Chapter 6 : Games with Sex and Debt

Games with Sex and Debt

When we return to an examination of conventional economic history, one thing that jumps out is how much has been made to disappear. Reducing all human life to exchange means not only shunting aside all other forms of economic experience (hierarchy, communism), but also ensuring that the vast majority of the human race who are not adult males, and therefore whose day-to-day existence is relatively difficult to reduce to a matter of swapping things in such a way as to seek mutual advantage, melt away into the background.

As a result, we end up with a sanitized view of the way actual business is conducted. The tidy world of shops and malls is the quintessential middle-class environment, but at either the top or the bottom of the system, the world of financiers or of gangsters, deals are often made in ways not so completely different from ways that the Gunwinggu or Nambikwara make them—at least in that sex, drugs, music, extravagant displays of food, and the potential for violence do often play parts.

Consider the case of Neil Bush (George W.’s brother) who, during divorce proceedings with his wife, admitted to multiple infidelities with women who, he claimed, would mysteriously appear at his hotel-room door after important business meetings in Thailand and Hong Kong.

“You have to admit it’s pretty remarkable,” remarked one of his wife’s attorneys, “for a man to go to a hotel-room door and open it and have a woman standing there and have sex with her.”

“It was very unusual,” Bush replied, admitting however that this had happened to him on numerous occasions.

“Were they prostitutes?”

“I don’t know.”[214]

In fact, such things seem almost par for the course when really big money comes into play.

In this light, the economists’ insistence that economic life begins with barter, the innocent exchange of arrows for tepee frames, with no one in a position to rape, humiliate, or torture anyone else, and that it continues in this way, is touchingly utopian.

As a result, though, the histories we tell are full of blank spaces, and the women in them seem to appear out of nowhere, without explanation, much like the Thai women who appeared at Bush’s door. Recall the passage cited in Chapter Three, from numismatist Philip Grierson, about money in the barbarian law codes:

Compensation in the Welsh laws is reckoned primarily in cattle and in the Irish ones in cattle or bondmaids (cumal), with considerable use of precious metals in both. In the Germanic codes it is mainly in precious metal …[215]

How is it possible to read this passage without immediately stopping at the end of the first line? “Bondmaids”? Doesn’t that mean “slaves?” (It does.) In ancient Ireland, female slaves were so plentiful and important that they came to function as currency. How did that happen? And if we are trying to understand the origins of money, here, isn’t the fact that people are using one another as currency at all interesting or significant?[216] Yet none of the sources on money remark much on it. It would seem that by the time of the law codes, slave girls were not actually traded, but just used as units of account. Still, they must have been traded at some point. Who were they? How were they enslaved? Were they captured in war, sold by their parents, or reduced to slavery through debt? Were they a major trade item? The answer to all these questions would seem to be yes, but it’s hard to say more because the history remains largely unwritten.[217]

Or let’s return to the parable of the ungrateful servant. “Since he was not able to pay, the master ordered that he and his wife and his children and all that he had be sold to repay the debt.” How did that happen? Note that we’re not even speaking of debt service here (he is already his creditor’s servant), but outright slavery. How did a man’s wife and children come to be considered no different than his sheep and crockery—as property to be liquidated on the occasion of default? Was it normal for a man in first-century Palestine to be able to sell his wife? (It wasn’t.)[218] If he didn’t own her, why was someone else allowed to sell her if he couldn’t pay his debts?

The same could be asked of the story in Nehemiah. It’s hard not to empathize with the distress of a father watching his daughter taken off by strangers. On the other hand, one might also ask: Why weren’t they taking him? The daughter hadn’t borrowed any money.

It’s not as if it is ordinary for fathers in traditional societies to be able to sell their children. This is a practice with a very specific history: it appears in the great agrarian civilizations, from Sumer to Rome to China, right around the time when we also start to see evidence of money, markets, and interest-bearing loans; later, more gradually, it also appears in those surrounding hinterlands that supplied those civilizations with slaves.[219] What’s more, if we examine the historical evidence, there seems good reason to believe that the very obsession with patriarchal honor that so defines “tradition” in the Middle East and Mediterranean world itself arose alongside the father’s power to alienate his children—as a reaction to what were seen as the moral perils of the market. All of this is treated as somehow outside the bounds of economic history.

Excluding all this is deceptive not only because it excludes the main purposes to which money was actually put in the past, but because it doesn’t give us a clear vision of the present. After all, who were those Thai women who so mysteriously appeared at Neil Bush’s hotel door? Almost certainly, they were children of indebted parents. Likely as not, they were contractual debt peons themselves.[220]

Focusing on the sex industry would be deceptive, though. Then as now, most women in debt bondage spend the vast majority of their time sewing, preparing soups, and scouring latrines. Even in the Bible, the admonition in the Ten Commandments not to “covet thy neighbor’s wife” clearly referred not to lust in one’s heart (adultery had already been covered in commandment number seven), but to the prospect of taking her as a debt-peon—in other words, as a servant to sweep one’s yard and hang out the laundry.[221] In most such matters, sexual exploitation was at best incidental (usually illegal, sometimes practiced anyway, symbolically important.) Again, once we remove some of our usual blinders, we can see that matters have changed far less, over the course of the last five thousand years or so, than we really like to think.

These blinders are all the more ironic when one looks at the anthropological literature on what used to be called “primitive money”—that is, the sort one encounters in places where there are no states or markets—whether Iroquois wampum, African cloth money, or Solomon Island feather money, and discovers that such money is used almost exclusively for the kinds of transactions that economists don’t like to have to talk about.

In fact, the term “primitive money” is deceptive for this very reason, since it suggests that we are dealing with a crude version of the kind of currencies we use today. But this is precisely what we don’t find. Often, such currencies are never used to buy and sell anything at all.[222] Instead, they are used to create, maintain, and otherwise reorganize relations between people: to arrange marriages, establish the paternity of children, head off feuds, console mourners at funerals, seek forgiveness in the case of crimes, negotiate treaties, acquire followers—almost anything but trade in yams, shovels, pigs, or jewelry.

Often, these currencies were extremely important, so much so that social life itself might be said to revolve around getting and disposing of the stuff. Clearly, though, they mark a totally different conception of what money, or indeed an economy, is actually about. I’ve decided therefore to refer to them as “social currencies,” and the economies that employ them as “human economies.” By this I mean not that these societies are necessarily in any way more humane (some are quite humane; others extraordinarily brutal), but only that they are economic systems primarily concerned not with the accumulation of wealth, but with the creation, destruction, and rearranging of human beings.

Historically, commercial economies—market economies, as we now like to call them—are a relative newcomer. For most of human history, human economies predominated. To even begin to write a genuine history of debt, then, we have to start by asking: What sort of debts, what sort of credits and debits, do people accumulate in human economies? And what happens when human economies begin to give away to or are taken over by commercial ones? This is another way of asking the question, “How do mere obligations turn into debts?”—but it means not just asking the question in the abstract, but examining the historical record to try to reconstruct what actually did happen.

This is what I will do over the course of the next two chapters. First I will look at the role of money in human economies, then describe what can happen when human economies are suddenly incorporated into the economic orbits of larger, commercial ones. The African slave trade will serve as a particularly catastrophic case in point. Then, in the next chapter, I will return to the first emergence of commercial economies in early civilizations of Europe and the Middle East.

Money as Inadequate Substitute

The most interesting theory of the origin of money is the one recently put forward by a French economist-turned-anthropologist named Philippe Rospabé. While his work is largely unknown in the English-speaking world, it’s quite ingenious, and it bears directly on our problem. Rospabé’s argument is that “primitive money” was not originally a way to pay debts of any sort. It’s a way of recognizing the existence of debts that cannot possibly be paid. His argument is worth considering in detail.

In most human economies, money is used first and foremost to arrange marriages. The simplest and probably most common way of doing this was by being presented as what used to be called “bride-price”: a suitor’s family would deliver a certain number of dog teeth, or cowries, or brass rings, or whatever is the local social currency, to a woman’s family, and they would present their daughter as his bride. It’s easy to see why this might be interpreted as buying a women, and many colonial officials in Africa and Oceania in the early part of the twentieth century did indeed come to that conclusion. The practice caused something of a scandal, and by 1926, the League of Nations was debating banning the practice as a form of slavery. Anthropologists objected. Really, they explained, this was nothing like the purchase of, say, an ox—let alone a pair of sandals. After all, if you buy an ox, you don’t have any responsibilities to the ox. What you are really buying is the right to dispose of the ox in any way that pleases you. Marriage is entirely different, since a husband will normally have just as many responsibilities toward his wife as his wife will have toward him. It’s a way of rearranging relations between people. Second of all, if you were really buying a wife, you’d be able to sell her. Finally, the real significance of the payment concerns the status of the woman’s children: if he’s buying anything, it’s the right to call her offspring his own.[223]

The anthropologists ended up winning the argument, and “bride-price” was dutifully redubbed “bridewealth.” But they never really answered the question: What is actually happening here? When a Fijian suitor’s family presents a whale tooth to ask for a woman’s hand in marriage, is this an advance payment for the services the woman will provide in cultivating her future husband’s gardens? Or is he purchasing the future fertility of her womb? Or is this a pure formality, the equivalent of the dollar that has to change hands in order to seal a contract? According to Rospabé, it’s none of these. The whale tooth, however valuable, is not a form of payment. It is really an acknowledgment that one is asking for something so uniquely valuable that payment of any sort would be impossible. The only appropriate payment for the gift of a woman is the gift of another woman; in the meantime, all one can do is to acknowledge the outstanding debt.

