Zomachi, the memorial of repentance

On Ouidah's Slave Route, between the town and the beach, there used to be a place whose name said it all: Zomachi, "the place where the light never goes out." It was not a neighborhood, nor an official monument. It was a grassroots memorial, driven by one man, and for more than twenty-five years it was the setting of a march of repentance.

In 2024, it was demolished.

This pillar explains what Zomachi was, why it mattered, what it said about a debate Benin opened in the 1990s, and where to look today for Ouidah's Afro-Brazilian heritage, which it is often confused with.

A name, a promise

In Fon, Zomachi translates as "the place where the light never goes out," or "the fire that does not go out." Zo means fire, or light. Zomachi is the light that is kept burning: the light of memory.

The name answers another place nearby on the route, Zomai, "where fire does not go," "where light must not enter." According to the tradition passed on by guides, it was a dark hut where captives were locked up before departure. The two names echo each other. One speaks of darkness and prohibition, the other of a light that is kept alive.

There is also another reading of Zomai. Researchers at the University of Liège report that the Zomai neighborhood, west of the center, served as a warehouse for the guns and gunpowder received in exchange for captives sold to Europeans. The name, "fire does not go there," would then reflect a very practical precaution: you keep fire away from a powder store. The two readings do not necessarily exclude each other, and our pillar on the Zomai enclosure presents both.

This play on names was no accident. Zomachi's founders wanted to answer the memory of confinement on the same road and in the same language.

Honorat Aguessy and IDEE

The Zomachi memorial was created by Professor Honorat Aguessy, a Beninese academic, together with Ouidah's civil society. He funded it through personal commitment and private money, via his institute, the Institute for Endogenous Development and Exchange (IDEE).

Born in 1934 in Ouidah, Honorat Aguessy studied philosophy at the Sorbonne after earning his baccalaureate in Porto-Novo in 1955. After working as a researcher at France's CNRS in Paris, he headed scientific and technical research in Benin, then a UNESCO program on higher education in Africa. At the University of Abomey-Calavi, he founded the sociology department, which is why he is often called the "father of sociology" in Benin.

Zomachi was therefore the work of a respected intellectual who came back to his hometown to do the work of memory. Honorat Aguessy died on September 15, 2022, in Cotonou. He was buried on September 22 in Ouidah, next to his wife, Béatrice Ayhi Aguessy.

Researchers at the University of Liège who studied Ouidah's memorial sites describe Place Zomachi as an initiative of the town's civil society and a symbol of light. That set it apart from the other stations on the Slave Route, which were set up with the state and UNESCO in the mid-1990s.

What the memorial held

Zomachi was more than a monument. According to IDEE, the site included exterior and interior bas-reliefs, a pantheon of reconciliation and a sculpture by the artist F. M. Agbenonci.

Around the memorial, the institute had developed a larger complex, the Escale du Retour ("the Return Stopover"), designed as a place of return and reconciliation for diaspora visitors. It included about fifty rooms, a museum, a conference hall, a restaurant and a gallery. Another element, the Tree of the Three C's, was part of the complex.

The memorial also looked toward those who came back. Wikipedia notes that it was dedicated in particular to the Retornados, Africans and people of African descent freed in Brazil who returned to settle on the coast of the Bight of Benin in the 19th century, especially after the 1835 Malê revolt in Salvador, Bahia. In Ouidah, together with the descendants of Brazilian merchants, they formed the Aguda community. Theirs is one of the rare stories of the slave trade that runs from the sea back to the land, and Zomachi wanted to honor that return.

Wikipedia adds that the memorial honored the victims of enslavement by slave traders and their local intermediaries, in a spirit of memory, repentance and forgiveness. It was also dedicated to reconciliation between the descendants of families who had taken part in the trade and those who had been its victims.

January 18, 1998: the first march of repentance

Zomachi's founding date is January 18, 1998. That day, according to IDEE, Ouidah notables knelt at Zomachi to ask forgiveness on behalf of their ancestors, for the collaboration of some of them with the slave traders.

It was a powerful gesture. It did not come from a foreign government or an international institution, but from Ouidah families themselves, in the town where the trade had been most massive.

After that, a march of remembrance and repentance was held every year on the third Sunday of January, led by Professor Aguessy and civil society. IDEE documented many editions, from 2011 to 2023. Some marches came with school competitions, to involve the town's students in this work of memory. In 2017, Honorat Aguessy wrote a poem for the march.

The timing mattered. Held a few days after the national vodun holiday, then celebrated on January 10, the march extended those days of remembrance by adding a question the holiday itself did not ask.

