Debt

  4. On cumal see Nolan 1926, Einzig 1949:247–48, Gerriets 1978, 1981, 1985, Patterson 1982:168–69, Kelly 1998:112–13. Most merely emphasize that cumal were just used as units of account and we don’t know anything about earlier practices. It’s notable, though, that in the law codes, when several different commodities are used as units of account, they will include that country’s most significant exports, and trade currency (that’s why in Russian codes, the units were fur and silver). This would imply a significant trade in female slaves in the period just before written records.

  5. So Bender 1996.

  6. Here I am drawing on the detailed ethnographic survey work of Alain Testart (2000, 2001, 2002). Testart does a magnificent job synthesizing the evidence, though he too—as we’ll see in the next chapter—has some equally strange blind spots in his conclusions.

  7. “Although the rhetorical phrase ‘selling one’s daughter into prostitution’ has wide currency … the actual arrangement is more often presented as either a loan to the family or an advance payment for the girl’s (usually unspecified or misrepresented) services. The interest on these ‘loans’ is often 100 percent, and the principal may be increased by other debts—for living expenses, medical care, bribes to officials—accrued once the girl has begun work” (Bishop & Robinson 1998:105).

  8. So Michael Hudson (cited in Wray 1999), but it’s clear enough if one looks at the language of the original: “Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s house, thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor any thing that is thy neighbour’s” (Exodus 20:17, Deuteronomy 5:21).

  9. Wampum is a good example: Indians never seem to have used it to buy things from other members of the same community, although it was regularly used in conducting trade with settlers (see Graeber 2001:117–150). Others, like Yurok shell money or some Papuan currencies, are widely used as currencies in addition to their social functions, but the first seems to have emerged from the second.

  10. The most important texts on the “brideprice debate”: Evans-Pritchard 1931, Raglan 1931, Gray 1968, Comaroff 1980, Valeri 1994. One reason why Evans-Pritchard originally proposed to change the name from “brideprice” to “bridewealth” because the League of Nations had in 1926 outlawed the practice as a form of slavery (Guyer 1994).

  11. On Tiv kinship and economy: Duggan 1932; Abraham 1933; Downes 1933; Akiga 1939; L. Bohannan 1952; P. Bohannan 1955, 1957, 1959; P. & L. Bohannan 1953, 1968, Tseayo 1975; Keil 1979.

  12. Akiga Sai 1939:106 for a good analysis of how this could happen. For a later comparative reanalysis in regional perspective, see Fardon 1984, 1985.

  13. Paul Bohannan puts it: “The kem relationship of debt between a man and his wife’s guardian is never broken, because kem is perpetual, the debt can never be fully paid.” (1957:73.) Otherwise the account is from Akiga (1939:126–127).

  14. Rospabé 1993:35.

  15. Evans-Pritchard 1940:153.

  16. As the ethnographer puts it, “that they are accepting the cattle only in order to honour him and not because they are ready to take cattle for the life of their dead kinsman.” (1940:153)

  17. Op cit 154–155.

  18. Morgan 1851:332. Morgan, a lawyer by training, is using a technical term here, “condonation,” which the Oxford English Dictionary defines as “the voluntary overlooking of an offence.”

  19. Morgan 1851:333. The baseline was five fathoms for a man, ten for a woman, but other factors might intervene (T. Smith 1983:236; Morgan 1851:331–34; Parker 1926). On “mourning wars” see Richter 1983; the expression “putting his name upon the mat” is from Fenton 1978:315. Incidentally I am assuming it’s a man who dies, since these are the examples in the sources. It’s not clear if the same was done for women who died naturally.

  20. Evans-Pritchard 1940:155, 1951:109–11; Howell 1954:71–80, Gough 1971, Hutchinson 1996:62, 175–76.

  21. Rospabe 1995:47–48, citing Peters 1947.

  22. On mourning war: Richter 1983. Interestingly, something similar occurred among the Nambikwara. I mentioned in chapter 3 that the feasts held after barter could lead to seductions and jealous murders; Levi-Strauss adds that the ordinary way of resolving such murders is for the killer to marry the victim’s wife, adopt his children, and thus, effectively, become the person the victim used to be (1943:123).

  23. Though people did use them to commission certain fancy craft goods (say, musical instruments) from specialists in other villages (1963:54–55).

