The trokosi system is a practice whereby a child who is a virgin, preferably a female, is selected by her family to serve time in a shrine in reparation for crimes committed by a member of her family, often a male. The child becomes known as a trokosi, an Ewe word variously translated as “wife of the gods,” “slave of the gods,” and “a person consecrated to the gods.” The plural form of the word is trokosio or trokosis. The practice is found among the Dangme, the Fon-speaking, and Ewe ethnic groups in West Africa, with the Ewes being the main practitioners. The Dangme word for trokosi is woryokwe. While the length of service varies from one shrine to the other, in theory, it does not exceed 3 years. In practice, however, it becomes a lifetime of service because, once sent to the shrines, the families are reluctant to take back their children mainly because of the stigma attached to trokosis. Hence, trokosis as old as 65 years have been encountered at trokosi shrines.

The system is set in motion when a crime occurs, and the offender is not known. In line with the Ewe virtue of seeking the truth in all circumstances, as will be discussed below, the victim seeks the assistance of a shrine¹ to find the offender. Once the shrine finds the offender, they strike by causing sudden and unnatural deaths, mysterious diseases, serious accidents, and tragedies in the family of the offender but make sure they spare the life of the culprit to live to confess his crime. Following the same practice of seeking the truth, the offender’s family, in turn, seeks the cause of the deaths, diseases, accidents, and tragedies from a shrine. They are then told about the offense, the identity of the offender, and the solution, which often translates into a sacrifice to the gods. If the particular shrine accepts human beings as objects for sacrifice (as indicated in the section below on traditional religion), then the offender’s family would send a child, usually a female virgin, to serve in the shrine in atonement for the crime.

Trokosis perform several functions at the shrines, including house chores, auxiliary functions during religious rites, and lending free labor to the economic activities of the shrine priests and owners. In some practicing communities, the priest must be the first to have sexual intercourse with them, which often takes place just after a girl’s menarche. The vast majority do not go to school. The negative label attached to trokosis is a product of several factors. For one, how the shrines operate is shrouded in mystery, instilling much fear in the people. So community members would rather stay clear of anything that has to do with the shrine, including trokosis. Second, trokosi girls are feared in the community because it is forbidden to have sexual relations with them. The family of anyone who has sexual relations with them must, as punishment, also provide a girl to serve in the shrine. This reinforces the negative perception community members have of trokosis to the extent that even those who are fortunate to be redeemed must often move away to other parts of the country in order to find partners for marriage.

It is important to make a distinction between trokosis, known in the trokosi system as “wives of the gods” and by some opponents in this controversy as “slaves of the gods” and related practices such as fiashidis and dorflevis. Fiashidis ² are initiates of the Nyigbla and Yewe religious order, who are either given by their families, inducted by the deities, or voluntarily choose to serve in the shrines. They are exclusively perceived as the “wives of the gods” and, consequently, are treated with respect by all in the community, including the priests. It is deemed an offense to the gods if their husbands maltreat them. They own property and are not considered poor by community standards. Fiashidis who serve at the insistence of their families do so as compensation for services rendered by the gods to the families in their times of difficulty (Greene, 1996, pp. 87–88). Many girls and women on their own accord opted to serve as fiashidis because of the benefits that accrued from doing so. Greene explains that association with one of the most powerful gods in Anlo, Nyigbla, (1) granted the women prestige, (2) gave their families the opportunity to establish close ties with the most powerful political and religious families or clans, and (3) provided them with an expanded set of contacts that could be of potential social and economic benefit (pp. 89–91).³ For most fiashidi women at the time, it was the only opportunity to associate directly with the political and religious elite of Anlo society, leading to respect from their own husbands and the rest of the community. It is no wonder that some young women were actively encouraged by their mothers to become fiashidis. Even for the Anlo state as a whole, the practice of fiashidi was seen as bringing unity to the whole polity as the state deity, Nyigbla, recruited initiates from every clan in the state. Nukunya and Kwafo (1998, p. 38) have also noted that because most fiashidis live with their parents and not in the shrine and are only summoned to the shrine on festive and special occasions, the harsh treatment meted out to trokosis in Tongu shrines is absent in the shrines in Anlo.

A subcategory of fiashidi practice is when a barren woman solicits the help of a god to reverse her infertility.⁴ According to Dovlo and Adzoyi (1995), this act is known as dorfefle (womb purchasing) and the offspring are known as dorfleviwo or dorflevis (children of womb purchasing). The first product of dorfefle if male is called Klu and if female is called Kosi. Dovlo and Adzoyi point out that these names denote indebtedness to the gods since in the Ewe language, the name Klu or Kluvi means slave.

