Brigitte Sossou Perenyi

Brigitte Sossou Perenyi (born in Togo in 1990) is a Ghanaian documentary producer. She lived under conditions of slavery after being kidnapped at the age of seven and sent to Ghanaian sanctuary where Trokosi, or wife of the gods, was a secular practice that sends young women to forced labor to redeem the sins of their relatives. She was adopted by an American art forger and as an adult she returned to Ghana to see the charity that helped her, the Ghanaian family who looked after her and her birth family in Togo. Stories of her life have won awards and in 2018 she was chosen as one of the BBC's 100 Women.

Life She was born in Togo in 1990. She was the fifth of six children.

When she was seven-years-old, her mother sent her to stay with her uncle in, Lome, the capital of Togo where she would be able to go to school.

In 1997, the 60-minute US program of the CBS chain showed the world the conditions in which Brigitte lived through a documentary titled My Stolen Childhood. With the help of the NGO International Needs which was started by Juliana Dogbadzi, Kenneth Perenyi decided to go to Ghana in order to release her. Perenyi had made a fortune from forging paintings and was under investigation by the FBI. Nevertheless, he arranged for her to be released and she was sent to stay initially with the Ghanaian Sabaa family to learn English and to normalise her situation for about two years. In 1999,

She returned to Ghana when she was 21 to do an internship in Accra. She was supported again by the International Needs charity. She visited the Sabaa family and they suggested that she should find her birth family in Togo. She was reunited with her four brothers, her birth parents, and a brother born after she left. Communication was not easy as she had forgotten her first language, but she learned that her parents had never known that her uncle had taken her to Ghana. Her uncle had refused to say where she was, and they thought that she was dead. She had previously thought they were complicit with her ill treatment and was now able to forgive them. She has said that her Christian faith which she gained with the Sabaa family has enable her to forgive her uncle and herself.