There are places where suitors say this quite explicitly. Consider the Tiv of Central Nigeria, who we have already met briefly in the last chapter. Most of our information on the Tiv comes from mid-century, when they were still under British colonial rule.[224] Everyone at that time insisted that a proper marriage should take the form of an exchange of sisters. One man gives his sister in marriage to another, that man marries the sister of his newfound brother-in-law. This is the perfect marriage because the only thing one can really give in exchange for a woman is another woman.

Obviously, even if every family had exactly equal numbers of brothers and sisters, things couldn’t always work this neatly. Say I marry your sister but you don’t want to marry mine (because, say, you don’t like her, or because she’s only five years old). In that case, you become her “guardian,” which means you can claim the right to dispose of her in marriage to someone else—for instance, someone whose sister you actually do wish to marry. This system quickly grew into a complex system in which most important men became guardians of numerous “wards,” often scattered over wide areas; they would swap and trade them and in the process accumulate numerous wives for themselves, while less-fortunate men were only able to marry late in life, or not at all.[225]

There was one other expedient. The Tiv at that time used bundles of brass rods as their most prestigious form of currency. Brass rods were only held by men, and never used to buy things in markets (markets were dominated by women); instead, they were exchanged only for things that men considered of higher importance: cattle, horses, ivory, ritual titles, medical treatment, magical charms. It was possible, as one Tiv ethnographer, Akiga Sai, explains, to acquire a wife with brass rods, but it required quite a lot of them. You would need to give two or three bundles of them to her parents to establish yourself as a suitor; then, when you did finally make off with her (such marriages were always first framed as elopements), another few bundles to assuage her mother when she showed up angrily demanding to know what was going on. This would normally be followed by five more to get her guardian to at least temporarily accept the situation, and more still to her parents when she gave birth, if you were to have any chance of their accepting your claims to be the father of her children. That might get her parents off your back, but you’d have to pay off the guardian forever, because you could never really use money to acquire the rights to a woman. Everyone knew that the only thing you can legitimately give in exchange for a woman is another woman. In this case, everyone has to abide by the pretext that a woman will someday be forthcoming. In the meantime, as one ethnographer succinctly puts it, “the debt can never be fully paid.”[226]

According to Rospabé, the Tiv are just making explicit the underlying logic of bridewealth everywhere. The suitor presenting bridewealth is never paying for a woman, or even for the rights to claim her children. That would imply that brass rods, or whale’s teeth, cowrie shells, or even cattle are somehow the equivalent of a human being, which by the logic of a human economy is obviously absurd. Only a human could ever be considered equivalent to another human. All the more so since, in the case of marriage, we are speaking of something even more valuable than one human life: we are speaking of a human life that also has the capacity to generate new lives.

Certainly, many of those who pay bridewealth are, like the Tiv, quite explicit about all this. Bridewealth money is presented not to settle a debt, but as a kind of acknowledgment that there exists a debt that cannot be settled by means of money. Often the two sides will maintain at least the polite fiction that there will, someday, be a recompense in kind: that the suitor’s clan will eventually provide one of its own women, perhaps even that very woman’s daughter or granddaughter, to marry a man of the wife’s natal clan. Or maybe there will be some arrangement about the disposition of her children; perhaps her clan will get to keep one for itself. The possibilities are endless.

Money, then, begins, as Rospabé himself puts it, “as a substitute for life.”[227] One might call it the recognition of a life-debt. This, in turn, explains why it’s invariably the exact same kind of money that’s used to arrange marriages that is also used to pay wergeld (or “bloodwealth” as it’s sometimes also called): money presented to the family of a murder victim so as to prevent or resolve a blood-feud. Here the sources are even more explicit. On the one hand, one presents whale teeth or brass rods because the murderer’s kin recognize they owe a life to the victim’s family. On the other, whale teeth or brass rods are in no sense, and can never be, compensation for the loss of a murdered relative. Certainly no one presenting such compensation would ever be foolish enough to suggest that any amount of money could possibly be the “equivalent” to the value of someone’s father, sister, or child.

So here again, money is first and foremost an acknowledgment that one owes something much more valuable than money.

In the case of a blood-feud, both parties will also be aware that even a revenge killing, while at least it conforms to the principle of a life for a life, won’t really compensate for the victim’s grief and pain either. This knowledge allows for some possibility of settling the matter without violence. But even here, there is often a feeling that, as in the case of marriage, the real solution to the problem is simply being temporarily postponed.

An illustration might be helpful. Among the Nuer, there is a special class of priestly figures who specialize in mediating feuds, referred to in the literature as “leopard-skin chiefs.” If one man murders another, he will immediately seek out one of their homesteads, since such a homestead is treated as an inviolate sanctuary: even the dead man’s family, who will be honor-bound to avenge the murder, will know that they cannot enter it, lest terrible consequences ensue. According to Evans-Pritchard’s classic account, the chief will immediately start trying to negotiate a settlement between the murderer and victim’s families, a delicate business, because the victim’s family will always first refuse:

The chief first finds out what cattle the slayer’s people possess and what they are prepared to pay in compensation.… He then visits the dead man’s people and asks them to accept cattle for the life. They usually refuse, for it is a point of honor to be obstinate, but their refusal does not mean that they are unwilling to accept compensation. The chief knows this and insists on their acceptance, even threatening to curse them if they do not give way …[228]

More-distant kin weigh in, reminding everyone of their responsibility to the larger community, of all the trouble that an outstanding feud will cause to innocent relatives, and after a great show of holding out, insisting that it is insulting to suggest that any number of cattle could possibly substitute for the life of a son or brother, they will usually grudgingly accept.[229] In fact, even once the matter has technically been settled, it really hasn’t—it usually takes years to assemble the cattle, and even once they have been paid, the two sides will avoid each other, “especially at dances, for in the excitement they engender, merely bumping into a man whose kinsman has been slain may cause a fight to break out, because the offense is never forgiven and the score must finally be paid with a life.”[230]

So it’s much the same as with bridewealth. Money does not wipe out the debt. One life can only be paid for with another. At best those paying bloodwealth, by admitting the existence of the debt and insisting that they wish they could pay it, even though they know this is impossible, can allow the matter to be placed permanently on hold.

Halfway around the world, one finds Lewis Henry Morgan describing the elaborate mechanisms set up by the Six Nations of the Iroquois to avoid precisely this state of affairs. In the event one man killed another,

Immediately on the commission of a murder, the affair was taken up by the tribes to which the parties belonged, and strenuous efforts were made to effect a reconciliation, lest private retaliation should lead to disastrous consequences.

The first council ascertained whether the offender was willing to confess his crime, and to make atonement. If he was, the council immediately sent a belt of white wampum, in his name, to the other council, which contained a message to that effect. The latter then endeavored to pacify the family of the deceased, to quiet their excitement, and to induce them to accept the wampum as condonation.[231]

Much as in the case of the Nuer, there were complicated schedules of exactly how many fathoms of wampum were paid over, depending on the status of the victim and the nature of the crime. As with the Nuer, too, everyone insisted that this was not payment. The value of the wampum in no sense represented the value of the dead man’s life:

The present of white wampum was not in the nature of a compensation for the life of the deceased, but of a regretful confession of the crime, with a petition for forgiveness. It was a peace-offering, the acceptance of which was pressed by mutual friends …[232]

Actually, in many cases there was also some way to manipulate the system to turn payments meant to assuage one’s rage and grief into ways of creating a new life that would in some sense substitute for the one that was lost. Among the Nuer, forty cattle were set as the standard fee for bloodwealth. But it was also the standard rate of bridewealth. The logic was this: if a man had been murdered before he was able to marry and produce offspring, it’s only natural that his spirit would be angry. He had been, effectively, robbed of his eternity. The best solution would be to use the cattle paid in settlement to acquire what was called a “ghost-wife”: a woman who would then be formally married to the dead man. In practice, she was usually paired off with one of the victim’s brothers, but this was not particularly important; it didn’t really matter too much who impregnated her, since he would be in no sense the father of her children. Her children would be considered the children of the victim’s ghost—and as a result, any boys among them were seen as having been born with a particular commitment to someday avenge his death.[233]

