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BOOK: The place where girls are sacrificed to atone for families

Sunday May 10 2020
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Bernice L McFadden is a seasoned writer of fiction and non-fiction. PHOTO | COURTESY

By KARI MUTU

We meet 33-year-old protagonist Abeo Kata in 2009 in New York city, “on the morning of the day she killed him”. This is the opening sentence of Praise for the Butterflies by Bernice L McFadden, where we journey into the secret world of modern-day child slavery set in a fictional West African country.

Abeo spots a man eating peanuts and barrels towards him brandishing a screwdriver while casually walking in the streets of New York. In the next chapter we go back to Abeo’s childhood in the fictional land of Ukemby. She comes from an affluent, loving family, adores her baby brother and is enchanted by her Aunt Serafine who lives in America, but occasionally visits them.

Life changes forever for the Kata family when Abeo’s grandfather dies and her grandmother comes to live with them. Not long afterwards Abeo’s father Wasik is falsely accused in a corruption scandal at work and suspended from his government job.

Without an income to support their fancy lifestyle, Wasik begins to buckle under the pressure. The tension is made worse by his tyrannical mother. His wife falls and breaks her ankle, then his young son gets a strange skin infection. The grandmother attributes the sudden misfortunes to an old family curse, but Abeo’s parents are practising Catholics who discount “the spirits, ancestors, and minor gods.”

Nine-year-old Abeo, too young to understand what is happening, is woken up in the middle of the night and driven off outside the city by her father. He abandons her in a strange village and Abeo never sees her family again. She has been sent to a trokosi to become a “wife of the gods”.

Trokosi is a traditional practise in Ghana and Togo where young, virgin girls are given away to religious shrines to atone for any family misdeeds that have angered the gods. The girls become unpaid labourers and sexual vassals of male priests said to be intermediaries of deities. Shrine slavery was banned in Ghana in 1998, but the practise allegedly continues from lack of oversight. Even after their release former trokosi women remain psychologically and physically traumatised. For the 13 years Abeo’s life is one of hard labour, hunger, punishments, rape and teenage pregnancy. She and the other trokosi girls, some as young as six years, serve at the pleasure of the old shrine priest. When he dies, his son Duma, who is even more evil, takes over.

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It is not until many years later that Abeo learns that her resentful grandmother is the one who convinced her father to send her away. Her salvation finally comes when a local rescue centre established by an American woman buys her freedom.  Though McFadden is African-American the story reads authentically African. She focuses on the barbaric practice of shrine slavery and the patriarchy that enables its existence.

Throughout the book we are connected to the better known trans-Atlantic slavery. However, the story would have been richer with a deeper exploration of trokosi and better characterisation of the antagonists and victims. A number of minor personalities felt immaterial and made the book unnecessarily long.

In the end the story feels underwhelming and lacks emotional depth, with parts of the plot seeming contrived in an effort to keep the narrative flowing.

McFadden is a seasoned writer of fiction and non-fiction including humorous erotica books under the pen name Geneva Holliday. Praise for the Butterflies was longlisted for the 2019 Women's Prize for Fiction.

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