By Carlos Mendoza Álvarez
Ouidah is the symbolic port of captivity, human trafficking, and African slavery at the dawn of modernity. It represents the dark side of the moon of the egoic dream of Western reason, which became a nightmare for those subjected to the dominating libido of European conquering power.
This small city on the Atlantic coast of Benin, in West Africa, has slowly transformed the memory of the atrocious suffering endured by around fourteen million people - who were enslaved by Portuguese traders, from the 16th to the 18th century - into a territory of resistance and hope for its survivors.
«"Africa Decides" is a cultural community center that promotes the healing of the collective memory of the survivors of those individuals and communities deported to Brazil five hundred years ago. It was an unprecedented diaspora that crossed "the door of no return," a succinct expression to describe the horror of those generations who never went home.
In the 19th century, after the abolition of slavery in Brazil in 1888, some decided to return from northeastern Brazil to their homeland in Benin, the former kingdom of Dahomey. They returned with the longing to find the land from which they had been taken, the land that was etched into their bodies, hearts, and souls. That indelible mark was what drew them back.
But upon returning, these new generations from the diaspora discovered a different time and place, where they didn't recognize their families or their crops. Their land had been colonized by France in the 18th century until its independence in 1960. Another period of dispossession that, to this day, has left a mark of impoverishment on the daily lives of its people. The country had a brief socialist period between 1960 and 1975 that left a legacy of social unrest, until it transitioned to a Western-style democracy with a strong influence in the West African region.
Those who had been resurrected had returned to reunite with their ancestors and reclaim their path as a diaspora people with those who remained behind. The revival of Vodou in present-day Benin represents a way of recovering precisely that collective memory that was stolen from them and left tattooed on their bodies and souls. It is a radically different mark from the brand of slavery imposed with a hot iron on their black skin, by which the trafficker assigned them an owner, a plantation, and a task that ranged from forced labor on the farms to systematic sexual abuse. These were practices that lasted for centuries and proved to be the foundation of the enrichment by dispossession that created modern European wealth.
∂
Silvia Regina de Lima Silva is a decolonial feminist theologian who has participated in the World Forum on Theology and Liberation for many years. She spoke to us from her own history as an Afro-Brazilian woman, rooted in both Christianity and Candomblé. She wove a narrative from her diasporic history of "returning home." Silvia proposed that we consider decoloniality as a process of liberation from diverse colonialities—those of power-knowledge-being analyzed by the Peruvian Aníbal Quijano—in which she delved into the spiritual depths of this devastating process she called "coloniality of the soul," a process of domination that, in her own words, consists of "killing one's own beliefs from within." The deepest aspect of modern coloniality, intrinsically linked to racism, is, for her, this servitude of being in its deepest spiritual impulses.
In dialogue with Silvia Regina, we have begun a joint theological reflection to consider the new forms of Christianity that can emerge from this process of "decolonizing the soul," engaging in creative dialogue with the spiritual traditions that inhabit our bodies and imaginations. Each of us, from our own "place," our "body," our "deepest being of believers," explores dialogues, mixtures, dynamic syntheses, and other practices of diverse spiritualities that we now call "dual belonging," or perhaps "mutual belonging," until we find no other way to speak of new ways of living in the divine Ruah.
Whether in South Africa or Brazil, in Benin or Chiapas, we, the people, are living through the time of that "return," to give a decolonial turn to the history of coloniality of yesterday and today, giving way to spiritualities of the pluriverse.
The "no return" signifies today a generating impulse of new spiritual communities of shared belonging, where traditions leave behind the logic of the coloniality of the soul to give way to a "decoloniality of believing" as a source of full life for all the spiritual traditions of humanity.
∂
The World Social Forum is about to take place in Benin, updating the "spirit of Porto Alegre" that inspired social movements in the Global South to seek "other possible worlds." As an alternative to the Davos Forum, controlled by governments and transnational corporations from the Global North, this forum has, for more than twenty-five years, sought to build networks of solidarity among social movements for justice, human rights, and the care of the planet from an alter-globalization perspective.
In the context of de-globalization, the financial oligarchy and the "warlords" who control the global economy and world politics today, enormous challenges are emerging for the articulation of resistance to this "war against humanity," as the Zapatistas from southeastern Mexico call it.
In the coming days, we will learn how these networks are being woven amidst an uncertain local context. It is a time for creativity, for mutual listening, support, South-South solidarity, and the cross-cutting nature of resistance. Indigenous peoples, women, children, and youth, along with so many other collectives resisting systemic violence, continue to weave their voices, where the recovery of each people's soul will be the compass for the birth of these other worlds, "where many worlds fit.".
Cotonou, August 2, 2026