Ginen, from Guinea, denotes Africa, the ancestral world and the abode of the dead, and it is located anba dlo, under the water. The songs of the Priyè Ginen call the nations of Africa by name; the dead go under the water at death and are called back from it a year later; practitioners describe serving Ginen as the whole of what they do, and sèvitè Ginen, servant of Guinea, is a self-description. The Middle Passage supplies the geography without anyone having to state it: people carried across an ocean, and their descendants, built a system in which the homeland and the land of the dead are the same submerged place, reachable only by going down. It is the most compressed statement Vodou makes about its own origin, it is sung at every service, and it has been remarked on by every serious scholar of the religion.