Debt: The First 5000 Years Part 5

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 bra.s.s rods.

We have perhaps a general principle: to make something saleable, 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.42 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 bra.s.s rods.43 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 dependants 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 bra.s.s rod, just as, in principle, no number of bra.s.s 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.44 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.45 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 f.e.c.kless, 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 subst.i.tute. 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 a.s.sorted 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 a.s.sume 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 ma.s.s-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 bra.s.s bell No. 1 3 copper bars58.

By the height of the trade fifty years later, British ships were bringing in large quant.i.ties 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 a.s.signed 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 p.a.w.ns.

The sort of "p.a.w.ns" 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 p.a.w.nship 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 p.a.w.ns would then become dependents in the creditors' households, working their fields and tending to their household ch.o.r.es-their persons acting as security while their labor, effectively, subst.i.tuted for interest.61 p.a.w.ns 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 p.a.w.ns 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 p.a.w.ns instead.

Upriver, debt p.a.w.ns 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 inst.i.tutions 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 G.o.d."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 bra.s.s 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 a.s.sist 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 bra.s.s 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 p.a.w.ns.) 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." Bra.s.s 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, t.i.tles, and other ceremonies."73 Most of those payments, t.i.tles, 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 pa.s.sage 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.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 p.a.w.n more and more of their own children or dependents, until finally there was no recourse but to p.a.w.n themselves.78 And of course, at the height of the slave trade, "p.a.w.ning" had become little more than a euphemism. The distinction between p.a.w.ns 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 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, ident.i.ty, 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 inst.i.tutions-fees for initiations, means of calculating guilt and compensation, social currencies, debt p.a.w.nship-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 amongst 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 ...80 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."81 Elsewhere, we hear similar stories to those in Africa-of peasants p.a.w.ning themselves or members of their families, or even gambling themselves into bondage; of princ.i.p.alities 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 dependants, became the bondsman of the ruler, of the injured party, or of whoever was able to pay his fine for him."82 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 Maj.a.pahit 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 n.o.bles 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 prost.i.tutes and concubines.83 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 kidnappings, after which the kidnappers would pay a woman's family to let the matter drop.84 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 raja ... More likely after affording a few years' licentious satisfaction, she would degenerate into a slave-like servant.85 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.86 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.87 As Adrian Vickers explains, even Bali's famous c.o.c.kfights-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 c.o.c.kfights in their capitals. The pa.s.sion 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 fuelled 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.88

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 Rospabe 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 subst.i.tute-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 ill.u.s.trated 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.89 This means that the raffia, in turn, is always something less. This is why I think Rospabe was right to emphasize the fact that in such economies, money can never subst.i.tute 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 subst.i.tute 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 quant.i.ties, 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 a.s.sault 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. n.o.body 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.90 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?91 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 a.s.s for everyone to jeer at.92 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 a.s.sumption 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 s.e.xes took place.93 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:94 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:95 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.96 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.97 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 s.p.a.ce 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 Pica.s.so) 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 const.i.tutive 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 a.s.sumptions and inst.i.tutions 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.

Chapter Seven.

HONOR AND DEGRADATION.

OR, ON THE FOUNDATIONS OF CONTEMPORARY CIVILIZATION.

ur5 [HAR]: n., liver; spleen; heart, soul; bulk, main body; foundation; loan; obligation; interest; surplus, profit; interest-bearing debt; repayment; slave-woman.

-early Sumerian dictionary1.

It is just to give each what is owed.

-Simonides.

IN THE LAST CHAPTER, I offered a glimpse of how human economies, with their social currencies-which are used to measure, a.s.sess, and maintain relationships between people, and only perhaps incidentally to acquire material goods-might be transformed into something else. What we discovered was that we cannot begin to think about such questions without taking into account the role of sheer physical violence. In the case of the African slave trade, this was primarily violence imposed from outside. Nonetheless, its very suddenness, its very brutality, provides us with a sort of freeze-frame of a process that must have occurred in a much slower, more haphazard fashion in other times and places. This is because there is every reason to believe that slavery, with its unique ability to rip human beings from their contexts, to turn them into abstractions, played a key role in the rise of markets everywhere.

