Dancing with Fire in Togo
During our tour, we were able to visit the small village of Kparatao, outside Sokode, famed for its fire dances. This is a practice carried out historically after women and children were burned in their huts during warfare with other tribes. To combat this a pact was made with the God of Fire offering a mark of respect and gratification to this god, in order to protect its people. This falls within the animist beliefs of Voodoo practised across the region, but specific to this village.
Subsequently, after the warring men returned from battle, they would carry out the fire dances as a celebration of their victory and as a mark of their animist faith in the God of Fire. Only certain village members were able to learn the art of the fire dance, which has been passed down through the generations and is still practised today.
An open area in the village was filled with locals and some tourists, all waiting expectantly for the spectacle to begin. We sat in the front row on benches trying to work out how this phenomenon would play out.
The dance started with persistent and rousing drumming, creating a hypnotic pulsation used by the chosen ones to reach a trance-like state before commencing their fire dance. A number of men then started to move around the fire which was being stoked for maximum heat prior to the dance commencing.
We sat in disbelief as a series of men picked up burning sticks and stood or kneeled right in front of us, running the burning end of the stick across their hands and arms and down their backs, with no signs of apparent pain or burning of flesh.
Being sceptical foreigners, we were sure that there must be some trick involved. But with the passage of time and a continuing number of participants remaining unharmed by their proximity to the hot flames, disbelief at what we were witnessing set in. We were offered to test the heat of the burning sticks with closeness to our own hands to confirm the heat of the flame, and we then became dumbfounded as to how this could possibly be happening.
Further into the dance, we saw a couple of men placing the end of the burning stick and chewing on the burning embers inside their mouths, again seemingly with no harm to their bodies. How could this possibly be?
Ultimately some of the men then proceeded to walk across the hot coals without burning their feet, signifying the end of the dance by helping to put out the flames.
Was it witchcraft or blind faith? Who knows how this can feasibly and reasonably be possible…but we saw it with our own eyes.
