Very few things have the power to give me sleepless nights.
About six years ago.
I flew through Cotonou Cadjehoun Airport in Benin. Within the next hour. I was running in the opposite direction to where my tour guide had been beckoning.
We were now in Porto Novo. As a person who just loves other people, I rushed through an alley towards a group of people who were cheering on some kind of gathering. Was it a festival? Who was that? Or rather, what was I seeing?
Transfixed at the sight of what I thought was a person dancing inside a hut thatched with long strings of different colours, I took my money out.
More like my money took itself out of my pocket and I found myself holding it out. As if to say to the dancers, you are so good, you can have my money.
"Who is inside the thing?" I blurted out that question. Another reveller answered. "There is no-one inside."
My mind raced, did that mean I had just offered my money to a dancing ghost? It was too late to put the money back in my pocket. For fear of offending whatever or whomever had seen my outstreched hand.
So I stretched my hand even further, hoping some magical criminal would have the balls to grab it from me and run. That in my mind was a better fate for the money in my hand than ending up in the unseen hands of an unseen spirit.
Not a single soul moved towards the money in my out-streched hand. Did God mean to tell me that amidst all the poor people in this whole wide world, not even one was willing to steal from me when I desperately needed to be saved by a crime?
Why is it that, that one time I was finally begging to be mugged, no one showed up?
Finally a guy came towards me and I happily gave him the money. As long as I gave the money into a human's hand, I was gonna be fine.
My connecting flight was in a few hours so I spent the remainder of my time there running behind my tour guide.
There are many beautiful things I saw while I was there but the memory of the dancing thing with no one in it has stuck with me.
I googled and youtubed trying to find out about the secret behind that cone shaped phenomenon with no satisfactory answer. So, I gave up digging. In fact, I had forgotten all about it. Untill a video was recently recommended to me by youtube's own unseen algorithm.
"That's what Ive been looking for!" A video titled something like,
"Who is inside a Zangbeto?"
Obviously, I wasn't about to miss the chance to finally put a long held curiosity to bed.
Not knowing which part of the video the myth was gonna be busted,I forced myself to watch all of it. Somewhere towards the end, the narator followed what I can only call a Zangbeto master. "So, whats the secret inside a Zangbeto?" "Nothing, there is nothing inside. Nobody is dancing. It's the spirit that controls itself. You can even set it on fire and collect the ashes or throw them away. It will always come back." So said the Zangbeto master.
Dissapointed as I was, I felt cheated. Why can't they just tell us whats really inside? Is it dark matter?
There are two questions in my life that I have spent the longest time asking without a satisfactory answer.
First question;
What, is inside a Zangbeto?
Second question;
What happened to Ning Li?
Keywords;
Zangbeto. Meaning; A cone shaped dancing costume with supposedly no one inside.
Ning Li.
A Chinese-American physicist whose work on anti-gravity excited me and many others accross the world. She hasn't been seen in a very long time.
Are you or someone you know from Africa? Particularly West Africa? What is really inside the thing?
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Is there any particular reason you use the #peakd topic tag on a post that isn't about PeakD?
... we are curious.
Eh, I hope the other hive users who are new like I was not so long ago will be curious enough to check it out and hopefully use it to post since its much more user friendly. That said I'll admit I did not know that its a tag for @peakd topics only lol. Now that I'm aware of that I probably won't add it in the future.
Those are topic tags and the topic of the post had nothing to do with PeakD so we were just confused. I think there are a lot of people that didn't know those are to classify the topic of your post.
Good to know. I am new on here and don't really know the rules of many things. So it's good to learn little by little
The deepness of every colour is black
@miss-p my experience with this ZANGBETO stuff wasn't funny
Was some week's leave off work, so I decided to visit the ancient city of Bagadry to feed my eyes with some historical facts like the slave trade, the first-story building in Nigeria, etc.
Unfortunately for me, I bombed into this set of ZANGBETO, there were about three of them, I was running Helter skelter shout for help, after few seconds I noticed people were busy laughing at me and I was like what's funny, a boy who had laughed uncontrollably walk towards my direction and said "bros" you are safe that this stuff is not harmful.
He made me understand the fact that ZANGBETO has its crew that could be invited to grace any ceremonial activities.
@miss-p lovely write-up and thanks for bringing back my memories with ZANGBETO.
I am from Africa but I have no idea what zangbeto is and what is inside it. But it sounds interesting.
Cool! I have seen videos online about this dance. I am from the other side of the world in the American continent. However here dance is as important as it is in several cultures. Many times culture, spirituality and dance unite. Here we believe in energies and spirits and it would be possible for spirits to make an object move or dance.
Never heard of a Zangbeto until now but it does make you question about a lot of things for sure!