We are also informed that an organisation called AfriKulture, “dedicated to saving aspects of Ghanaian culture and tradition that it claims are under attack from the Western world”, campaigns to defend and perpetuate the practice (72–3), claiming that the young women who are affected by it are “privileged” and are taught “the ways of morality” (73).

The practice is known as trokosi and has been outlawed, but as often happens, persists in remoter regions where the laws on the books have less power than entrenched, locally validated practices. The phrase wife of the gods (which he used as the title of his first novel) alludes to a practice in the Volta region (where the Ewe language and culture predominate) of redeeming “family sins or crimes” by dedicating young girls (who are not themselves given any say in whether they want to be such an “offering”) to serve as “wives of the gods serving at a shrine often brought to the shrine as girls as young as nine nce they reach puberty, the fetish priests begin to have sex with them” (72). Kwei Quartey, a Ghanaian, works in the US (California) as a physician, but in his detective novels it is Ghanaian social, familial and professional life, and belief systems, that are investigated or used to contextualise his narratives. Shares 0 Facebook 0 Tweet 0 Pin 0 Print 0 Email 0 LinkedIn 0

Wife of the Gods by Kwei Quartey