa also raises present-day dilemmas, such as the use of parts from vulnerable species, a debate that sets wildlife conservation against the continuity of very old cultural practices. Beyond those tensions, the market remains a powerful reminder that, in Togo, the world of the 'vodun' is not folklore from the past but a living part of everyday life, from the coast at Lomé to the villages around Lake Togo.