This latter is unusual. But Nuer appear to have been unusually stubborn about feuds. Rospabé provides examples from other parts of the world that are even more telling. Among North African Bedouins, for instance, it sometimes happened that the only way to settle a feud was for the killer’s family to turn over a daughter, who would then marry the victim’s next of kin—his brother, say. If she bore him a male child, the boy was given the same name as his dead uncle and considered to be, at least in the broadest sense, a substitute for him.[234] The Iroquois, who traced descent in the female line, did not trade women in this fashion. However, they had another, more direct approach. If a man died—even of natural causes—his wife’s relatives might “put his name upon the mat,” sending off belts of wampum to commission a war party, which would then raid an enemy village to secure a captive. The captive could either be killed, or, if the clan matrons were in a benevolent mood (one could never tell; the grief of mourning is tricky), adopted: this was signified by throwing a belt of wampum around his shoulders, whereon he would be given the name of the deceased and be considered, from that moment on, married to the victim’s wife, the owner of his personal possessions, and in every way, effectively, the exact same person as the dead man used to be.[235]

All of this merely serves to underline Rospabé’s basic point, which is that money can be seen, in human economies, as first and foremost the acknowledgment of the existence of a debt that cannot be paid.

In a way, it’s all very reminiscent of primordial-debt theory: money emerges from the recognition of an absolute debt to that which has given you life. The difference is that instead of imagining such debts as between an individual and society, or perhaps the cosmos, here they are imagined as a kind of network of dyadic relations: almost everyone in such societies was in a relation of absolute debt to someone else. It’s not that we owe “society.” If there is any notion of “society” here—and it’s not clear that there is—society is our debts.

Blood Debts (Lele)

Obviously, this leads us to the same familiar problem: How does a token of recognition that one cannot pay a debt turn into a form of payment by which a debt can be extinguished? If anything, the problem seems even worse than it was before.

In fact, it isn’t. The African evidence clearly shows how such things can happen—though the answer is a bit unsettling. To demonstrate this, it will be necessary to look at one or two African societies with a closer focus.

I’ll start with the Lele, an African people who had, at the time that Mary Douglas studied them in the 1950s, managed to turn the principle of blood debts into the organizing principle of their entire society.

The Lele were, at that time, a group of perhaps ten thousand souls, living on a stretch of rolling country near the Kasai River in the Belgian Congo, and considered a rude backcountry folk by their richer and more cosmopolitan neighbors, the Kuba and Bushong. Lele women grew maize and manioc; the men thought of themselves as intrepid hunters but spent most of their time weaving and sewing raffia-palm cloth. This cloth was what the area was really known for. It was not only used for every sort of clothing, but also exported: the Lele considered themselves the clothiers of the region, and it was traded with surrounding people to acquire luxuries. Internally, it functioned as a sort of currency. Still, it was not used in markets (there were no markets), and, as Mary Douglas discovered to her great inconvenience, within a village, one couldn’t use it to acquire food, tools, tableware, or really much of anything.[236] It was the quintessential social currency.

Informal gifts of raffia cloth smooth all social relations: husband to wife, son to mother, son to father. They resolve occasions of tension, as peace-offerings; they make parting gifts, or convey congratulations. There are also formal gifts of raffia which are neglected only at risk of rupture of the social ties involved. A man, on reaching adulthood, should give 20 cloths to his father. Otherwise he would be ashamed to ask his father’s help for raising his marriage dues. A man should give 20 cloths to his wife on each delivery of a child …[237]

Cloth was also used for various fines and fees, and to pay curers. So for instance, if a man’s wife reported a would-be seducer, it was customary to reward her with 20 cloths for her fidelity (it was not required, but not doing so was considered decidedly unwise); if an adulterer was caught, he was expected to pay 50 or 100 cloths to the woman’s husband; if the husband and lover disturbed the peace of the village by fighting before the matter was settled, each would have to pay two in compensation, and so forth.

Gifts tended to flow upward. Young people were always giving little presents of cloth as marks of respect to fathers, mothers, uncles, and the like. These gifts were hierarchical in nature: that is, it never occurred to those receiving them that they should have to reciprocate in any way. As a result, elders, and especially elder men, usually had a few extra pieces lying around, and young men, who could never weave quite enough to meet their needs, would have to turn to them whenever time for some major payment rolled around: for instance, if they had to pay a major fine, or wished to hire a doctor to assist their wife in child-birth, or wanted to join a cult society. They were thus always slightly in debt, or at least slightly beholden, to their elders. But everyone also had a whole range of friends and relatives who they had helped out, and so could turn to for assistance.[238]

Marriage was particularly expensive, since the arrangements usually required getting one’s hands on several bars of camwood. If raffia cloth was the small change of social life, camwood—a rare imported wood used for the manufacture of cosmetics—was the high-denomination currency. A hundred raffia cloths were equivalent to three to five bars. Few individuals owned much in the way of camwood, usually just little bits to grind up for their own use. Most was kept in each village’s collective treasury.

This is not to say that camwood was used for anything like bridewealth—rather, it was used in marriage negotiations, in which all sorts of gifts were passed back and forth. In fact, there was no bridewealth. Men could not use money to acquire women; nor could they use it to claim any rights over children. The Lele were matrilineal. Children belonged not to their father’s clan, but to their mother’s.

There was another way that men gained control over women, however.[239] This was the system of blood debts.

It is a common understanding among many traditional African peoples that human beings do not simply die without a reason. If someone dies, someone must have killed them. If a Lele woman died in childbirth, for example, this was assumed to be because she had committed adultery. The adulterer was thus responsible for the death. Sometimes she would confess on her deathbed, otherwise the facts of the matter would have to be established through divination. It was the same if a baby died. If someone became sick, or slipped and fell while climbing a tree, one would check to see if they had been involved in any quarrel that could be said to have caused the misfortune. If all else failed, one could employ magical means to identify the sorcerer. Once the village was satisfied that a culprit had been identified, that person owed a blood-debt: that is, he owed the victim’s next of kin a human life. The culprit would thus have to transfer over a young woman from his family, his sister or her daughter, to be the victim’s ward, or “pawn.”

As with the Tiv, the system quickly became immensely complicated. Pawnship was inherited. If a woman was someone’s pawn, so would her children be, and so would her daughters’ children. This meant that most males were also considered someone else’s man. Still, no one would accept a male pawn in payment of blood-debts: the whole point was to get hold of a young woman, who would then go on to produce additional pawn children. Douglas’s Lele informants emphasized that any man would naturally want to have many of these as possible:

Ask “Why do you want to have more pawns?” and they invariably say, “The advantage of owning pawns is that if you incur a blood-debt, you can settle it by paying one of your pawns, and your own sisters remain free.” Ask, “Why do you wish your own sisters to remain free?” and they reply, “Ah! then if I incur a blood-debt, I can settle it by giving one of them as a pawn …”

Every man is always aware that at any time he is liable for a blood-debt. If any woman he has seduced confesses his name in the throes of child-birth, and subsequently dies, or if her child dies, or if anyone he has quarreled with dies of illness or accident, he may be held responsible … Even if a woman runs away from her husband, and fighting breaks out on her account, the deaths will be laid at her door, and her brother or mother’s brother will have to pay up. Since only women are accepted as blood-compensation, and since compensation is demanded for all deaths, of men as well as of women, it is obvious that there can never be enough to go around. Men fall into arrears in their pawnship obligations, and girls used to be pledged before their birth, even before their mothers were of marriageable age.[240]

In other words, the whole thing turned into an endlessly complicated chess game—one reason, Douglas remarks, why the term “pawn” seems singularly apropos. Just about every adult Lele male was both someone else’s pawn, and engaged in a constant game of securing, swapping, or redeeming pawns. Every major drama or tragedy of village life would ordinarily lead to a transfer of rights in women. Almost all of those women would eventually get swapped again.

Several points need to be emphasized here. First of all, what were being traded were, quite specifically, human lives. Douglas calls them “blood-debts,” but “life-debts” would be more appropriate. Say, for instance, a man is drowning, and another man rescues him. Or say he’s deathly ill but a doctor cures him. In either case, we would likely say one man “owes his life” to the other. So would the Lele, but they meant it literally. Save someone’s life, they owe you a life, and a life owed had to be paid back. The usual recourse was for a man whose life was saved to turn over his sister as a pawn—or if not that, a different woman; a pawn he had acquired from someone else.

The second point is that nothing could substitute for a human life. “Compensation was based on the principle of equivalence, a life for a life, a person for a person.” Since the value of a human life was absolute, no amount of raffia cloth, or camwood bars, or goats, or transistor radios, or anything else could possibly take its place.

