Officially declared a religion in Benin in 1996, Voodoo and the Voodoo festival attracts thousands of devotees and tourists for a day filled with ritual dances and gin drinking. [Photo/Agencies]

"Ouidah is a duty of memory," said voodoo priest Erol Josue, who heads the national ethnology bureau in Haiti and who traveled to Benin with seven others to "make peace with the past".

"It's important to return to the ancestral land to accept oneself as a Caribbean," he added, his eyes thick with khol cosmetics and a heavy ring from Mali's Dogon tribe on his finger.

"To understand the behavior of the Haitian people, you have to go back to the source."

Josue breaks off to film a video on his smartphone as a man climbs a bamboo pole nearly 15 meters (50 feet) high with his bare hands. The crowd goes wild.