Ghana, Ghana
The practice of ritual or customary servitude was outlawed in Ghana in 1998, but no one has ever been prosecuted under the law. Rather, the practical implementation of the law has fallen largely to NGO's who have facilitated the shrines in ending the practice. Two NGO's, Every Child Ministries Ghana and International Needs Ghana negotiated with the Gborble shrine and educated them as to the issues over a span of over a year, finally winning the approval of the shrine for the liberation of all its trokosi slaves on January 31, 2003. The liberation was a public event in which the shrine freed the slaves and agreed to end the practice of ritual servitude in that place. In this case a 26 year old woman was liberated who had been sent to be a shrine slave at the age of seven. Supposedly her grandfather had captured and eaten a neighbor’s fowl. This resulted in the neighbor visiting the shrine to place a curse on the offending family. (The curse is never placed on the offender himself, only on the family. Likewise, it is never the offender who pays for the crime, but rather an innocent virgin girl from his family. The offender is virtually always male, the one who pays for the offense virtually always female, or more specifically, a young virgin). When the seven-year old victim arrived at the shrine, she was forced to go through an initiation ceremony in which she was stripped and paraded naked around the town. The victim says she hated life in the shrine, with its long, hard hours of work on behalf of the priest, harsh punishment, constant humiliation, endless taboos and restrictions, and forced worship of the shrine god (in spite of the fact that Ghana officially gives everyone freedom of religion).