The third and most important point is that in practice, “human life” actually meant “woman’s life”—or even more specifically, “young woman’s life.” Ostensibly this was to maximize one’s holdings: above all, one wished for a human being who could become pregnant and produce children, since those children would also be pawns. Still, even Mary Douglas, who was in no sense a feminist, was forced to admit that the whole arrangement did seem to operate as if it were one gigantic apparatus for asserting male control over women. This was true above all because women themselves could not own pawns.[241] They could only be pawns. In other words: when it came to life-debts, only men could be either creditors or debtors. Young women were thus the credits and the debits—the pieces being moved around the chessboard—while the hands that moved them were invariably male.[242]

Of course, since almost everyone was a pawn, or had been at some point in their lives, being one could not in itself be much of a tragedy. For male pawns it was in some ways quite advantageous, since one’s “owner” had to pay most of one’s fines and fees and even blood-debts. This is why, as Douglas’s informants uniformly insisted, pawnship had nothing in common with slavery. The Lele did keep slaves, but never very many. Slaves were war captives, usually foreigners. As such they had no family, no one to protect them. To be a pawn, on the other hand, meant to have not one, but two different families to look after you: you still had your own mother and her brothers, but now you also had your “lord.”

For a woman, the very fact that she was the stakes in a game that all men were playing afforded all sorts of opportunities to game the system. In principle, a girl might be born a pawn, assigned to some man for eventual marriage. In practice, however,

a little Lele girl would grow up a coquette. From infancy she was the center of affectionate, teasing, flirting attention. Her affianced husband never gained more than a very limited control over her … Since men competed with one another for women there was scope for women to maneuver and intrigue. Hopeful seducers were never lacking and no woman doubted that she could get another husband if it suited her.[243]

In addition, a young Lele woman had one unique and powerful card to play. Everyone was well aware that, if she completely refused to countenance her situation, she always had the option of becoming a “village-wife.”[244]

The institution of village-wife was a peculiarly Lele one. Probably the best way to describe it is to imagine a hypothetical case. Let us say that an old, important man acquires a young woman as pawn through a blood-debt, and he decides to marry her himself. Technically, he has the right to do so, but it’s no fun for a young woman to be an old man’s third or fourth wife. Or, say he decides to offer her in marriage to one of his male pawns in a village far away from her mother and natal home. She protests. He ignores her protestations. She waits for an opportune moment and slips off at night to an enemy village, where she asks for sanctuary. This is always possible: all villages have their traditional enemies. Neither would an enemy village refuse a woman who came to them in such a situation. They would immediately declare her “wife of the village,” who all men living there would then be obliged to protect.

It helps to understand that here, as in many parts of Africa, most older men had several wives. This meant that the pool of women available for younger men was considerably reduced. As our ethnographer explains, the imbalance was a source of considerable sexual tension:

Everyone recognized that the young unmarried men coveted the wives of their seniors. Indeed, one of their pastimes was to plan seductions and the man who boasted of none was derided. Since the old men wished to remain polygynists, with two or three wives, and since adulteries were thought to disrupt the peace of the village, Lele had to make some arrangement to appease their unmarried men.

Therefore, when a sufficient number of them reached the age of eighteen or so, they were allowed to buy the right to a common wife.[245]

After paying an appropriate fee in raffia cloth to the village treasury, they were permitted to build a collective house, and then they were either allotted a wife to put in it, or allowed to form a party that would try to steal one from a rival village. (Or, alternately, if one showed up as a refugee, they would ask the rest of the village for the right to accept her: this was invariably granted.) This common wife is what’s referred to as a “village wife.” The position of village wife was more than respectable. In fact, a newly married village wife was treated very much like a princess. She was not expected to plant or weed in the gardens, fetch wood or water, or even to cook; all household chores were done by her eager young husbands, who provided the best of everything, spending much of their time hunting in the forest vying to bring her the choicest delicacies, or plying her with palm wine. She could help herself to others’ possessions and was expected to make all sorts of mischief to the bemused indulgence of all concerned. She was also expected to make herself sexually available to all members of the age-set—perhaps ten or twelve different men—at first, pretty much whenever they wanted her.[246]

Over time, a village wife would usually settle down with just three or four of her husbands, and finally, just one. The domestic arrangements were flexible. Nonetheless, in principle, she was married to the village as a whole. If she had children, the village was considered to be their father, and as such expected to bring them up, provide them with resources, and eventually, get them properly married off—which is why villages had to maintain collective treasuries full of raffia and camwood bars in the first place. Since at any time a village was likely to have several village wives, it would also have its own children and grandchildren, and therefore be in a position to both demand and pay blood-debts, and thus, to accumulate pawns.

As a result, villages became corporate bodies, collective groups that, like modern corporations, had to be treated as if they were individuals for purposes of law. However there was one key difference. Unlike ordinary individuals, villages could back up their claims with force.

As Douglas emphasizes, this was crucial, because ordinary Lele men were simply not able to do this to one another.[247] In everyday affairs, there was an almost complete lack of any systematic means of coercion. This was the main reason, she notes, that pawnship was so innocuous. There were all sorts of rules, but with no government, no courts, no judges to make authoritative decisions, no group of armed men willing or able to employ the threat of force to back those decisions up, rules were there to be adjusted and interpreted. In the end, everyone’s feelings had to be taken into account. In everyday affairs, Lele put great stock on gentle and agreeable behavior. Men might have been regularly seized with the urge to throw themselves at each other in fits of jealous rage (often they had good reason to), but they very rarely did. And if a fight did break out, everyone would immediately jump in to break it up and submit the affair to public mediation.[248]

Villages, in contrast, were fortified, and age-sets could be mobilized to act as military units. Here, and only here, did organized violence enter the picture. True, when villages fought, it was also always over women (everyone Douglas talked to expressed incredulity at the very idea that grown men, anywhere, could ever come to blows over anything else). But in the case of villages, it could come to an actual war. If another village’s elders ignored one’s claims to a pawn, one’s young men might organize a raiding party and kidnap her, or carry off some other likely young women to be their collective wife. This might lead to deaths, and to further claims for compensation. “Since it had the backing of force,” Douglas observes dryly, “the village could afford to be less conciliatory towards the wishes of its pawns.”[249]

It’s at exactly this point, too, where the potential for violence enters, that the great wall constructed between the value of lives and money can suddenly come tumbling down.

Sometimes when two clans were disputing a claim to blood compensation, the claimant might see no hope of getting satisfaction from his opponents. The political system offered no direct means for one man (or clan) to use physical coercion or to resort to superior authority to enforce claims against another. In such a case, rather than abandon his claim to a pawn-woman, he would be ready to take the equivalent in wealth, if he could get it. The usual procedure was to sell his case against the defendants to the only group capable of extorting a pawn by force, that is, to a village.

The man who meant to sell his case to a village asked them for 100 raffia cloths or five bars of camwood. The village raised the amount, either from its treasury, or by a loan from one of its members, and thereby adopted as its own his claim to a pawn.[250]

Once he held the money, his claim was over, and the village, which had now bought it, would proceed to organize a raid to seize the woman in dispute.

In other words, it was only when violence was brought into the equation that there was any question of buying and selling people. The ability to deploy force, to cut through the endless maze of preferences, obligations, expectations, and responsibilities that mark real human relationships, also made it possible to overcome what is otherwise the first rule of all Lele economic relationships: that human lives can only be exchanged for other human lives, and never for physical objects. Significantly, the amount paid—a hundred cloths, or an equivalent amount of camwood—was also the price of a slave.[251] Slaves were, as I mentioned, war captives. There seem never to have been very many of them; Douglas only managed to locate two descendants of slaves in the 1950s, some twenty-five years after the practice had been abolished.[252] Still, the numbers were not important. The mere fact of their existence set a precedent. The value of a human life could, sometimes, be quantified; but if one was able to move from A = A (one life equals another) to A = B (one life = one hundred cloths), it was only because the equation was established at the point of a spear.

Flesh-Debt (Tiv)

I have dwelt on the Lele in such detail in part because I wanted to convey some sense of why I was using the term “human economy,” what life is like inside one, what sort of dramas fill people’s days, and how money typically operates in the midst of all this. Lele currencies are, as I say, quintessential social currencies. They are used to mark every visit, every promise, every important moment in a man’s or woman’s life. It is surely significant, too, what the objects used as currency here actually were. Raffia cloth was used for clothing. In Douglas’s day, it was the main thing used to clothe the human body; camwood bars were the source of a red paste that was used as a cosmetic—it was the main substance used as makeup, by both men and women, to beautify themselves each day. These, then, were the materials used to shape people’s physical appearance, to make them appear mature, decent, attractive, and dignified to their fellows. They were what turned a mere naked body into a proper social being.