Repentance, a national debate in the 1990s

Zomachi belongs to a particular moment in Benin's history. In the 1990s, after the end of Marxist-Leninist rule and the return of democracy, the memory of the slave trade became a matter of public debate. Beninese researcher Nassirou Bako-Arifari analyzed its stages in an article published in 2000 in the Journal des Africanistes.

Three events marked the decade:

• From February 8 to 18, 1993, the Ouidah 92 festival, the first world festival of vodun arts and cultures, brought together practitioners from Benin, Haiti, Cuba, Brazil and the United States under the theme "Americas-Africa Reunion."
• In September 1994, UNESCO launched its Slave Route Project in Ouidah, making the town one of the great memorial sites of the Atlantic slave trade.
• On December 2 and 3, 1999, Cotonou hosted an international conference on reconciliation and development, often called the "forgiveness summit," at the initiative of President Mathieu Kérékou.

That same year, Kérékou made headlines in the United States by apologizing to African Americans, at a church in Baltimore, for Africa's part in the slave trade. In 2000, on another visit to the United States, he declared: "We implore forgiveness and reconciliation," and "The slave trade is a shame, and we repent of it."

Such words from a sitting African head of state were rare at the time. They also set Benin apart as a country willing to name its own history, a stance that later shaped its outreach to the diaspora, all the way to the 2024 citizenship law for people of African descent.

The debate is delicate. Talking about African responsibility in the slave trade means recalling that kingdoms, including Dahomey, and local traders sold captives to Europeans. It also touches families today, some descended from those traders and others from captives who stayed. Bako-Arifari shows how the question of "who the slaves are" in contemporary Beninese society remains sensitive.

Zomachi was one of the rare places where that question was asked publicly, on the ground, by people from Ouidah. That is what made it unique.

Other acts of apology in Africa

Benin is not the only African country where the question of forgiveness has come up. A few landmarks, compiled by Wikipedia:

• Uganda, 1998: President Yoweri Museveni declined to seek an apology from US President Bill Clinton, saying it was African chiefs who waged war on each other and sold their own people. He presented an official apology himself in 2023.
• Ghana, 2006-2007: the country launched the "Joseph Project" to reconnect with the diaspora. In 2007, in London, President John Kufuor rejected the idea that responsibility lay with Europeans alone and called the trade "shameful."
• Ghana, 2019: Ghana declared a "Year of Return" to mark 400 years since the first documented arrival of enslaved Africans in the English colony of Virginia in 1619, inviting African Americans and the wider diaspora to visit and settle. It became the best-known diaspora homecoming campaign in West Africa, and Benin's own citizenship law of 2024 followed a similar logic of welcome.
• Nigeria: in 2009, a civil rights group called on traditional chiefs to apologize, and the Aro Council of Elders refused. In 2018, the Oluwo of Iwo apologized for the part played by traditional royal families. In Badagry, descendants of the slave trader Seriki Abass have also apologized.
• Cameroon, 2013: a chief of the Oku clan formally apologized to a descendant of captives sold by his clan.
• Ghana, 2022: the traditional king of Asebu expressed deep regret to the African diaspora.

In that list, the 1998 Zomachi march stands out: it came neither from a head of state nor from a king, but from notables and residents of one town, brought together by an academic.

A singular memorial

Most slave-trade memorials speak of the victims and of the Europeans. That is true of many monuments on Gorée, at Cape Coast, and along the Slave Route itself. Zomachi added a third party: the African intermediaries.

That choice can be read in several ways. You can see it as a rare act of truth, acknowledging the whole chain of the trade, and a step toward the descendants of those deported. You can also worry that insisting on African repentance dilutes the responsibility of the European powers that organized and financed the trade. Or you can note that it was a private initiative, carried by an institute and a personality, more than a memorial chosen by the town as a whole.

Those readings are not mutually exclusive. They show that Zomachi was not a backdrop but a place of debate.

The 2024 demolition

In 2024, the Zomachi memorial was demolished by decision of the public authorities. According to IDEE, the demolition took place as early as January 2024, a little over a year after its founder's death. The official reasons were never fully explained, and the demolition drew criticism from cultural circles.

It is part of a broad redevelopment of Ouidah's memorial sites, led since 2021 by Benin's national heritage and tourism agency (ANPT). Other monuments disappeared in the same period: the "Cité historique de Ouidah" monument at the Vassého crossroads, built in 2006, was torn down in 2025. The Door of No Return was completely rebuilt in late 2025. The Portuguese Fort is under renovation to house the International Museum of Memory and Slavery (MIME).

