Debt

  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.46

  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.”47

  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.48

  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.49

  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.50 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.51 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.52

  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.53 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.54 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 pedlars 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.55 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.56 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:

  one bar iron 4 copper bars

  one bunch of beads 4 copper bars

  five rangoes57 4 copper bars

  one basin No. 1 4 copper bars

  one tankard 3 copper bars

  one yard linen 1 copper bar

  six knives 1 copper bar

  one brass bell No. 1 3 copper bars58

  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.59 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.60 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.61 Pawns were not slaves; they were not, like slaves, cut off from their families; but neither were they precisely free.62 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.63 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.64 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.”65 Backed by heavily armed mercenaries and the prestige of their famous Oracle at Arochukwu, they established a new and notoriously harsh justice system.66 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.67 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.68 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.69 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.70 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.71 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:72

  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.”73 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.74

  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 t
he 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.75 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 endeavours by the satisfaction of his Creditors to free his Countrymen.”76 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.77

  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.78 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.79