This is no coincidence. In fact, it’s extraordinarily common in what I’ve been calling human economies. Money almost always arises first from objects that are used primarily as adornment of the person. Beads, shells, feathers, dog or whale teeth, gold, and silver are all well-known cases in point. All are useless for any purpose other than making people look more interesting, and hence, more beautiful. The brass rods used by the Tiv might seem an exception, but actually they’re not: they were used mainly as raw material for the manufacture of jewelry, or simply twisted into hoops and worn at dances. There are exceptions (cattle, for instance), but as a general rule, it’s only when governments, and then markets, enter the picture that we begin to see currencies like barley, cheese, tobacco, or salt.[253]

It also illustrates the peculiar progression of ideas that so often mark human economies. On the one hand, human life is the absolute value. There is no possible equivalent. Whether a life is given or taken, the debt is absolute. In places, this principle is indeed sacrosanct. More often, it is compromised by the elaborate games played by the Tiv, who treat the giving of lives, and the Lele, who treat the taking of lives, as creating debts that can only be paid by delivering another human being. In each case, too, the practice ends up engendering an extraordinarily complex game in which important men end up exchanging women, or at least, rights over their fertility.

But this is already a kind of opening. Once the game exists, once the principle of substitution comes in, there was always the possibility of extending it. When that begins to happen, systems of debt that were premised on creating people can—even here—suddenly become the means of destroying them.

As an example, let us once again return to the Tiv. The reader will recall that if a man did not have a sister or a ward to give in exchange for one’s wife, it was possible to assuage her parents and guardians by gifts of money. However, such a wife would never be considered truly his. Here too, there was one dramatic exception. A man could buy a slave, a woman kidnapped in a raid from a distant country.[254] Slaves, after all, had no parents, or could be treated as if they didn’t; they had been forcibly removed from all those networks of mutual obligation and debt in which ordinary people acquired their outward identities. This was why they could be bought and sold.

Once married, though, a purchased wife would quickly develop new ties. She was no longer a slave, and her children were perfectly legitimate—more so, in fact, than those of a wife who was merely acquired through the continual payment of brass rods.

We have perhaps a general principle: to make something salable, in a human economy, one needs to first rip it from its context. That’s what slaves are: people stolen from the community that made them what they are. As strangers to their new communities, slaves no longer had mothers, fathers, kin of any sort. This is why they could be bought and sold or even killed: because the only relation they had was to their owners. A Lele village’s ability to organize raids and kidnap a woman from an alien community seems to have been the key to its ability to start trading women for money—even if in their case, they could do so only to a very limited extent. After all, her relatives were not very far away, and they would surely come around demanding an explanation. In the end, someone would have to come up with an arrangement that everyone could live with.[255]

Still, I would also insist that there is something more than this. One gets the distinct sense, in much of the literature, that many African societies were haunted by the awareness that these elaborate networks of debt could, if things went just slightly wrong, be transformed into something absolutely terrible. The Tiv are a dramatic case in point.

Among students of anthropology, the Tiv are mainly famous for the fact that their economic life was divided into what their best-known ethnographers, Paul and Laura Bohannan, referred to as three separate “spheres of exchange.” Ordinary, everyday economic activity was mostly the affair of women. They were the ones who filled the markets, and who trod the paths giving and returning minor gifts of okra, nuts, or fish. Men concerned themselves with what they considered higher things: the kind of transactions that could be conducted using the Tiv currency, which, as with the Lele, consisted of two denominations, a kind of locally made cloth called tugudu, widely exported, and, for major transactions, bundles of imported brass rods.[256] These could be used to acquire certain flashy and luxurious things (cows, purchased foreign wives), but they were mainly for the give and take of political affairs, hiring curers, acquiring magic, gaining initiation into cult societies. In political matters, Tiv were even more resolutely egalitarian than the Lele: successful old men with their numerous wives might have lorded it over their sons and other dependents within their own house compounds, but beyond that, there was no formal political organization of any sort. Finally, there was the system of wards, which consisted entirely of men’s rights in women. Hence, the notion of “spheres.” In principle, these three levels—ordinary consumption goods, masculine prestige goods, and rights in women—were completely separate. No amount of okra could get you a brass rod, just as, in principle, no number of brass rods could give you full rights to a woman.

In practice, there were ways to game the system. Say a neighbor was sponsoring a feast but was short on supplies; one might come to his aid, then later, discreetly, ask for a bundle or two in repayment. To be able to wheel and deal, to “turn chickens into cows,” as the saying went, and ultimately, broker one’s wealth and prestige into a way of acquiring wives, required a “strong heart”—that is, an enterprising and charismatic personality.[257] But “strong heart” had another meaning too. There was believed to be a certain actual biological substance called tsav that grew on the human heart. This was what gave certain people their charm, their energy, and their powers of persuasion. Tsav therefore was both a physical substance and that invisible power that allows certain people to bend others to their will.[258]

The problem was—and most Tiv of that time appear to have believed that this was the problem with their society—that it was also possible to augment one’s tsav through artificial means, and this could only be accomplished by consuming human flesh.

Now, I should emphasize right away that there is no reason to believe that any Tiv actually did practice cannibalism. The idea of eating human flesh appears to have disgusted and horrified them as much as it would most Americans. Yet for centuries, most appear to have been veritably obsessed by the suspicion that some of their neighbors—and particularly prominent men who became de facto political leaders—were, in fact, secret cannibals. Men who built up their tsav by such means, the stories went, attained extraordinary powers: the ability to fly, to become impervious to weapons, to be able to send out their souls at night to kill their victims in such a way that their victims did not even know that they were dead, but would wander about, confused and feckless, to be harvested for their cannibal feasts. They became, in short, terrifying witches.[259]

The mbatsav, or society of witches, was always looking for new members, and the way to accomplish this was to trick people into eating human flesh. A witch would take a piece of the body of one of his own close relatives, who he had murdered, and place it in the victim’s food. If the man was foolish enough to eat it, he would contract a “flesh-debt,” and the society of witches ensured that flesh-debts are always paid.

Perhaps your friend, or some older man, has noticed that you have a large number of children, or brothers and sisters, and so tricks you into contracting the debt with him. He invites you to eat food in his house alone with him, and when you begin the meal he sets before you two dishes of sauce, one of which contains cooked human flesh …

If you eat from the wrong dish, but you do not have a “strong heart”—the potential to become a witch—you will become sick and flee from the house in terror. But if you have that hidden potential, the flesh will begin to work in you. That evening, you will find your house surrounded by screeching cats and owls. Strange noises will fill the air. Your new creditor will appear before you, backed by his confederates in evil. He will tell of how he killed his own brother so you two could dine together, and pretend to be tortured by the thought of having lost his own kin as you sit there, surrounded by your plump and healthy relatives. The other witches will concur, acting as if all this is your own fault. “You have sought for trouble, and trouble has come upon you. Come and lie down on the ground, that we may cut your throat.”[260]

There’s only one way out, and that’s to pledge a member of your own family as substitute. This is possible, because you will find you have terrible new powers, but they must be used as the other witches demand. One by one, you must kill off your brothers, sisters, children; their bodies will be stolen from their graves by the college of witches, brought back to life just long enough to be properly fattened, tortured, killed again, then carved and roasted for yet another feast.

The flesh debt goes on and on. The creditor keeps on coming. Unless the debtor has men behind him who are very strong in tsav, he cannot free himself from the flesh debt until he has given up all his people, and his family is finished. Then he goes himself and lies down on the ground to be slaughtered, and so the debt is finally discharged.[261]

The Slave Trade

In one sense, it’s obvious what’s going on here. Men with “strong hearts” have power and charisma; using it, they can manipulate debt to turn extra food into treasures, and treasures into wives, wards, and daughters, and thus become the heads of ever-growing families. But that very power and charisma that allows them to do this also makes them run the constant danger of sending the whole process jolting back into a kind of horrific implosion, of creating flesh-debts whereby one’s family is converted back into food.

Now, if one is simply trying to imagine the worst thing that could possibly happen to someone, surely, being forced to dine on the mutilated corpses of one’s own children would, anywhere, be pretty high on the list. Still, anthropologists have come to understand, over the years, that every society is haunted by slightly different nightmares, and these differences are significant. Horror stories, whether about vampires, ghouls, or flesh-eating zombies, always seem to reflect some aspect of the tellers’ own social lives, some terrifying potential, in the way they are accustomed to interact with each other, that they do not wish to acknowledge or confront, but also cannot help but talk about.[262]

In the Tiv case, what would that be? Clearly, Tiv did have a major problem with authority. They lived in a landscape dotted with compounds, each organized around a single older man with his numerous wives, children, and assorted hangers-on. Within each compound, that man had near-absolute authority. Outside there was no formal political structure, and Tiv were fiercely egalitarian. In other words: all men aspired to become the masters of large families, but they were extremely suspicious of any form of mastery. Hardly surprising, then, that Tiv men were so ambivalent about the nature of power that they became convinced that the very qualities that allow a man to rise to legitimate prominence could, if taken just a little bit further, turn him into a monster.[263] In fact, most Tiv seemed to assume that most male elders were witches, and that if a young person died, they were probably being paid off for a flesh-debt.

