Traditional Religion, Social Structure, and Children’s Rights in Ghana: the making of a trokosi child

1. Traditional Religion, Social Structure, and Children’s Rights in Ghana: the making of a trokosi child Robert Ameh, PhD Wilfrid Laurier University

2. Objectives • to show how Ewe social culture and traditional religion produced and sustain the institution of troxovi and the trokosi system. • to depict how the institution and practice violate domestic and international human rights legal instruments. • to re-focus the trokosi debate on solutions rather than demonizing Ewes.

3. The Trokosi System a system whereby children who are virgins, preferably females, are made to serve time in a shrine in atonement for crimes committed by members of their family, usually males.

4. Ewe Social Structure

5. Social Structure • Patrilineal descent: family is a group of people who can trace common descent to a known male. • “Collective responsibility”: members of the extended family (clan) operate as a unit rather than as individuals. The actions of an individual clan member have consequences for all other clan members. • Rights and duties.

6. Vengeance • Hlobabia • G. K. Nukunya (1997) “The terms for vengeance, hlobabia, and avenge, bia hlo, which are expressed in terms of the clan clearly testify to this. Hlobiabia (vengeance) literally means “asking the clan” while bia hlo (to avenge) means “ask the clan” (p. 48).

7. Ewe Traditional Religion

8. Ewe Cosmology • The world comprises the living and the dead, the natural and the supernatural. • But the supernatural beings hold the key to life and death, to justice and fairness with human beings. • Staying in harmony with the supernatural beings – i.e. strict observance of the moral codes presided over by the supernatural beings – ensures abundant life, all the good material things of life.

9. Ewe Cosmology • However, offending the supernatural powers leads to curses, afflictions, and tragedies. • Hence, question every misfortune and tragedy and believe the truth must be found in every instance. • Tragic events that set-off the trokosi system.

10. Crime and Punishment • “Sin” (nuvo) or “crime”: an act offensive to the gods such that they withhold the good things of life from the individual offender and society in general (Abotchie 1997). • “Forgiveness” (tsotsoke) • “Prayer” (gbedododa) - ‘“petition for evil, pain and suffering to be removed from the human condition and replaced with material prosperity and long life” (Gaba (1997: 97).

11. “Forgiveness” • Not achieved only through words (prayer) but also action. - offerings and gifts (sacrifice). • Types of sacrifice • dzasacrifce: worship and thanksgiving to seek favor and show gratitude. • nuxe (nuxexe) or vosa (vosasa) sacrifice: the removal or prevention of an impending danger. (Gaba 1997)

12. Nuxe or Vosa sacrifice “Nuxe is a combination of two words, a noun, nu which means a thing and a verb xe which means to pay a debt or to prevent from happening. Similarly in vosa, vo, a noun, means evil and sa, a verb, which means to bind or to pass by or over. Nuxe and vosa, then, convey the same idea and mean the removal of an over-hanging or the stopping of a threatening danger which comes from the sacred. In short, nuxe or vosa sacrifice becomes necessary when the Ewes of southeastern Ghana desire to remove a life-negating manifestation of the sacred from human affairs thereby restoring communion with the object of worship so that the human condition would be full of life-affirming experiences” (Gaba 1997: 90-91).

13. Objects for sacrifice • Food, drinks, money and other material things. • Animals. • Human beings. • Conditions: gravity of offence, urgency of situation, and economic standing of offender’s family.

14. Troxovi • Deity that accepts human beings as penance

15. So what?

16. But let us not rush into the error of condemning genital mutilations as uncivilized and sanguinary practices. One must beware of describing what is merely an aspect of difference in culture as barbarous. In traditional Africa, sexual mutilations evolved out of a coherent system, with its own values, beliefs, cultural and ritual conduct. These practices, however, raise a problem today because our societies are in a process of major transformation and are coming up against new socio-cultural dynamic forces in which such practices have no place or appear to be relics of the past. What is therefore needed are measures to quicken their demise. The main part of this struggle will be waged by education rather than by anathema and from the inside rather than from the outside. I hope that this struggle will make women free and “disalienated,” personifying respect for the eminent dignity of life. (Abdoul Diouf, President of the Republic of Senegal, 1985. Emphasis added)