Trokosi: The West African custom where girls are forced to serve at shrines for sins of their fathers

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Before Insecure star Jay Ellis would secure a leading role opposite Issa Rae in the hit HBO dramedy, he featured in a Ghanaian film about a traditional Ewe custom known as trokosi.

In Like Cotton Twines, Ellis plays an American teacher in a remote village in south-eastern Ghana. He takes a special interest in one of his promising students after he learned that the 14-year-old girl would have to leave school and go serve at the shrine of the local deity.

This development had been occasioned by the teenager’s father’s iniquities. He cannot atone for them so his daughter has to be one of the many wife-servants to the deity.

However, the deity’s priest, a middle-aged man, would be the physical manifestation as well as spokesperson of the deity. He, too, has urges that the young girls, and some older women, would have to do well to satisfy.

The film brought on screen a very real but also tricky conundrum. Trokosi has been the way of the Ewe people for centuries but in the face of modernization, or rather honestly, westernization, director Leila Djansi, urges abandonment of something African.