But this still doesn’t answer the one obvious question: Why is all this framed in terms of debt?

Here a little history is in order. It would appear that the ancestors of the Tiv arrived in the Benue river valley and adjacent lands sometime around 1750—a time when all of what’s now Nigeria was being torn apart by the Atlantic slave trade. Early stories relate how the Tiv, during their migrations, used to paint their wives and children with what looked like smallpox scars, so that potential raiders would be afraid to carry them off.[264] They established themselves in a notoriously inaccessible stretch of country and offered up ferocious defense against periodic raids from neighboring kingdoms to their north and west—with which they eventually came to a political rapprochement.[265]

The Tiv, then, were well aware of what was happening all around them. Consider, for example, the case of the copper bars whose use they were so careful to restrict, so as to avoid their becoming an allpurpose form of currency.

Now, copper bars had been used for money in this part of Africa for centuries, and at least in some places, for ordinary commercial transactions, as well. It was easy enough to do: one simply snapped them apart into smaller pieces, or pulled some of them into thin wires, twisted those around to little loops, and one had perfectly serviceable small change for everyday market transactions.[266] Most of the ones current in Tivland since the late eighteenth century, on the other hand, were mass-produced in factories in Birmingham and imported through the port of Old Calabar at the mouth of the Cross River, by slave-traders based in Liverpool and Bristol.[267] In all the country adjoining the Cross River—that is, in the region directly to the south of the Tiv territory—copper bars were used as everyday currency. This was presumably how they entered Tivland; they were either carried in by peddlers from the Cross River or acquired by Tiv traders on expeditions abroad. All this, however, makes the fact that the Tiv refused to use copper bars as such a currency doubly significant.

During the 1760s alone, perhaps a hundred thousand Africans were shipped down the Cross River to Calabar and nearby ports, where they were put in chains, placed on British, French, or other European ships, and shipped across the Atlantic—part of perhaps a million and a half exported from the Bight of Biafra during the whole period of the Atlantic slave trade.[268] Some of them had been captured in wars or raids, or simply kidnapped. The majority, though, were carried off because of debts.

Here, though, I must explain something about the organization of the slave trade.

The Atlantic Slave Trade as a whole was a gigantic network of credit arrangements. Ship-owners based in Liverpool or Bristol would acquire goods on easy credit terms from local wholesalers, expecting to make good by selling slaves (also on credit) to planters in the Antilles and America, with commission agents in the city of London ultimately financing the affair through the profits of the sugar and tobacco trade.[269] Ship-owners would then transport their wares to African ports like Old Calabar. Calabar itself was the quintessential mercantile city-state, dominated by rich African merchants who dressed in European clothes, lived in European-style houses, and in some cases even sent their children to England to be educated.

On arrival, European traders would negotiate the value of their cargoes in the copper bars that served as the currency of the port. In 1698, a merchant aboard a ship called the Dragon noted the following prices he managed to establish for his wares:

By the height of the trade fifty years later, British ships were bringing in large quantities of cloth (both products of the newly created Manchester mills and calicoes from India), and iron and copper ware, along with incidental goods like beads, and also, for obvious reasons, substantial numbers of firearms.[272] The goods were then advanced to African merchants, again on credit, who assigned them to their own agents to move upstream.

The obvious problem was how to secure the debt. The trade was an extraordinarily duplicitous and brutal business, and slave raiders were unlikely to be dependable credit risks—especially when dealing with foreign merchants who they might never see again.[273] As a result, a system quickly developed in which European captains would demand security in the form of pawns.

The sort of “pawns” we are talking about here are clearly quite different from the kind we encountered among the Lele. In many of the kingdoms and trading towns of West Africa, the nature of pawnship appears to have already undergone profound changes by the time Europeans showed up on the scene around 1500—it had become, effectively, a kind of debt peonage. Debtors would pledge family members as surety for loans; the pawns would then become dependents in the creditors’ households, working their fields and tending to their household chores—their persons acting as security while their labor, effectively, substituted for interest.[274] Pawns were not slaves; they were not, like slaves, cut off from their families; but neither were they precisely free.[275] In Calabar and other ports, masters of slaving ships, on advancing goods to their African counterparts, soon developed the custom of demanding pawns as security—for instance, two of the merchants’ own dependents for every three slaves to be delivered, preferably including at least one member of the merchants’ families.[276] This was in practice not much different than demanding the surrender of hostages, and at times it created major political crises when captains, tired of waiting for delayed shipments, decided to take off with a cargo of pawns instead.

Upriver, debt pawns also played a major part in the trade. In one way, the area was a bit unusual. In most of West Africa, the trade ran through major kingdoms such as Dahomey or Asante to make wars and impose draconian punishments—one very common expedient for rulers was to manipulate the justice system, so that almost any crime came to be punishable by enslavement, or by death with the enslavement of one’s wife and children, or by outrageously high fines which, if one could not pay them, would cause the defaulter and his family to be sold as slaves. In another way, it is unusually revealing, since the lack of any larger government structures made it easier to see what was really happening. The pervasive climate of violence led to the systematic perversion of all the institutions of existing human economies, which were transformed into a gigantic apparatus of dehumanization and destruction.

In the Cross River region, the trade seems to have seen two phases. The first was a period of absolute terror and utter chaos, in which raids were frequent, and anyone traveling alone risked being kidnapped by roving gangs of thugs and sold to Calabar. Before long, villages lay abandoned; many people fled into the forest; men would have to form armed parties to work the fields.[277] This period was relatively brief. The second began when representatives of local merchant societies began to establish themselves in communities up and down the region, offering to restore order. The most famous of these was the Aro Confederacy, who called themselves, “Children of God.”[278] Backed by heavily armed mercenaries and the prestige of their famous Oracle at Arochukwu, they established a new and notoriously harsh justice system.[279] Kidnappers were hunted down and themselves sold as slaves. Safety was restored to roads and farmsteads. At the same time, Aro collaborated with local elders to create a code of ritual laws and penalties so comprehensive and severe that everyone was at constant risk of falling afoul of them.[280] Anyone who violated one would be turned over to the Aro for transport to the coast, with their accuser receiving their price in copper bars.[281] According to some contemporary accounts, a man who simply disliked his wife and was in need of brass rods could always come up with some reason to sell her, and the village elders—who received a share of the profits—would almost invariably concur.[282] The most ingenious trick of the merchant societies, though, was to assist in the dissemination of a secret society, called Ekpe. Ekpe was most famous for sponsoring magnificent masquerades and for initiating its members into arcane mysteries, but it also acted as a secret mechanism for the enforcement of debts.[283] In Calabar itself, for example, the Ekpe society had access to a whole range of sanctions, starting with boycotts (all members were forbidden to conduct trade with a defaulting debtor), fines, seizure of property, arrest, and finally, execution—with the most hapless victims left tied to trees, their lower jaws removed, as a warning to others.[284] It was ingenious, particularly, because such societies always allowed anyone to buy in, rising though the nine initiatory grades if they could pay the fee—these also exacted, of course, in the brass rods the merchants themselves supplied. In Calabar, the fee schedule for each grade looked like this:[285]

In other words, it was quite expensive. But membership quickly became the chief mark of honor and distinction everywhere. Entry fees were no doubt less exorbitant in small, distant communities, but the effect was still the same: thousands ended up in debt to the merchants, whether for the fees required for joining, or for the trade goods they supplied (mostly cloth and metal put to use creating the gear and costumes for the Ekpe performances—debts that they thus themselves became responsible for enforcing on themselves. These debts, too, were regularly paid in people, ostensibly yielded up as pawns.)

