As Benin invests in museums, welcomes the return of looted royal treasures and stages the Festival of Masks, it is advancing a new vision of heritage in which ritual, scholarship and cultural policy converge, challenging conventional understandings of what museums preserve and how history is told.
Suzette Bell-Roberts
5 August 2026
Describing the Festival of Masks as “a way of writing our own history”, Suzanne Céleste Delaunay Belleville places the annual gathering within a far broader cultural and intellectual project. A member of Benin’s Committee of Vodun Rites and the prefiguration committee established to guide the development of the future International Vodun Museum, she works at the intersection of Indigenous knowledge, heritage policy and museum practice. Her words speak not simply to the festival itself, but to Benin’s determination to reclaim the authority to interpret, preserve and present its own cultural traditions after centuries in which Vodun and its associated practices were filtered through colonial scholarship, missionary discourse and ethnographic classification.
That ambition becomes immediately apparent in Porto-Novo. The first figures to emerge are the Zangbéto. Massive cones of woven raffia sweep across the parade area, spinning and sending clouds of dust into the air before giving way to richly embroidered Egungun masqueraders, Kaléte, Gèlèdè performers, broad textile figures and delegations from across Benin, West Africa and China. Drummers lead each procession, followed by singers, attendants and members of the community, while thousands of spectators line the route. The movement is rhythmic and deliberate, at once ceremonial and communal. What unfolds over two days is not simply a cultural festival but the public expression of one of the most ambitious heritage projects currently underway on the African continent.
Rooted in Vodun—the Indigenous spiritual tradition that emerged in the Kingdom of Dahomey and continues to shape religious, philosophical and social life across southern Benin—the festival presents masquerade not as folklore or spectacle but as a living expression of community, memory and ancestral knowledge. Through the transatlantic slave trade, Vodun travelled to the Caribbean and the Americas, where it gave rise to distinct traditions including Haitian Vodou, Cuban Regla de Ocha and Brazilian Candomblé. Yet in Benin its practices remain embedded in everyday life, evolving through ritual, oral tradition and communal participation rather than existing as historical relics.
This understanding distinguishes the Festival of Masks from many cultural events. Conceived as an international gathering, the 2026 edition brought together an extraordinary range of masquerade traditions, including Zangbéto, Egungun, Gèlèdè, Gounouko, Hounvè, Kaléta, Adé-Oba and the Masques du Nord, alongside invited participants from Togo, Côte d’Ivoire, Nigeria and China. Rather than presenting a singular idea of the “African mask”, the festival revealed a remarkable diversity of traditions, each rooted in its own cosmology, social function and historical development. The inclusion of Chinese dragon and lion dancers reinforced the organisers’ conviction that ceremonial masking is not unique to Benin but forms part of a broader human history through which societies express identity, memory and systems of belief.
For Delaunay Belleville, however, the festival’s significance lies beyond performance. The Committee of Vodun Rites, she explains, was established by the Beninese government to address the misconceptions and prejudices that have long surrounded Vodun. Approaching these traditions through research, documentation and public engagement creates opportunities to preserve them for future generations while making them accessible to scholars from around the world. More importantly, it enables Benin to tell its own story through its own intellectual and cultural frameworks.
That emphasis on research was evident throughout the festival. Alongside the public performances, an international scientific symposium brought together historians, anthropologists, museum professionals, traditional authorities and cultural practitioners to examine masquerade traditions from historical, philosophical and anthropological perspectives. Scholarship was not presented as separate from ritual but as one of the means through which these traditions are documented, interpreted and transmitted. Heritage in Porto-Novo is understood not simply as something to be celebrated but as something to be studied, debated, and continually renewed.
The symposium also reflected a wider shift in how Benin is positioning Vodun within national life. For much of the colonial period, the tradition was viewed through missionary writings and European ethnographic frameworks that reduced it to superstition or exotic spectacle. Those representations obscured a complex Indigenous system of philosophy, ethics and social organisation that continues to inform relationships between communities, ancestors and the natural world. Today, Benin is actively challenging those inherited narratives, not by romanticising the past but by recognising Vodun as one of the country’s foundational systems of knowledge.
It is within this context that the Festival of Masks assumes its wider significance. The performances are undoubtedly spectacular, but they are also vehicles through which communities affirm continuity, transmit knowledge and negotiate relationships between the living and the ancestral. The festival is therefore less concerned with recreating history than with demonstrating that these traditions remain active participants in contemporary cultural life.
If the Festival of Masks offers the public face of Benin’s cultural renaissance, it also raises a more fundamental question: what exactly is a mask?
It is a question that Professor Mahougnon Kakpo, President of Benin’s Committee of Vodun Rites, is reluctant to answer using the language itself. During our conversation, he paused at the French word masque.
“It troubles me to speak about Vodun using the word masque,” he reflected. “A mask is something that covers the face.”
