A ministry to all the women in your church, published by Baptist Women of Ontario and Quebec

Every year The Link & Visitor receives awards Canadian Church Press awards. It received Honourable Mention for the prestigious A.C. Forrest Memorial Award for excellence in religious journalism with a social conscience two years in a row: 2004 and 2005. Read "Wife of the Gods," the 2005award-winning story by Link editor Esther Barnes, below. Her editorial decrying "cute" Christmas pageants won a 2006 CCP honoourable mention.

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WIFE OF THE GODS

“GRACE” ESCAPED FROM SLAVERY IN GHANA.

NOW CANADA SAYS SHE SHOULD GO BACK.

HER BAPTIST FRIENDS IN FORT ERIE DISAGREE.

For the past 300 years, parents in Ghana and nearby countries have surrendered their virgin daughters to a pernicious form of slavery known as trokosi. Trokosi literally means “wife of the gods.”

This religious custom generally means that a girl is sent to a shrine against her will and symbolically given to a deity to atone for a relative’s crime. The fetish priest then exerts full ownership rights over her. He beats her when she tries to escape, controls her interaction with others, demands labour and sex from her, and denies her food, education, and basic health services. Sometimes she is freed after a few years, when she has served her purpose. Sometimes not.

“Grace” was a trokosi slave for 25 years. When she was about six years old, her family surrendered her to a shrine. She toiled from dawn to dusk in the fields and fulfilled her duties as a sex slave. At 31 she escaped to the United States. She took a course in working with seniors. With the help of a Baptist church, she applied to stay in the country. She lost her case and headed to Canada with her three-year-old daughter.

In March 2004 they arrived at the Matthew House home for refugee claimants in Fort Erie, Ontario. Like many who have come through this Matthew House in the past five years, she found a warm welcome at First Baptist Church, Fort Erie. She was baptized, joined the church, and blossomed as a dynamic Christian. She hoped to pursue further training in seniors’ care.

But Canadian officials want to send her back to Ghana. Her refugee claim has been denied. So has her request for a judicial review. However, her Canadian friends believe her when she says it would not be safe for her to return to her homeland.

“We have gone to the wall for her,” says Jim McNair of First Baptist, ministry coordinator of Matthew House-Fort Erie. “When legal aid would not fund her request for a judicial review, we told the lawyer to go ahead.” As he speaks, he is holding a $3,000 bill for legal services. The church will help to pay it, but its resources are limited.

Grace’s case could become too large a burden for this small congregation. Eighty to a hundred worshippers of all ages attend on a given Sunday. Twenty percent of them are newcomers who have come to the church through Matthew House. Jim and his wife Shirley, manager of Matthew House-Fort Erie, hope that by publicizing Grace’s situation they can enlist other Baptists’ help and support.

Grace now faces two options: to appeal to stay in Canada on compassionate/humanitarian grounds, or to pursue a pre-removal risk assessment.

“She’s months and months away from a final resolution,” Jim says.

Meanwhile, back in Ghana, trokosi continues, even though Ghana’s 1992 constitution and 1998 international agreements require the eradication of all slavery and slavery-like practices within the country. A 1998 law banned all forms of ritualized forced labour.

Christian and secular organizations have tried to stop trokosi and rehabilitate its victims. In the 1990s, the Ghanaian Baptist Convention lobbied the government and UN for anti-trokosi laws. Ghanaian Baptists now provide schooling for freed trokosis, since these girls are often illiterate, rejected by their families, and therefore at risk of fallinginto crime, drugs, and prostitution.

Recently pastors visited villages with shrines and talked with leaders, shrine elders, and priests. The UN Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM) threw its weight behind anti-trokosi programs such as vocational centres, counselling, schools for trokosi children, and campaigns to educate people on laws and trokosi practices. A Ghanaian non-government organization offered cash and livestock to priests who would release their trokosi slaves.

Thousands of trokosis have been freed—but more are being enslaved.

A vocal group of fetish priests known as the Afrikania Renaissance Mission has aggressively defended trokosi slavery, claiming a right to maintain their forefathers’ culture. They contend that the practice of sending girls to shrines is really about training them to become role models for their families. They argue that the campaign against trokosi is an attack on their freedom of religion, guaranteed by Ghana’s constitution. This argument has not been lost on some officials, who have hesitated to restrict trokosi because the practice is an integral part of their own religious beliefs.

Last summer in Ghana, fetish priests demanded that “Patrick” send his teenaged daughter to a shrine. They promised to send her home after she had performed rites for them, but he couldn’t believe them. They told him that his nine brothers had died because of their father’s crime. The family was so fearful that Patrick felt pushed to comply. “If you refuse bringing what they need, they make sure that the one who is refusing will die, or another person will die,” he told Ghanaian Chronicle.

Ending a custom that is so embedded in superstition is not simple. Legislation cannot drive away fear. But it can push illegal practices underground.

And that’s why it’s not safe for Grace to return.

BY ESTHER BARNES, editor of The Link & Visitor.



Soon after this story was printed, immigration lawyers found a loophole that made it possible for Grace and her daughter to return to the United States.

Copyright 2005, The Link & Visitor. May not be reproduced in any other print or electronic medium without permission of the editor.

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