The Basilica of the Immaculate Conception

Construction began in 1903 at the initiative of Bishop Louis Dartois, first apostolic vicar of Dahomey, under the direction of the Society of African Missions. It was completed six years later: the consecration took place on 9 May 1909, before nearly four thousand people. On 9 November 1989, John Paul II raised the building to the rank of minor basilica.

The choice of ground was not neutral. To raise a building of that height directly facing the sanctuary of Dangbé carried an intention, and it must be named: to dominate the spiritual heart of the town visually. What happened next is more interesting than the intention. The dignitaries of the cult let it proceed. A century later, the two still face each other, and neither has yielded.

For the missionaries arrived with plans, not with hands. In Ouidah, at the turn of the twentieth century, almost the entire population followed Vodun. It was Vodunsi who dug the earth, shaped and fired the thousands of bricks, raised the walls. The master carpenters who assembled the vault and the timber frame came from traditional lineages of the town. Local memory also records that the customary libations were made before the foundations were dug, for the assent of the deities of the earth.

That is what makes this building respected by everyone in Ouidah. It belongs to the history of the Catholic faith, and it belongs just as much to the history of the labour and the tolerance of the Vodun communities. The Agouda, who returned Catholic from Brazil in the nineteenth century, formed the core of the first parish community: the basilica is therefore also a landmark in reading Brazilian Ouidah, alongside the balconied houses of the Maro and Brésil quarters.

During the Vodun Days as at the feasts of the Nativity, Catholic faithful and Vodun adepts cross paths on the same square, and it surprises no one. This is not a curiosity laid on for visitors. It has been so for more than a century.