Culture : To Market, to Market to Buy the Odd Animal Skull or Carcass : They come by bicycle and Mercedes-Benz to the largest fetish market in Africa. It is the center of a traditional religion loosely known as animism.

Naked to the waist, his huge head shaved bald, Atchedo Nassessode reached out from the unlighted shack that is his place of business and proffered his card.

“Chief Fetishist, Traditional Healer,” it read. “Explicator of African Voodoo Forces.” Finally it gave his address: the huge fetish market in this suburb of the capital of Togo, down a long red-clay road, hard by the city dump.

Outside in the bleached afternoon sun the market stalls were open. Animal skulls of every description--monkeys, crocodiles, even the occasional lion’s head--were set out in neat ranks, fringed by rows of owl and hawk carcasses from which an appalling stench permeated the steamy heat.

Hanging on lines strung along the edges of the stalls were white and brown horse- and goat-hair whisks. Dolls and effigies and rusty cowbells were on sale everywhere.

This is the largest fetish market in Africa, a place so busy that just a few years ago it had to move from a nearby suburb because the traditional quarters there had become too cramped.

Today the market draws customers pedaling bicycles and cruising in Mercedes-Benzes alike. They come from local neighborhoods or from neighboring countries to consult with fetishists like Nassessode who assess, for a fee, physical ailments or troubles with school or love and prescribe an anodyne from the stalls outside.

The market’s prominence is not surprising, for Togo is the vibrant center of the traditional religion known loosely as animism.

In its myriad forms, animism is so widespread that scarcely a single African country is without a large contingent of traditional believers. In Guinea and Liberia, there are secret societies replete with initiation rites and credos of immortality; in Madagascar, there is a form of ancestor worship manifested by parading exhumed and elaborately wrapped corpses around the metropolis in grand processions.

The essence of this belief is a faith in the efficacy of inanimate objects in summoning the aid of intermediaries for appeals to the spirit world. The Togolese believe that their ancestors are their intermediaries. But the talismans they use to indicate their needs and desires are many and varied, each one’s use specified with that compound of ambiguity and seeming arbitrariness that is common to any non-empirical belief.

“The head of a crocodile--if a son is dishonest, you put it in water and the son bathes in it,” proclaims Cofi Amouzou, hoisting the object aloft.

“The monkey skull is powdered, for malaria,” continues Amouzou, an all-around factotum and guide at the market.

He selects a pair of wooden dolls from one stall. “If a woman gets twins and one dies,” he says, “the woman carries the live baby on her back and the wooden one on her front. You have to care for it like a living child, so the living twin will not be alone.”

It will not do to treat all this without gravity. Almost every Togolese family--including the 30% or so who formally profess Catholicism or Islam--has an animist shrine in the house, generally consisting of a mound of earth used to represent an ancestor, sometimes adorned with seashells or beads. At birth, each child gets a mound of its own.

Minor sacrifices are made before the altars at various times--before a school exam or a marriage, perhaps--but a major sacrifice is made at a designated period once a year, when a goat or cow might be slaughtered.

Even competing religions learn to accommodate themselves to the strength of animist practice in this part of the world.

“You have to respect it, because it’s a matter of faith,” says Father Ernest Klur, a French missionary who has lived in the northern part of Togo since 1968. “And you have to respect another’s faith.”

Not too long ago, Klur recalls, during the visit of a prominent Roman Catholic cardinal to Togo, a young missionary unceremoniously clambered atop a household shrine to take a snapshot of the cardinal and some local bishops.

When one Togolese bishop flinched at the affront, the missionary asked: “But father, you don’t really believe in this, do you?”

“Not in my head, I don’t,” the prelate replied. “But I do in my guts.”

Like many other Catholic clergymen in pagan or animist parts of Africa, Father Klur plays a delicate game in appropriating elements of traditional belief for his liturgy while trying not to go too far. This is a sensitive issue for the Vatican, where it is termed “inculturation.”

