Gine, the Kreyol word usually translated as Africa, carries more than one meaning in Vodou, and McGee argues that the slippage between them is what makes claims about African authenticity work. Gine names a lost continent, but it also names the world of the spirits, a forested place beneath the waters and behind mirrors. Songs that send prayers from Afrikan toward Gine show the two are not the same.

Understood as an aesthetic rather than a geography, Gine becomes a resource that can be claimed and fought over. McGee finds a parallel in Candomble, where practices presented as African survivals were assembled in twentieth-century Brazil, and reviews work by Richman, Apter and Palmie that sets aside the hunt for origins and reads the Rada and Petwo distinction through class, creolization and morality instead.

Priests, and later outside scholars and artists, helped fix what counted as authentic, though comparable distinctions were already legible to colonial observers.