A hut on the other side of the worldDAVE MAASS
At this moment, I feel extremely out of place. Right now, I'm just a big, gangly, white American Jew with thick glasses hunching topless on a bench in the Nyigble "fetish shrine." My bottom half is wrapped in a length of loudly colorful fabric and my bare feet are playing nervously in the sandy floor. The shrine is a small enclosure surrounding a smaller hut; inside is some sort of idol to one of their gods, and only the priest is allowed to visit it. This open-aired room is quickly filling up with old women. Some are very large, others as thin and knotted as a twig. Many of them can no longer be bothered to keep their robes covering their breasts. There are few men, mostly very young. It's getting crowded. As a JHR volunteer, I'm working with The Ghanaian Chronicle, a.k.a. "The Spear of the Nation," Ghana's most popular independent newspaper. I'm supposed to mentor, advise and work side-by-side with a Ghanaian journalist, in this case Florence Gbolu, who's sitting beside me with her notepad. The idea is to help the Ghanaian media more effectively cover human-rights abuses. Potentially, this will all end up on the weekly "Social Justice" page I'm charged with editing. Whether human rights abuses are occurring in this fetish shrine is still up in the air. The Paramount Chief of the area secured us an invite to this ceremony (it cost us three bottles of gin - one for the chief, two for the shrine's priest). What we've been told: A woman has been kept in a room off to the side of the shrine for three months. She has not left this room, has not seen the sun, has not changed her clothes. Normally, this would be inhumane imprisonment. In this case, however, the woman volunteered. I'm not exactly sure why. Everyone is speaking the local Ewe language. Florence's mother was born not too far from the shrine, and Florence speaks Ewe fluently. I'm her journalistic adviser, but as an anthropologist I'm expecting her to be my guide to this ceremony. I'm expecting her to explain the legends and meanings around each act. But no. She knows almost as much about these rituals as I - a Jew who practices when I'm back in Scottsdale for the holidays - know about those of Chasidic Jews in Tzfat, Israel. And so we both sit there in somewhat stunned silence as women and young men to the left and right of us begin thrashing in trances to the thumping beat of drums and priestess songs, as twin roosters are sacrificed and left to their last flops a few feet from where we're sitting. Finally, when Florence turns to me, it's to whisper what she's just been told by one of the chief's men: A woman is about to be lashed. I don't quite understand why she's so excited. "We have a story!" she says. Oh, right: We're human-rights journalists. "We do," I agree, with a discreet smile. To read articles by Dave Maass on his experiences in Ghana, visit the Journalists for Human Rights Web site, http://community.jhr.ca. |
