Lap of the gods: unable to leave, unpaid, severely exploited and controlled by violence, the trokosi are slaves by any other name

There are several thousand women and girls serving at shrines throughout the Volta delta, around an hour east of Accra, Ghana. Known as trokosi, they are, theoretically, wives and servants to the gods. In practice, they have a range of roles, including domestic and agricultural duties. Trokosi emerged in around 1900, when a family offered a shrine priest one of its virgin daughters because it could not afford the cattle it had been told to bring as an offering to the gods. The Ghanaian government passed legislation in late 1998 making it illegal to send a child away from home for a religious ritual, but there are problems associated with implementing this legislation.