To speak of the past is to clear a path for the future. This is the labour of mothers and wives in these urban Africas, where histories are layered, diasporic, enacted rather than merely remembered. Porto-Novo, Xọ̀gbónù, Àjàṣẹ: capital of the Republic of Benin, colonial town, ancient kingdom, a city of many faces, turning back upon itself like a fractal. Here, people move and fight, trade and return, settling with their tongues, their myths, and their gods. Ògún—the Òrìṣà / vodún of iron, of conflict, of the road, is the unseen guide of this initiatory walk. He is the breaker of paths and the revolutionary force that drives the city from the blazing suns of independence to the deep, patient time of the forge. He moves through festivals staged for tourists and the quiet chambers where ancestors keep vigil. In the courtyards of the household, the white man’s reverence for his own antiquities is met with a knowing laugh; his colonial relics are guarded like trophies while other stories—of violence and power, of founding acts and binding alliances—are told and retold. There is the gentle trade of the stranger, the eternal son‑in‑law, and there is its unspeakable twin: the Atlantic crossing, the countless captives folded into marriage. Women who became wives, whose daughters now carry memory on their bodies, enact remembrance and forgetting, loss and futurity all at once. A reflexive inquiry into urban life and vodún thought, Ògún et les matrimoines weaves together standpoint epistemology and a critical reading of sources; a non-(patri)linear understanding of inheritance; political anthropology and urban sociology—binding scholarship to story, analysis to voice.