The article aims to analyze ritual oaths, typical of African traditional religions, and their criminal use in trafficking in people, in the Nigerian state of Edo. Since the Nineties, in this territory these rituals are indeed also used in order to subjugate victims of trafficking for the purpose of sexual exploitation. These young women are mostly lured by decep- tion from the traffickers, and asked to sign loyalty and secrecy agreements.

The study therefore intends to reconstruct the physiognomy of these rituals from a historical-religious perspective, by examining their multiplicity of uses and vast social roots, and thus to offer a reading of the deviant use of the phenomenon.