If you are tired of bringing home magnets and travel postcards, go to Africa, to the voodoo market. Here you will forget what a banal souvenir is. The largest and most accessible bazaar is called Akodesseva, and it is located in Togo (Lima).
We warn you right away that entertainment is not for the faint of heart, but if you liked the Cabinet of Curiosities, you were in a museum of torture mechanisms or work as a pathologist, then it will be a little easier for you to perceive what you see. The counters are literally littered with corpses, skeletons, animal body parts, large and small. Severed heads are dried with eyes and hair, or lie refreshed, without eyes and hair. Indifferent traders will sell tiger claws and zebra hooves for weight.
It is better not to think about how many and often monkeys, dogs, crocodiles, antelopes, elephants and other creatures are killed in Togo just so that someone in the family has a wealth, a second kidney grows, or the last remaining one falls off. It is better not to think about how many voodoo followers live in Africa, and what they can do to a person using dead flesh for their rituals.
With the onset of darkness, sorcerers flock to the bazaar, often, they differ from the locals only by their look: the white-red whites of the eyes inquisitively rummage through the counters in search of the right product. These are the eyes of people who know the value of life, which they can break or destroy with a click. Magic to kill a person or turn him into a zombie - an obedient slave - was invented by voodoo sorcerers, who often use homemade wooden totems or dolls that personify a particular person.
Blanks of ritual dolls are sold at the Akodessev bazaar. Flat anthropomorphic pieces of wood are decorated with straw, human hair, animal bones. Buy one such souvenir home and watch your life. The deceit of the merchants does not appear immediately. In 1980, a famous traveler who traveled to 20 countries entered the market in Togo. Black figurines seemed like the most normal souvenir to take home, and the man bought one small doll. The doll gave off goosebumps: a symbolic face with a head of hair of hard human hair and a body covered with bumps. It turned out that through totems, merchants convey their troubles to customers, saying curses on souvenirs. A good way to get rid of diseases worked, and after 3 weeks after arriving home 3 family members of the traveler's friends to whom he presented the product,have a rare skin disease; besides, the buyer himself did not even catch a cold.
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It is believed that there is no protection against voodoo magic, so we do not advise you to come to the market of sorcerers in Africa without special need. Step on the sorcerer's bare foot with your heavy boot and you may not dream of a happy life. One drop of your sweat, blood, or a hair from your clothes is enough for a magician to make a voodoo doll in your honor.
But how difficult it is to resist! There are quite a few people who love to tickle their nerves with an unpleasant, gloomy spectacle. It is good that the bazaar is located in a rather distant and inaccessible place.