So far the Vatican has approved such steps as incorporating Zairian dancing and songs in the Mass in Zaire. The further limits are indistinct.

“You have to be prudent,” Klur says, adding that he strives to emphasize elements of Togolese animist theology that resemble those of Catholicism.

The question of treating one’s ancestors as intermediaries between oneself and the spirit world, for instance: “For us, Christ is the intermediary--but he’s our ancestor, after all,” he says.

Klur also doesn’t shrink from playing the same role as a traditional sorcerer might in the villages within his scope. “If someone comes to me and says, ‘I have a spell against me--do you have a counter spell,’ I say yes, and I go and pray at his house.”

Of all the countries of Africa, Togo may be one where modern religions have penetrated the least. Sixty percent of its people profess animism, compared to 21.5% who claim to be Christians and 12% who say they are Muslim. That’s much higher than such nearby countries as Nigeria, where animists account for about 20% of the population and Islam and Christianity split the balance.

The Togo figures may even understate the true reach of animism, say some people in the country, because animist habits and ritual have penetrated the workaday practice of Christianity and Islam.

Togo’s heavy concentration of unalloyed believers may be an important element in the peculiarly overt and colorful quality of its animist rituals.

It is not unusual for guests at the most august gatherings to try downing dinner amid a procession of fire-eaters, fire-walkers, glass-chewers, and sword swallowers, all forming part of a pageant in which the dance of a fetishist is the clamorous backdrop. No circus sideshow could be more bizarre.

During one recent ceremony in honor of Togo’s sole political party, pride of place before the reviewing stand went to a man drawing a sharpened blade across his naked chest, leaving nary a scratch.

“They have faith in their feticheurs, “ remarked a top government minister during one of these displays.

Yet for all the theatricality, fetishism is squarely in the mainstream of Togolese life. Consider the standard French reading primer in the country’s primary schools, an utterly conventional collection of stories about mother and father, the house we live in, and so on. Where an American text might have a chapter on seeing the dentist, this text features one entitled “Going to the Charlatan’s.”

Here, the term does not carry the pejorative connotation that it does in English, but the book is still a little arch about this experience common to almost all Togolese children.

“Come in,” the fetishist in the tale invites the little girl of the story and her grandfather. “The ancestors have already explained to me the reason for your visit, but I want to hear you tell it to me first.”

In real life the role of fetishist is a serious one, passed down within families. Atchedo Nassessode inherited the job of Chief Fetishist at the Lome market from his father and will pass it on to his son, Alphonse, a serious-looking boy of 14. Alphonse explains one day that his two younger brothers are now attending school but that his training keeps him out of the formal educational system.

Instead, he undergoes a three-year ordeal at the so-called “Sacrifice Forest” of neighboring Benin, where he will be schooled in diagnostic technique and in the talismanic properties of various objects.

A certain amount of marketing savvy is also likely to be in the curriculum--if not in the forest, then certainly at his father’s feet. To begin with, there is a candid appeal to tourism in some of the displays in the reddish dust of Akodessewa.

A market visit is promoted as a must-do for the few who come here on organized tours, and not long ago the market extended its hours to attract afternoon curiosity-seekers.

Nassessode himself has a well-worn routine of offering tourists a series of sorry trinkets--this one for safe travel, that one for fertility, another for love, and so on. It all culminates in a frank appeal for a fee and an invitation to dicker over the price.

But that is just for tourists. Outside Nassessode’s shack, Cofi Amouzou scarcely pauses in his explanation of the specific purposes of each fetishist’s noisome stock. Dead snakes, frogs, and scorpions are a remedy for rheumatism and arthritis: the fetishist powders the carcasses, makes a solution, and rubs it into a skin-prick as a “vaccination.” Standing nearby is a client willing to make a testimonial as convincing as any that a Westerner might hear on his TV.

“Oh, it works,” he says, showing a tiny scar where his hand was vaccinated. “I had rheumatism here, and today I’m in good health.”