His objection is more than linguistic. It exposes the limitations of the concepts through which African ritual traditions have long been interpreted. In European thought, a mask generally conceals identity or enables performance. Within Vodun, however, what appears before the community is understood very differently. Through initiation and ritual, the masquerade becomes the manifestation of a spiritual presence, carrying what Kakpo repeatedly described as parole—speech that conveys wisdom, memory and guidance. The masquerade is therefore not simply something to be seen, but something to be heard, interpreted and experienced.
That distinction transforms the way the Festival of Masks should be understood. The Zangbéto are admired for the extraordinary precision with which their great conical forms spin across the parade area, raising clouds of dust as they rotate. Constructed from lightweight wicker frames covered in densely layered raffia, they conceal the initiate completely from view. Yet within Vodun belief they are not regarded as performers hidden beneath elaborate costumes, but as spiritual guardians associated with protection, vigilance and social order. During certain ceremonies the raffia covering may be tilted to reveal what appears to be an empty interior, reinforcing the understanding that the presence before the community cannot be explained solely through physical appearance.
The same principle extends across the festival’s diverse masquerade traditions. Whether in the richly embroidered Egungun processions of Yoruba communities, the ceremonial performances of Gèlèdè societies or the many regional traditions represented in Porto-Novo, the masquerade exists within a network of relationships linking the living to the ancestors, individuals to their communities and the visible world to the spiritual realm. These traditions differ in form, purpose, and history, but they share the understanding that knowledge is embodied through ritual rather than preserved exclusively in written texts or material objects.
It is here that the Festival of Masks intersects with the museum in unexpected ways.
For more than a century, African masquerades entered European and North American museums as ethnographic specimens or works of art. Their aesthetic qualities were celebrated, their craftsmanship admired, and their influence on twentieth-century modernism extensively documented. Much less attention was paid to the philosophies, ceremonies and systems of knowledge that gave them meaning. Detached from their communities, they became objects for others to interpret rather than expressions of living cultures capable of speaking for themselves.
Benin’s current cultural strategy seeks to reverse that relationship.
The restitution of the twenty-six royal treasures from France in 2021 was undoubtedly historic, but the return of objects alone cannot restore cultural continuity. Heritage survives because it continues to be practised, interpreted and renewed. Museums therefore become one element within a broader cultural ecosystem that includes ritual practitioners, scholars, traditional authorities, artists and local communities. The Festival of Masks, the International Vodun Museum, the Museum of the Epic of the Amazons and Kings of Danxomè, the restoration of historic sites and the work of the Committee of Vodun Rites all contribute to a national strategy that reconnects collections with the knowledge systems from which they originate.
This approach also reframes contemporary debates on restitution. Discussions have often centred on ownership: where objects belong and which institutions should care for them. Benin suggests that an equally important question concerns interpretation. Who has the authority to explain the meanings embodied within these objects? Who determines the narratives through which they are presented? By placing traditional authorities, scholars and practitioners alongside museum professionals, the Festival of Masks demonstrates that heritage cannot be understood through collections alone. It requires dialogue between institutions and the communities that continue to sustain these traditions.
The festival’s international dimension reflects the same philosophy. Delegations from Togo, Côte d’Ivoire and Nigeria participated alongside Chinese dragon and lion dancers, whose performances opened a conversation about the place of ceremonial masking across different cultures. The intention was not to suggest that these traditions are equivalent, nor to diminish their distinct histories, but to recognise that many societies have developed ritual forms through which memory, belief and collective identity are expressed. The festival therefore becomes a platform for cultural diplomacy grounded in exchange rather than spectacle.
Questions nevertheless remain. As the Festival of Masks grows in international prominence, how can sacred traditions be protected from commercialisation? How should cultural tourism be balanced with spiritual integrity? Which forms of knowledge are intended for public audiences, and which should remain within initiated communities? These are not challenges unique to Benin. They confront museums, cultural institutions, and heritage practitioners across the world as they seek new ways to present living traditions without reducing them to performance alone.
Porto-Novo does not claim to have resolved these questions. What it offers instead is a compelling framework for approaching them. The Festival of Masks demonstrates that museums and ritual need not exist in separate worlds, nor should scholarship be detached from community knowledge. Each strengthens the other. Collections preserve material evidence; research deepens understanding; ritual sustains meaning.
As the final processions leave the parade area and the drums fall silent, the significance of the Festival of Masks extends well beyond the performances themselves. Benin is not replacing the museum with ritual, nor is it proposing that living traditions exist outside institutional frameworks. Instead, it advances a more expansive understanding of heritage in which museums, scholarship, and community practice remain inseparable. At a moment when restitution, decolonisation and Indigenous knowledge have become defining questions for museums around the world, the country’s cultural strategy offers an important proposition: that heritage is most resilient when the objects entrusted to museums remain connected to the people, beliefs and practices that continue to give them life.