  24. Douglas 1958: 112; also 1982:43.

  25. Douglas (1963:58) estimates that a successful man will have spent at minimum 300 raffia cloths in payments, and given away at least 300 more as gifts, by the time he reached full social maturity.

  26. As anthropologists often note, the fact that one traces descent through the female line does not necessarily mean that women themselves have a lot of power. It can; it did among the Iroquois, and it does among Minangkabau right now. But it doesn’t necessarily.

  27. Douglas 1963:144–45, which is an adoption of 1960:3–4.

  28. She was in fact a conservative Catholic, married a Tory economist, and tended to look with disdain on all liberal concerns.

  29. As if to hammer this home, a man was actually considered to be owed a life-debt for fathering female children (Douglas 1963:115)—that could only be paid by allowing him to take one of his own daughters’ daughters as a pawn. This only makes sense if we assume a principle that only men can be owed a life, and therefore, in the case of women, the creation of life was assumed to be given free. Men, as noted, could be pawns and many were, but they were never traded.

  30. Douglas 1966:150.

  31. On “village-wives,” see particularly Douglas 1951, also 1963:128–40.

  32. Douglas 1963:76; compare 1951:11. The author is clearly simply repeating her informants’ explanation for the custom: the Lele didn’t “have to” make such an arrangement; in fact, most African societies did not.

  33. Some village wives were literally princesses, since chiefs’ daughters invariably chose to marry age-sets in this way. The daughters of chiefs were allowed to have sex with anyone they wanted, regardless of age-set, and also had the right to refuse sex, which ordinary village wives did not. Princesses of this sort were rare: there were only three chiefs in all Lele territory. Douglas estimates that the number of Lele women who became village wives, on the other hand, was about 10 percent (1951).

  34. For instance: 1960:4, 1963:145–46, 168–73, 1964:303. Obviously, men could sometimes put a great deal of physical pressure on women, at least, if everyone else agreed they had a moral right to do so, but even here Douglas emphasizes most women had a good deal of room for maneuver.

  35. On peacefulness, particularly, 1963:70–71.

  36. 1963:170.

  37. 1963:171.

  38. Cost of slaves: 1963:36, 1982:46–47.

  39. Partly, though, this was because the main purpose of male slaves was to be sacrificed at important men’s funerals (1963:36).

  40. See Graeber 2001, chapter 4. The great exception might seem to be the cattle money of the Nuer, and similar pastoral peoples. Yet even these were arguably adornment of the person of a sort.

  41. Akiga Sai 1939: 121, 158–60.

  42. So too when Tiv practiced marriage by capture: Akiga Sai (1939:137–41).

  43. Here I’m drawing on the classic “spheres of exchange” analysis by Paul Bohannan (1955, 1959), supplemented by Dorward (1976) and Guyer (2004:27–31).

  44. So Akiga Sai 1939:241; P. Bohannan 1955:66, P. & L. Bohannnan 1968:233, 235. As charisma in general: East in Akiga Sai 1939:236, Downes 1971:29.

  45. See Abraham 1933:26; Akiga Sai 1939:246; P. Bohannan 1958:3; Downes 1971:27.

  46. On witches in general: P. Bohannan 1957:187–88, 1958; Downes 1971: 32–25. On flesh debts (or ikipindi): Abraham 1933:81–84; Downes 1971:36–40.

  47. Akiga Sai 1939:257.

  48. Akiga Sai 1939:260.

/>   49. Following here Wilson 1951.

  50. Paul Bohannan (1958:4) makes a similar but not identical argument.

  51. Tiv migration stories (e.g. Abraham 1933:17–26; Akiga & Bohannan 1954; P. Bohannan 1954) do not explicitly say this, but they could easily be read this way. Akiga’s story (1939:137) about Tiv migrants painting what looked like sores on their women’s bodies so raiders would not take them is particularly suggestive. Despite their lack of government, Tiv did have a notoriously effective war organization, and as Abrahams notes (1933:19), managed to successfully play the Fulani and Jukun against each other by intervening in their own wars with each other.

  52. Some of these raids were not entirely unsuccessful. For a while, it would appear, the nearby Jukun kingdom, which made several ultimately unsuccessful efforts to incorporate the Tiv in the eighteenth century, appear to have been selling Tiv captives to slave dealers operating on the coast (Abraham 1933:19; Curtin 1965:255, 298; Latham 1973:29; Tambo 1976: 201–3.) It’s doubtless significant here that many Tiv insisted in the 1930s that the Jukun were themselves cannibals, and that the origins of the mbatsav “organization” lay in certain chiefly titles that Tiv acquired from them when they finally came to a political rapprochement (Abraham 1933:33–35).