The program has its supporters and its critics. For the former, it gives Ouidah memorial sites that match its history and the growing number of visitors. For the latter, it erases local, sometimes long-standing initiatives in favor of a more centralized narrative. Zomachi's disappearance is one of the most debated cases.

For visitors, the takeaway is simple: Zomachi can no longer be visited. But what it stood for, the memory of the slave trade and the question of repentance, remains at the heart of the Slave Route.

Zomachi is not the Afro-Brazilian quarter

You will often read, including on travel websites, that Zomachi is the neighborhood of the Aguda, Ouidah's Afro-Brazilian families. That is a mix-up.

The Aguda descend partly from freed Africans who returned from Brazil from the 1830s on, and partly from Portuguese and Brazilian traders who settled on the coast. According to a heritage study published in the journal In Situ, their families live mainly in the Brésil, Zomaï and Docomè neighborhoods. The Maro and Abata neighborhoods took in Nago (Yoruba) people and freed returnees from Brazil after 1830.

The confusion probably comes from geography: Zomachi stood near the Zomai hut, and Zomaï is one of the Aguda neighborhoods. Wikipedia also notes that the Zomachi memorial was dedicated in part to the Retornados. But a memorial dedicated to the Retornados is not a Retornado neighborhood.

To see that heritage, a few landmarks:

• The Maison du Brésil (Brazil House), in the Zomaï neighborhood: an Afro-Brazilian-style house built in 1930, with one floor above the ground level. It served as an administrative building and residence, then as the public treasury in colonial times. Restored from 2016 with World Bank funding under ANPT, it now houses offices and temporary exhibitions and serves as a memory house for the Afro-Brazilian community. It is the counterpart of the Casa do Benin in Salvador, Bahia.
• The Villa Ajavon, built in 1922, home to the Fondation Zinsou museum, behind the basilica.
• The two-story houses of Aguda families, with balconies, colorful facades and Portuguese surnames: de Souza, da Silva, d'Almeida, Paraíso…

Our pillars on the Aguda community and the Brazilian legacy tell that story in detail.

What remains of Zomachi

A name remains, along with photos, IDEE's archives and the memories of those who marched. And a question the memorial asked in its own way: how does a town that saw more than a million captives leave remember its own share in the trade?

Ouidah's new memorial landscape may answer it differently. The future museum in the Portuguese Fort will also have to tell the story of Dahomey's role and of the coastal traders. In the meantime, walking the Slave Route from Place Chacha to the beach is still the best way to ask that question on site.

If you want to talk about it with local people, ask your guide whether they knew Zomachi and the march of repentance. Many people in Ouidah have a view on the subject, and listening to them is worth more than any plaque.

Remembering Zomachi today

Even without the memorial, there are still ways to approach what Zomachi was:

• Walk the Slave Route and stop at the Zomai hut and the Zoungbodji memorial, the two stations closest to the former site.

• Visit IDEE's website, which documented the marches of repentance from 2011 to 2023, with photos, texts and the poem Honorat Aguessy wrote in 2017.

• Ask about the third-Sunday-of-January march. We have not found reliable information on whether the march has continued since the memorial's demolition and its founder's death. IDEE and Ouidah's guides are best placed to answer.

• Read further before you come. Nassirou Bako-Arifari's article on the memory of the slave trade in 1990s Benin (in French) is the best short analysis of the debates Zomachi took part in. If you are traveling from the United States, reading about Kérékou's 1999 apology and the story of the Clotilda, told in our pillar on the Door of No Return, gives useful context for the whole route.

Walk the Slave Route with a local guide →

Sources

• IDEE, Zomachi and the march of remembrance (French) and IDEE, the Escale du Retour (French): meaning of the name, January 18, 1998, third Sunday of January, contents of the memorial, demolition.
• Honorat Aguessy, Wikipedia (French) and IDEE, biography (French).
• Mémorial Zomachi, Wikipedia (French): created by Honorat Aguessy, dedication, 2024 demolition.
• Our pillar on the Aguda community: the Retornados and the Malê revolt.
• University of Liège, memorial and tourist sites of vodun in Ouidah (French).
• Nassirou Bako-Arifari, "La mémoire de la traite négrière dans le débat politique au Bénin dans les années 1990," Journal des Africanistes, 2000 (French).
• African apologies for the slave trade, Wikipedia (French).
• In Situ, Afro-Brazilian architectural heritage of Ouidah (French): Aguda neighborhoods.
• Maison du Brésil (Ouidah), Wikipedia (French).