How did it work in practice? It appears to have varied a great deal from place to place. In the Afikpo district, on a remote part of the upper Cross River, for instance, we read that everyday affairs—the acquisition of food, for example—was conducted, as among the Tiv, “without trade or the use of money.” Brass rods, supplied by the merchant societies, were used to buy and sell slaves, but otherwise mostly as a social currency, “used for gifts and for payments in funerals, titles, and other ceremonies.”[286] Most of those payments, titles, and ceremonies were tied to the secret societies that the merchants had also brought to the area. All this does sound a bit like the Tiv arrangement, but the presence of the merchants ensured that the effects were very different:

In the old days, if anybody got into trouble or debt in the upper parts of the Cross River, and wanted ready money, he used generally to “pledge” one or more of his children, or some other members of his family or household, to one of the Akunakuna traders who paid periodical visits to his village. Or he would make a raid on some neighboring village, seize a child, and sell him or her to the same willing purchaser.[287]

The passage only makes sense if one recognizes that debtors were also, owing to their membership in the secret societies, collectors. The seizing of a child is a reference to the local practice of “panyarring,” current throughout West Africa, by which creditors despairing of repayment would simply sweep into the debtor’s community with a group of armed men and seize anything—people, goods, domestic animals—that could be easily carried off, then hold it hostage as security.[288] It didn’t matter if the people or goods had belonged to the debtor, or even the debtor’s relatives. A neighbor’s goats or children would do just as well, since the whole point was to bring social pressure on whoever owed the money. As William Bosman put it, “If the Debtor be an honest man and the Debt just, he immediately endeavors by the satisfaction of his Creditors to free his Countrymen.”[289] It was actually a quite sensible expedient in an environment with no central authority, where people tended to feel an enormous sense of responsibility toward other members of their community and very little responsibility toward anyone else. In the case of the secret society cited above, the debtor would, presumably, be calling in his own debts—real or imagined—to those outside the organization, in order not to have to send off members of his own family.[290]

Such expedients were not always effective. Often debtors would be forced to pawn more and more of their own children or dependents, until finally there was no recourse but to pawn themselves.[291] And of course, at the height of the slave trade, “pawning” had become little more than a euphemism. The distinction between pawns and slaves had largely disappeared. Debtors, like their families before them, ended up turned over to the Aro, then to the British, and finally, shackled and chained, crowded into tiny slaving vessels and sent off to be sold on plantations across the sea.[292]

If the Tiv, then, were haunted by the vision of an insidious secret organization that lured unsuspecting victims into debt traps, whereby they themselves became the enforcers of debts to be paid with the bodies of their children, and ultimately, themselves—one reason was because this was, literally happening to people who lived a few hundred miles away. Nor is the use of the phrase “flesh-debt” in any way inappropriate. Slave-traders might not have been reducing their victims to meat, but they were certainly reducing them to nothing more than bodies. To be a slave was to be plucked from one’s family, kin, friends, and community, stripped of one’s name, identity, and dignity; of everything that made one a person rather than a mere human machine capable of understanding orders. Neither were most slaves offered much opportunity to develop enduring human relations. Most that ended up in Caribbean or American plantations, though, were simply worked to death.

What is remarkable is that all this was done, the bodies extracted, through the very mechanisms of the human economy, premised on the principle that human lives are the ultimate value, to which nothing could possibly compare. Instead, all the same institutions—fees for initiations, means of calculating guilt and compensation, social currencies, debt pawnship—were turned into their opposite; the machinery was, as it were, thrown into reverse; and, as the Tiv also perceived, the gears and mechanisms designed for the creation of human beings collapsed on themselves and became the means for their destruction.

I do not want to leave the reader with the impression that what I am describing here is in any way peculiar to Africa. One could find the exact same things happening wherever human economies came into contact with commercial ones (and particularly, commercial economies with advanced military technology and an insatiable demand for human labor).

Remarkably similar things can be observed throughout Southeast Asia, particularly among hill and island people living on the fringes of major kingdoms. As the premier historian of the region, Anthony Reid, has pointed out, labor throughout Southeast Asia has long been organized above all through relations of debt bondage.

Even in relatively simple societies little penetrated by money, there were ritual needs for substantial expenditures—the payment of bride-price for marriage and the slaughter of a buffalo at the death of a family member. It is widely reported that such ritual needs are the most common reason why the poor become indebted to the rich …[293]

For instance, one practice, noted from Thailand to Sulawesi, is for a group of poor brothers to turn to a rich sponsor to pay for the expenses of one brother’s marriage. He’s then referred to as their “master.” This is more like a patron-client relation than anything else: the brothers might be obliged to do the occasional odd job, or appear as his entourage on occasions when he has to make a good impression—not much more. Still, technically, he owns their children, and “can also repossess the wife he provided if his bondsmen fail to carry out his obligations.”[294]

Elsewhere, we hear similar stories to those in Africa—of peasants pawning themselves or members of their families, or even gambling themselves into bondage; of principalities where penalties invariably took the form of heavy fines. “Frequently, of course, these fines could not be paid, and the condemned man, often accompanied by his dependents, became the bondsman of the ruler, of the injured party, or of whoever was able to pay his fine for him.”[295] Reid insists that most of this was relatively innocuous—in fact, poor men might take out loans for the express purpose of becoming debtors to some wealthy patron, who could provide them with food during hard times, a roof, a wife. Clearly this was not “slavery” in the ordinary sense. That is, unless the patron decided to ship some of his dependents off to creditors of his own in some distant city like Majapahit or Ternate, whereupon they might find themselves toiling in some grandee’s kitchen or pepper plantation like any other slave.

It’s important to point this out because one of the effects of the slave trade is that people who don’t actually live in Africa are often left with an image of that continent as an irredeemably violent, savage place—an image that has had disastrous effects on those who do live there. It might be fitting, then, to consider the history of one place that is usually represented as the polar opposite: Bali, the famous “land of ten thousand temples”—an island often pictured in anthropological texts and tourist brochures as if it were inhabited exclusively by placid, dreamy artists who spend their days arranging flowers and practicing synchronized dance routines.

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Bali had not yet obtained this reputation. At the time, it was still divided among a dozen tiny, squabbling kingdoms in an almost perpetual state of war. In fact, its reputation among the Dutch merchants and officials ensconced in nearby Java was almost exactly the opposite of what it is today. Balinese were considered a rude and violent people ruled by decadent, opium-addicted nobles whose wealth was based almost exclusively on their willingness to sell their subjects to foreigners as slaves. By the time the Dutch were fully in control in Java, Bali had been turned largely into a reservoir for the export of human beings—young Balinese women in particular being in great demand in cities through the region as both prostitutes and concubines.[296] As the island was drawn into the slave trade, almost the entire social and political system of the island was transformed into an apparatus for the forcible extraction of women. Even within villages, ordinary marriages took the form of “marriage by capture”—sometimes staged elopements, sometimes real forcible kidnapings, after which the kidnappers would pay a woman’s family to let the matter drop.[297] If a woman was captured by someone genuinely important, though, no compensation would be offered. Even in the 1960s, elders recalled how attractive young women used to be hidden away by their parents,

forbidden to bear towering offerings to temple festivals, lest they be espied by a royal scout and hustled into the closely protected female quarters of the palace, where the eyes of male visitors were restricted to foot level. For there was slim chance a girl would become a legitimate low-caste wife (penawing) of the rajah … More likely after affording a few years’ licentious satisfaction, she would degenerate into a slave-like servant.[298]

Or, if she did rise to such a position that the high-caste wives began to see her as a rival, she might be either poisoned or shipped off overseas to end up servicing soldiers at some Chinese-run bordello in Jogjakarta, or changing bedpans in the house of a French plantation-owner in the Indian Ocean island of Reunion.[299] Meanwhile, royal law codes were rewritten in all the usual ways, with the exception that here, the force of law was directed above all and explicitly against women. Not only were criminals and debtors to be enslaved and deported, but any married man was granted the power to renounce his wife, and by doing so render her, automatically, property of the local ruler, to be disposed of as he wished. Even a woman whose husband died before she had produced male offspring would to be handed over to the palace to be sold abroad.[300]

As Adrian Vickers explains, even Bali’s famous cockfights—so familiar to any first-year anthropology student—were originally promoted by royal courts as a way of recruiting human merchandise:

Kings even helped put people into debt by staging large cockfights in their capitals. The passion and extravagance encouraged by this exciting sport led many peasants to bet more than they could afford. As with any gambling, the hope of great wealth and the drama of a contest fueled ambitions which few could afford and at the end of the day, when the last spur had sunk into the chest of the last rooster, many peasants had no home and family to return to. They, and their wives and children, would be sold to Java.[301]

Reflections on Violence

I began this book by asking a question: How is it that moral obligations between people come to be thought of as debts, and as a result, end up justifying behavior that would otherwise seem utterly immoral?

I began this chapter by beginning to propose an answer: by making a distinction between commercial economies and what I call “human economies”—that is, those where money acts primarily as a social currency, to create, maintain, or sever relations between people rather than to purchase things. As Rospabé so cogently demonstrated, it is the peculiar quality of such social currencies that they are never quite equivalent to people. If anything, they are a constant reminder that human beings can never be equivalent to anything—even, ultimately, to one another. This is the profound truth of the blood-feud. No one can ever really forgive the man who killed his brother because every brother is unique. Nothing could substitute—not even some other man given the same name and status as your brother, or a concubine who will bear a son who will be named after your brother, or a ghost-wife who will bear a child pledged to someday avenge his death.