  53. Jones 1958; Latham 1971; Northrup 1978:157–64; Herbert 2003:196. The famous Medieval Arab traveler Ibn Battuta, who we’ve already met at the court of the King of Singh in chapter 2, saw people using them as money in the Niger region, not far away, in the 1340s.

  54. Herbert (2003:181) estimates that Europeans imported about 20,000 tons of English brass and copper into Africa between 1699 and 1865. It was manufactured in Bristol, Cheadle, and Birmingham. The vast majority was exchanged for slaves

  55. I base this number on the fact that 152,076 slaves are known to have been exported from the Bight of Biafra as a whole in those years (Eltis, Behrent, Richardson & Klein 2000). The slave trade at Old Calabar lasted roughly from 1650 to 1841, during which time the port was by far the largest in the Bight, and the exports from the Bight itself during its height represent about 20 percent of all Africa (Lovejoy & Richardson 1999:337).

  56. Sheridan 1958, Price 1980, 1989, 1991.

  57. A larger variety of beads.

  58. Barbot in Talbot 1926 I: 185–186.

  59. Inkori (1982) demonstrates that in the late eighteenth century, British ships docking in Old Calabar brought on average 400 muskets each, and that between 1757 and 1806, the total number imported into the Calabar-Cameroons region was 22,986. Rum and other liquor was, however, a very minor import.

  60. One common expedient, especially in the early years, was for merchants to arrive at village markets with canoes full of wares, exchange them for slaves, and then, if they didn’t come up to quota, wait until nightfall and simply attack homesteads along the river, carrying off anyone they could find (Clarkson in Northrup 1978:66, also cited in Noah 1990:94.)

  61. The existing scholarly literature is of little help in reconstructing the history of how one form was transformed into the other, since there are only works treating pawnship either as a matter of kinship (e.g., Douglas 1964, Fardon 1985, 1986), or of commerce (e.g., Falola & Lovejoy 1994), but never comparing the two. As a result, many basic questions remain unasked. Falola and Lovejoy, for instance, suggest that pawns’ labor functions as interest, but the book contains no information on whether interest-bearing loans even existed in the parts of Africa where pawnship was practiced.

  62. It’s also clear that this sort of pawnship must have developed from something like the Lele institution. Many of the rules are the same: for instance, much as among the Lele, if a girl was pledged, the creditor often had the option of marrying her when she reached maturity, thus cancelling the debt.

  63. Lovejoy & Richardson 1999:349–51; 2001.

  64. Equiano 1789:6–13.

  65. Others included the Akunakuna, and the Efik, who were based in Calabar itself. The Aro were Igbo-speakers, and the region a patchwork of speakers of Igbo and Ibibio languages.

  66. On the Aro in general, see Jones 1939; Ottenberg 1958; Afigbo 1971; Ekejiuba 1972; Isichei 1976; Northrup 1978; Dike & Ekejiuba 1990; Nwauwa 1991.

  67. Dike and Ekejiuba (1990:150) estimate that 70 percent of the slaves sold to Europeans in the Bight of Biafra came from the Aro. Most of the rest came from the other merchant societies.

  68. One twentieth-century elder recalled, “a woman who commited adultery would be sold by her husband and the husband kept the money. Thieves were sold, and the money went to the elders whose responsibility it was to make the decision.” (Northrup 1978: 69)

  69. Northrup 1978:73

  70. On Ekpe as debt enforcement in Calabar itself: Jones 1968, Latham 1973:35–41, Lovejoy & Richardson 1999:347–49. On the spread of Ekpe to Arochukwe and throughout the region: Ruel 1969:250–258, Northrup 1978:109–110, Nwaka 1978, Ottenberg & Knudson 1985. Nwaka (1978:188) writes: “The Ekpe society, the most widespread in the Cross River area, formed the basis of local government. It performed executive and judicial functions in areas where it operated. Through the agency of its members, punishments were administered to public offenders, customs enforced and the authority of the elders upheld. Ekpe laws to some extent regulated the lives of most members of the community in such matters as the cleaning of towns and streets, collection of debts and other measures of public benefit.”