The Southern Ewe are comprised of a group of autonomous Ewe states whose people migrated from Ketu in the modern Republic of Benin and stopped over in Notsie in the present Republic of Togo before settling down in the southeastern corner of contemporary Ghana (Amenumey, 1986; Asamoa, 1986). The eminent Ewe historian, Professor Amenumey (1997) dismissed claims of migration from “Babel” of the Bible—Mesopotamia and Egypt—on the basis of lack of scientific evidence. This invalidated the claims of trokosi proponents such as Dartey-Kumordzie⁵ and Robert Barker (2007a, 2007b; 2011a, 2011b)⁶ who argue that Ewes are Israelites and that trokosi practice identifies them as one of the lost tribes of the kingdom of ancient Israel. They occupy the southern part of the Volta Region and are spread across five administrative districts—Keta, Ketu, Avenor, and South and North Tongu—within the local government organizational structure in Ghana. The most dominant states among the Southern Ewe are the Anlo, the largest polity among the Ewes, and the 13 states that constitute Tongu (Nukunya, 1997a). Though autonomous, the southern Ewe states, like all the Ewe states in Ghana, are known for their unity as one people. The basis of this unity is founded on a common history of migration from Ketu, language (though with dialectical variations), and shared social, political, and religious values and institutions (Nukunya, 1997a).

Patrilineal descent is the main principle around which southern Ewe social organization revolves (Nukunya, 1997b). Families are built around a group of people who can trace common descent to a known male ancestor (Nukunya, 1969). To the southern Ewe, family is not, however, limited to a nuclear family of father, mother, and children. In fact, the mother is not a member of her nuclear family as she rather belongs to the family of her father. The family of prime importance to the southern Ewe is the extended family of people, male and female, who trace their descent through the male line. The extended family is important because a group of extended families constitutes a lineage or clan, the most important social unit among the Ewes (Amewudah, 1984; Nukunya, 1969, 1997b).

Lineage or clan membership carries with it rights, duties, and obligations. In traditional Eweland, whatever rights an individual was entitled to, and did enjoy, was by virtue of his or her membership of a particular lineage or family. Members were entitled to political, economic, social, and religious rights such as succession, inheritance, help during emergencies, and plots of land for farming or access to creeks for fishing (Nukunya, 1997b). Very few rights, such as the right to life, existed outside clan or lineage. Even then, individuals enjoyed the right to life only within the parameters of the clan’s collective interests. The lineage or clan was thus a corporate unit of great socioeconomic importance to every individual. However, as Nukunya (1969, 1997b) explains, members were also obliged to observe the clan/lineage taboos and norms, rules of exogamy, bear a family name, defend and protect other family members, and offer assistance to other family members in need. Thus, the principle of “collective responsibility” (group rights and duties) was the major notion that informed clan membership and action (Abotchie, 1997; Nukunya, 1969, 1997b). From the foregoing, it is clear that this principle is reciprocal: just as rights accrue to an individual by being a member of a clan, a member could be asked to pay for acts of omission or commission by other members of the clan. For example, the clan must seek vengeance on behalf of a victimized member.

Collective responsibility constitutes a major ground for members to be interested in the conduct and discipline of other members, to ensure they comport themselves in a manner as to bring no disgrace to the name of the clan. In effect, the clan takes precedence over the individual, and group rights surpass individual rights. In this way, it is not difficult to understand how children (trokosis) or any other member of the family could be asked to pay for crimes committed by other members of the family. What is not easily explained is, “Why the preference for female children?” which relates to the wider question generally asked of the victims of most negative traditional practices in Africa, “Why is it always girls and women?” The importance of males in patrilineal systems does not fully explain the choice of females as victims regarding most negative traditional practices considering the prominent status of males in even matrilineal systems where the family is traced through a known female ancestor (e.g., the preeminent significance of mother’s brother and the fact that women are the victims of traditional widowhood rights among the matrilineal Asantes in Ghana). Hence, it is proposed that patriarchy, the system and practice whereby everything male is deemed as more important than anything female, better explains the choice of women to become the victims of controversial traditional practices such as the trokosi system (Ameh, 2004b). Among the Ewes, as will be explained below, the type of sacrifice that produced and maintains the trokosi system is regarded as punishment and making a trokosi sacrifice connotes losing a family member, since it ends up becoming servitude for life. If sacrifice entails “losing” a family member, it is better to lose the least important than the most important members.