Legba's Crossing: From Fon Messenger to Papa Legba of the Crossroads

The same trade that carried Dan across the Atlantic as Damballa carried Legba as well, and the youngest child of Mawu-Lisa reappears in Haiti as Papa Legba, guardian of the crossroads in Haitian Vodou. Scholarship on Haitian religion, notably Leslie Desmangles's study of Vodou's fusion with Roman Catholicism, treats Legba's continuity from Fon Vodun to the Haitian lwa as one of the clearest and best documented cases of a specific West African deity surviving the crossing with his function intact: the Fon Legba who must be addressed before any other vodun can be reached becomes, in Haiti, the lwa who must be greeted first in every ceremony, since no other spirit can be reached without his permission. Haitian tradition also gave him a new visual language, an old man leaning on a cane and smoking a pipe rather than the youngest child of the Fon telling, syncretized in some Vodou practice with Catholic imagery of a gatekeeper saint. What survived the crossing unaltered is the structural role rather than the iconography: the figure through whom every other spirit must be reached, standing at the threshold between the human world and the divine, occupies the same office in Ouidah and in Port-au-Prince alike, even where the details worshippers hang on it differ.