  71. Latham 1963:38.

  72. Taken from Walker 1875:120

  73. Ottenberg & Ottenberg 1962:124.

  74. Partridge 1905:72.

  75. If one were seeking a pawn, one couldn’t simply take a random child from a neighboring village, as his or her parents would quickly track the child down.

  76. In Lovejoy & Richardson 2001:74. For a parallel case in Ghana, see Getz 2003:85.

  77. Remarkably, Akiga Sai (1939:379–80) insists that, among the Tiv, this was the origin of slavery: the seizing of hostages from the same lineage as someone who refused to pay a debt. Say, he says, the debtor still refuses to pay. They will keep their hostage fettered for a while, then, finally, sell them in another country. “This is the origin of slavery.”

  78. So Harris 1972:128 writing of another Cross River district, Ikom: one of the major suppliers of slaves for Calabar. There, she notes, debtors were often obliged to pawn themselves when maternal and paternal kin intervened to prevent them from selling off any more of their relatives, with the result that they were finally enslaved and sent to Calabar.

  79. We do not know what proportion. King Eyo II told a British missionary that slaves “were sold for different reasons—some as prisoners of war, some for debt, some for breaking their country’s laws and some by great men who hated them” (in Noah 1990:95). This suggests that debt was not insignificant, especially since as Pier Larson (2000:18) notes, all sources at the time would list “war,” since it was considered the most legitimate. Compare Northrup (1978:76–80).

  80. Reid 1983:8

  81. op cit.

  82. Reid 1983:10

  83. Vickers (1996) provides an excellent history of Bali’s image in the North Atlantic imagination, from “savage Bali” to terrestrial paradise.

  84. Geertz & Geertz 1975; Boon 1977:121–24. Belo (1936:26) cites informants in the 1920s that insisted that marriage by capture was a fairly recent innovation, which emerged from gangs of young men stealing women from enemy villages and, often, demanding that their fathers pay money to get them back.

  85. Boon 1977:74

  86. Covarrubias (1937:12) notes that as early as 1619, Balinese women were in great demand in slave markets in Reunion.

  87. Boon 1977:28, van der Kraan 1983, Wiener 1995:27

  88. Vickers 1996:61. I need only remark that the anthropological literature on Bali, most notably Clifford Geertz’s famous essay on the Balinese cockfight as “deep play” (1973), a space where Balinese people can express their inner demons and tell stories about themselves, or his conception of pre-colonial governments as “theater st
ates” (1980) whose politics centered around gathering the resources to create magnificent rituals, might well be rethought in the light of all of this. There is a peculiar blindness in this literature. Even Boon, after the above quote about men hiding their daughters, proceeds on the very next page (1977:75) to refer to that government’s “subjects” as really just a “slightly taxed audience for its rituals,” as if the likely prospect of the rape, murder and enslavement of one’s children didn’t really matter, or, anyway, was not of explicitly political import.

  89. All this is meant in part as a critique of Louis Dumont’s arguments (1992) that the only truly egalitarian societies are modern ones, and even those only by default: since their ultimate value is individualism, and since each individual is valuable above all for the degree to which he or she is unique, there can be no basis for saying that anyone is intrinsically superior to anybody else. One can have the same effect without any doctrine of “Western individualism” at all. The entire concept of “individualism” needs to be seriously rethought.

  90. Beattie 1960: 61.

  91. True, in many traditional societies, penalties are given to men who beat their wives excessively. But again, the assumption is that some such behavior is at least par for the course.

  92. On charivari, see for instance Davis 1975, Darnton 1984. Keith Thomas (1972:630), who cites this very Nyoro story in an account of English villages of that time, recounts a whole series of social sanctions, such as dunking the “village scold,” that seem almost entirely aimed at the violent control of women, but oddly, he claims that charivari were directed at men who beat their wives, despite the fact that all other sources say the opposite.

  93. Not quite all. Again, one might cite Iroquois society of the same period as an example: it was in many senses a matriarchy, particularly on the everyday household level, and women were not exchanged.

  94. Taken from Trawick 2000:185, figure 11.

  95. The diagram is reproduced from P. Bohannan 1957:87.

  96. Akiga Sai 1939:161.

  97. So too among the Lele, where Mary Douglas (1963:131) remarks that it was considered acceptable to whip a village wife for refusing work or sex, but this was no reflection on her status, since the same was true of Lele wives married to just one man, too.