[1] However, because since the first half of the eighteenth century to nineteenth many slaves were exported from Benin to the present United States, the number of African Americans with one or more Beninese ancestors could be much higher.
It is also important to note that they were slaves from modern Benin (along with the Haitian immigrants arrived in the United States in the late nineteenth century), who exchanged voodoo practices with Francophone African descendants in Louisiana.
1840–1935) and Redoshi (c. 1848–1937), considered to be the last persons born on African soil to have been enslaved in the United States when slavery was still lawful),[3] in the Gulf Coast.
[8] The slaves brought with them their cultural practices, languages, and religious beliefs rooted in spirit and ancestor worship, which were key elements of Louisiana Voodoo.
In the late 1990s many other Beninese people from Benin and Europe immigrated to United States in one second wave, pursuing also better working conditions and study, well as a graduate education.
[9] Now, many U.S. Beninese immigrants work more than 80 hours a week with the aim, in addition of earning enough money to survive, of helping their relatives who want to emigrate to the United States.
In some cities, many Benineses participate in tontine groups, small cooperatives whose purpose is to raise money, through verbal agreement among their members.
The Beninese Americans are also the founders of African Hairbraiding Association of Illinois in 2001, to achieve another form of licensing pressing to state for them.
[9] Benin's slaves brought voodoo to Louisiana, followed then by Haitian migrants that arrived to the state in the late nineteenth century.
Their knowledge of herbs, poisons, and the ritual creation of charms and amulets, intended to protect oneself or harm others, became key elements of Louisiana Voodoo.