In a human economy, each person is unique, and of incomparable value, because each is a unique nexus of relations with others. A woman may be a daughter, sister, lover, rival, companion, mother, age-mate, and mentor to many different people in different ways. Each relation is unique, even in a society in which they are sustained through the constant giving back and forth of generic objects such as raffia cloth or bundles of copper wire. In one sense, those objects make one who one is—a fact illustrated by the way the objects used as social currencies are so often things otherwise used to clothe or decorate the human body, that help make one who one is in the eyes of others. Still, just as our clothes don’t really make us who we are, a relationship kept alive by the giving and taking of raffia is always something more than that.[302] This means that the raffia, in turn, is always something less. This is why I think Rospabé was right to emphasize the fact that in such economies, money can never substitute for a person: money is a way of acknowledging that very fact, that the debt cannot be paid. But even the notion that a person can substitute for a person, that one sister can somehow be equated with another, is by no means self-evident. In this sense, the term “human economy” is double-edged. These are, after all, economies: that is, systems of exchange in which qualities are reduced to quantities, allowing calculations of gain and loss—even if those calculations are simply a matter (as in sister exchange) of 1 equals 1, or (as in the feud) of 1 minus 1 equals 0.

How is this calculability effectuated? How does it become possible to treat people as if they are identical? The Lele example gave us a hint: to make a human being an object of exchange, one woman equivalent to another for example, requires first of all ripping her from her context; that is, tearing her away from that web of relations that makes her the unique conflux of relations that she is, and thus, into a generic value capable of being added and subtracted and used as a means to measure debt. This requires a certain violence. To make her equivalent to a bar of camwood takes even more violence, and it takes an enormous amount of sustained and systematic violence to rip her so completely from her context that she becomes a slave.

I should be clear here. I am not using the word “violence” metaphorically. I am not speaking merely of conceptual violence, but of the literal threat of broken bones and bruised flesh; of punches and kicks; in much the same way that when the ancient Hebrews spoke of their daughters in “bondage,” they were not being poetic, but talking about literal ropes and chains.

Most of us don’t like to think much about violence. Those lucky enough to live relatively comfortable, secure lives in modern cities tend either to act as if it does not exist or, when reminded that it does, to write off the larger world “out there” as a terrible, brutal place, with not much that can be done to help it. Either instinct allows us not to have to think about the degree to which even our own daily existence is defined by violence or at least the threat of violence (as I’ve often noted, think about what would happen if you were to insist on your right to enter a university library without a properly validated ID), and to overstate the importance—or at least the frequency—of things like war, terrorism, and violent crime. The role of force in providing the framework for human relations is simply more explicit in what we call “traditional societies”—even if in many, actual physical assault by one human on another occurs less often than in our own. Here’s a story from the Bunyoro kingdom, in East Africa:

Once a man moved into a new village. He wanted to find out what his neighbors were like, so in the middle of the night he pretended to beat his wife very severely, to see if the neighbors would come and remonstrate with him. But he did not really beat her; instead he beat a goatskin, while his wife screamed and cried out that he was killing her. Nobody came, and the very next day the man and his wife packed up and left that village and went to find some other place to live.[303]

The point is obvious. In a proper village, the neighbors should have rushed in, held him back, demanded to know what the woman could possibly have done to deserve such treatment. The dispute would become a collective concern that ended in some sort of collective settlement. This is how people ought to live. No reasonable man or woman would want to live in a place where neighbors don’t look after one another.

In its own way it’s a revealing story, charming even, but one must still ask: How would a community—even one the man in the story would have considered a proper community—have reacted if they thought she was beating him?[304] I think we all know the answer. The first case would have led to concern; the second would have led to ridicule. In Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, young villagers used to put on satirical skits making fun of husbands beaten by their wives, even to parade them about the town mounted backwards on an ass for everyone to jeer at.[305] No African society, as far as I know, went quite this far. (Neither did any African society burn as many witches—Western Europe at that time was a particularly savage place.) Yet as in most of the world, the assumption that the one sort of brutality was at least potentially legitimate, and that the other was not, was the framework within which relations between the sexes took place.[306]

What I want to emphasize is that there is a direct relation between that fact and the possibility of trading lives for one another. Anthropologists are fond of making diagrams to represent preferential marriage patterns. Sometimes, these diagrams can be quite beautiful:[307]

Ideal pattern of bilateral cross-cousin marriage

Sometimes they merely have a certain elegant simplicity, as in this diagram on an instance of Tiv sister exhange:[308]

Human beings, left to follow their own desires, rarely arrange themselves in symmetrical patterns. Such symmetry tends to be bought at a terrible human price. In the Tiv case, Akiga is actually willing to describe it:

Under the old system an elder who had a ward could always marry a young girl, however senile he might be, even if he were a leper with no hands or feet; no girl would dare to refuse him. If another man were attracted by his ward he would take his own and give her to the old man by force, in order to make an exchange. The girl had to go with the old man, sorrowfully carrying his goat-skin bag. If she ran back to her home her owner caught her and beat her, then bound her and brought her back to the elder. The old man was pleased, and grinned till he showed his blackened molars. “Wherever you go,” he told her, “you will be brought back here to me; so stop worrying, and settle down as my wife.” The girl fretted, till she wished the earth might swallow her. Some women even stabbed themselves to death when they were given to an old man against their will; but in spite of all, the Tiv did not care.[309]

The last line says everything. Citing it might seem unfair (the Tiv did, evidently, care enough to elect Akiga to be their first parliamentary representative, knowing he supported legislation to outlaw such practices), but it serves nicely to bring home the real point: that certain sorts of violence were considered morally acceptable.[310] No neighbors would rush in to intervene if a guardian was beating a runaway ward. Or if they did, it would be to insist that he use more gentle means to return her to her rightful husband. And it was because women knew that this is how their neighbors, or even parents, would react that “exchange marriage” was possible.

This is what I mean by people “ripped from their contexts.”

The Lele were fortunate enough to have largely escaped the devastations of the slave trade; the Tiv were sitting practically on the teeth of the shark, and they had to make heroic efforts to keep the threat at bay. Nonetheless, in both cases there were mechanisms for forcibly removing young women from their homes, and it was precisely this that made them exchangeable—though in each case too, a principle stipulated that a woman could only be exchanged for another woman. The few exceptions, when women could be exchanged for other things, emerged directly from war and slavery—that is, when the level of violence was significantly ratcheted up.

The slave trade, of course, represented violence on an entirely different scale. We are speaking here of destruction of genocidal proportions, in world-historic terms, comparable only to events like the destruction of New World civilizations or the Holocaust. Neither do I mean in any way to blame the victims: we need only imagine what would be likely to happen in our own society if a group of space aliens suddenly appeared, armed with undefeatable military technology, infinite wealth, and no recognizable morality—and announced that they were willing to pay a million dollars each for human workers, no questions asked. There will always be at least a handful of people unscrupulous enough to take advantage of such a situation—and a handful is all it takes.

Groups like the Aro Confederacy represent an all-too-familiar strategy, deployed by fascists, mafias, and right-wing gangsters everywhere: first unleash the criminal violence of an unlimited market, in which everything is for sale and the price of life becomes extremely cheap; then step in, offering to restore a certain measure of order—though one which in its very harshness leaves all the most profitable aspects of the earlier chaos intact. The violence is preserved within the structure of the law. Such mafias, too, almost invariably end up enforcing a strict code of honor in which morality becomes above all a matter of paying one’s debts.

Were this a different book, I might reflect here on the curious parallels between the Cross River societies and Bali, both of which saw a magnificent outburst of artistic creativity (Cross River Ekpe masks were a major influence on Picasso) that took the form, above all, of an efflorescence of theatrical performance, replete with intricate music, splendid costumes, and stylized dance—a kind of alternative political order as imaginary spectacle—at the exact moment that ordinary life became a game of constant peril in which any misstep might lead to being sent away. What was the link between the two? It’s an interesting question, but not one we can really answer here. For present purposes, the crucial question has to be: How common was this? The African slave trade was, as I mentioned, an unprecedented catastrophe, but commercial economies had already been extracting slaves from human economies for thousands of years. It is a practice as old as civilization. The question I want to ask is: To what degree is it actually constitutive of civilization itself?

I am not speaking strictly of slavery here, but of that process that dislodges people from the webs of mutual commitment, shared history, and collective responsibility that make them what they are, so as to make them exchangeable—that is, to make it possible to make them subject to the logic of debt. Slavery is just the logical end-point, the most extreme form of such disentanglement. But for that reason it provides us with a window on the process as a whole. What’s more, owing to its historical role, slavery has shaped our basic assumptions and institutions in ways that we are no longer aware of and whose influence we would probably never wish to acknowledge if we were. If we have become a debt society, it is because the legacy of war, conquest, and slavery has never completely gone away. It’s still there, lodged in our most intimate conceptions of honor, property, even freedom. It’s just that we can no longer see that it’s there.

In the next chapter, I will begin to describe how this happened.