Day: February 12, 2001

The Tragedy of Female Slavery in Ghana

The BBC recently ran a sad report about the persistence of trokosi — a form of religious slavery — in rural parts of Ghana. Although a law was passed three years ago in Ghana outlawing it, up to 3,000 women are still estimated to be enslaved as a result of the practice.

Trokosi is a religious practice of the Ewe who inhabit Benin, Nigeria, Togo, Ghana. One of the Ewe’s religious beliefs is ju-ju — the notion that the gods punish one person’s sins by causing the death of other family members until the sin is forgiven by the gods. Priests offer to pardon the sin in exchange for some form of atonement.

According to the American Anti-Slavery Group, until the 18th century the offering typically took the form of livestock or other gifts, but that began to change and priests began demanding, and receiving, virgin girls as atonement for the sins of their relatives.

Girls, often under the age of 10, are brought to the priest, ritually stripped of all their possessions, including clothes, and told they have to do anything the priest tells them. Most girls are raped repeatedly.

Technically the girl only has to serve the priest for 3 to 5 years, but the reality is that for many this is a life long sentence. In order for the girl to return to her family at the end of her years of service, her family must pay a redemption fee set by the priest. Not surprisingly, such redemption fees are typically set at prices which the family cannot afford.

To add to the problem, trokosi can be inherited. If a woman dies before her parents can redeem her by paying the priest, they must give him another virgin girl.

It is believed there are up to 4,000 trokosi in Africa, with 3,000 of those in Ghana. As mentioned earlier, Ghana passed a law in 1998 banning the practice but it has persisted, in part due to unwillingness of the government to enforce the law.

The BBC interviewed Hutealor Wede who is a slave to a Ewe priest,

My grandfather had illegal sex with a woman. The gods punished our family. I was the virgin daughter, so I was brought to this village and given to the priest to stop the disasters happening. I have to do everything for the priest. Anything he wants.

Some people, such as Osofu Kofi Ameve, the head of the African Renaissance Mission, defend trokosi and attack those who would outlaw it as imperialists intent on wiping out traditional African religions to establish Western religious. He told the BBC that, “It’s all lies … No woman is a slave in Ghana. Christianity, your Christianity, allows for no other religion. You want to eradicate all African religion.”

Fortunately for the thousands of women enduring such slavery, one of those who does not share this view is the newly elected president of Ghana, John Kufuor, who says he will stop the practice. Kufuor told the BBC, “Young girls should be in educational establishments, not in the harem of some fetish priest.”

Still, at the moment, little has been done to stop the practice except by controversial groups such as International Need and others who have raised money to purchase the freedom of such women. Hopefully Kufuor will follow through and elimination slavery in his country.

Source:

Ghana’s trapped slaves. Humphrey Hawksley, The BBC, February 8, 2001.

The Trokosi: Religious slavery in Ghana. The American Anti-Slavery Group.

Google Changes

Jim Roepcke seems to have his finger on the pulse of the search engine world, finding these two stories which highlight important, very positive changes at Google:

Google Acquires Deja’s Usenet Discussion Service

Google Ventures into the Invisible Web: The Web’s First Large-Scale PDF Search

Adding the ability to quickly search through hundreds of millions of Usenet posts and PDF files should dramatically improve what was already the best search engine on the Internet. I especially like the Google’s willingness to show me a text version of a PDF file, though fear it Google may find itself in litigation over that feature (since I suspect it will be more objectionable to some content providers than the “cached version” of HTML pages that Google currently provides).

Republicans Overplaying Their Hand Again

Personally, I think Bill Clinton’s pardoning of Marc Rich was one of the few things he did in his last days in office that was worthwhile. The Republicans and Democrats (and most of the country as far as I can tell) disagree, and nobody seems happy about it.

But it seems like the Republicans are once again overplaying their hand. Newt Gingrich and other Republicans almost created a disaster with by not understanding how far they could go with the impeachment hearings, and a lot of the rhetoric coming from Congressional Republicans seems to indicate they still haven’t learned their lesson.

Whether you agree with it or not, the Constitution is incredibly clear that Clinton can pardon whoever he wants. If Republicans are seriously going to claim that it was improper that Denise Richards bought her husband’s pardon with her huge donations to the Democrats, they might as well line up to have all their own heads chopped off as this sort of thing happens every week in Washington, DC. (And the notion they would indict Denise Rich because her ex-husband gave her money is so absurd, I can’t believe they’re even discussing this publicly).

Give Republicans enough time, though, and somehow they’ll find a way in this mess to make Clinton seem like a sympathetic victim. THey don’t seem to be able to stop the growth of big government, but they do excel at shooting themselves in the foot on a regular basis.

NASA to Webcast NEAR Landing on Eos

The Register and other news sources are reporting that NASA will webcast the landing of its Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous (NEAR)/ Shoemaker space probe onto the surface of the asteroid Eros today.

Eros is important, among other things. because it is one of about 200 known asteroids which is larger than 1 km and crosses the Earth’s orbit (at its maximum, for example, Eros is never more than 1.78 astronomical units away from the Sun. Mars, by contrast, is about 1.49 AUs from the Sun). Eros sometimes comes within 20 million kilometers of the Earth. If an asteroid such as Eros ever struck the Earth, the impact would release energy equivalent to 240 billion Hiroshima bombs and likely obliterate almost all life on Earth.

The NEAR/Shoemaker probe is a much better use of federal funding for spacecraft. It cost only about a tenth as much as putting a single module on the International Space Station — coming in at about $220 million for construction and launch costs — and will probably yield a lot more information than the ISS. The NEAR probe has been circling Eros for the last year providing a very detailed surface map of the asteroid and collected other data that will help provide more definitive answers to scientific speculation about asteroids.

NASA needs to focus more on truly relevant missions such as the Eros probe rather than simply dreaming up new and expensive missions for the shuttle (which has proven to be a complete boondoggle).

The NEA: It’s All About Politics

George Will recently provoked a lot of comment from liberals and leftists with a recent column calling for a more conservative National Endowment for the arts. As a statist conservative, Will has no problems with state-run art, he just wants it to reflect his values,

The NEA is here to stay, which is fine, if it can learn to do no harm and to do occasional good. Government, which subsidizes soybeans, can subsidize art, too, if government can entrust cultural policy to people—postmodernists need not apply—who know how arts differ from soybeans.

Of course the state has proven it is no better at subsidizing art than it is at subsidizing soybeans. What is interesting, however, is the necessarily weak response by liberals and leftists typified by Salon.Com’s Carina Chocano.

In her confused response to Will, Chocano runs through the standard pro-NEA arguments. Art that is considered canonical today was considered heretical in its time, blah blah blah. The thing she doesn’t seem to notice is that her argument is exactly identical to Will’s — art is inherently political act and spending on the arts an inherently political activity.

Will argues that funding the postmodernist art that the NEA seems so fond of is an intolerable rejection of Western civilization, while Chocano ends up calling Will’s notion of political tests for art a fascist conceit even though, of course, she is simply arguing for just another set of political ideas.

Which is why the state should not get into being a patron of the arts in the first place. It simply cannot do so without favoring one political position over another. As Chocano points out, states that have set themselves up as arbiters of what “real” art is hardly had a good track record in the 20th century and the United States would do well not to emulate them.

Sources:

Privileging’ Postmodernism. George Will, Newsweek, February 5, 2001.

The postmodernist problem. Carina Chocano, Salon.Com, February 8, 2001.

Launch A Satellite for $50K

Slashdot recently posted a link to a Spaceflight Now story about a company launching mini-satellites into orbit for as little as $50,000.

In November One Step Satellite Solutions expects to launch the first of the cube-shaped satellites which are only 4″ x 4″ x 4″. The satellites use solar cells on each side along with batteries for power.

OSSS expects to launch 100 to 200 of the small cubes each year. All of the cubes will be brought back to Earth after their mission is complete to avoid further littering the relatively crowded space near the Earth (presumably by burning the satellites up on re-entry into the atmosphere).