What happens, then, when the same process happens more slowly? It would seem that much of this history is permanently lost-since in both the ancient Middle East and the ancient Mediterranean, most of the really critical moments seem to have occurred just before the advent of written records. Still, the broad outlines can be reconstructed. The best way to do so, I believe, is to start from a single, odd, vexed concept: the concept of honor, which can be treated as a kind of artifact, or even as a hieroglyphic, a fragment preserved from history that seems to compress into itself the answer to almost everything we've been trying to understand. On the one hand, violence: men who live by violence, whether soldiers or gangsters, are almost invariably obsessed with honor, and a.s.saults on honor are considered the most obvious justification for acts of violence. On the other, debt. We speak both of debts of honor, and honoring one's debts; in fact, the transition from one to the other provides the best clue to how debts emerge from obligations; even as the notion of honor seemed to echo a defiant insistence that financial debts are not really the most important ones; an echo, here, of arguments that, like those in the Vedas and the Bible, go back to the very dawn of the market itself. Even more disturbingly, since the notion of honor makes no sense without the possibility of degradation, reconstructing this history reveals how much our basic concepts of freedom and morality took shape within inst.i.tutions-notably, but not only, slavery-that we'd sooner not have to think about at all.

To underscore some of the paradoxes surrounding the concept and bring home what's really at stake here, let us consider the story of one man who survived the Middle Pa.s.sage: Olaudah Equiano, born sometime around 1745 in a rural community somewhere within the confines of the Kingdom of Benin. Kidnapped from his home at the age of eleven, Equiano was eventually sold to British slavers operating in the Bight of Biafra, from whence he was conveyed first to Barbados, then to a plantation in colonial Virginia.

Equiano's further adventures-and there were many-are narrated in his autobiography, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano: or, Gustavus Va.s.sa, the African, published in 1789. After spending much of the Seven Years' War hauling gunpowder on a British frigate, he was promised his freedom, denied his freedom, sold to several owners-who regularly lied to him, promising his freedom, and then broke their word-until he pa.s.sed into the hands of a Quaker merchant in Pennsylvania, who eventually allowed him to purchase his freedom. Over the course of his later years he was to become a successful merchant in his own right, a best-selling author, an Arctic explorer, and eventually, one of the leading voices of English Abolitionism. His eloquence and the power of his life story played significant parts in the movement that led to the British abolition of the slave trade in 1807.

Readers of Equiano's book are often troubled by one aspect of the story: that for most of his early life, he was not opposed to the inst.i.tution of slavery. At one point, while saving money to buy his freedom, he even briefly took a job that involved purchasing slaves in Africa. Equiano only came around to an abolitionist position after converting to Methodism and falling in with religious activists against the trade. Many have asked: Why did it take him so long? Surely if anyone had reason to understand the evils of slavery, he did.

The answer seems, oddly, to lie in the man's very integrity. One thing that comes through strikingly in the book is that this was not only a man of endless resourcefulness and determination, but above all, a man of honor. Yet this created a terrible dilemma. To be made a slave is to be stripped of any possible honor. Equiano wished above all else to regain what had been taken from him. The problem is that honor is, by definition, something that exists in the eyes of others. To be able to recover it, then, a slave must necessarily adopt the rules and standards of the society that surrounds him, and this means that, in practice at least, he cannot absolutely reject the inst.i.tutions that deprived him of his honor in the first place.

It strikes me that this experience-of only being able to restore one's lost honor, to regain the ability to act with integrity by acting in accord with the terms of a system that one knows, through deeply traumatic personal experience, to be utterly unjust-is itself one of the most profoundly violent aspects of slavery. It is another example, perhaps, of the need to argue in the master's language, but here taken to insidious extremes.

All societies based on slavery tend to be marked by this agonizing double consciousness: the awareness that the highest things one has to strive for are also, ultimately, wrong; but at the same time, the feeling that this is simply the nature of reality. This might help explain why throughout most of history, when slaves did rebel against their masters, they rarely rebelled against slavery itself. But the flip side of this is that even slave-owners seemed to feel that the whole arrangement was somehow fundamentally perverse or unnatural. First-year Roman law students, for instance, were made to memorize the following definition: slavery.

is an inst.i.tution according to the law of nations whereby one person falls under the property rights of another, contrary to nature.2 At the very least, there was always seen to be something disreputable and ugly about slavery. Anyone too close to it was tainted. Slave-traders particularly were scorned as inhuman brutes. Throughout history, moral justifications for slavery are rarely taken particularly seriously even by those who espouse them. For most of human history, most people saw slavery much as we see war: a tawdry business, to be sure, but one would have to be naive indeed to imagine it could simply be eliminated.

Honor Is Surplus Dignity.

So what is slavery? I've already begun to suggest an answer in the last chapter. Slavery is the ultimate form of being ripped from one's context, and thus from all the social relationships that make one a human being. Another way to put this is that the slave is, in a very real sense, dead.

This was the conclusion of the first scholar to carry out a broad historical survey of the inst.i.tution, an Egyptian sociologist named Ali 'Abd al-Wahid Wafi, in Paris in 1931.3 Everywhere, he observes, from the ancient world to then-present-day South America, one finds the same list of possible ways whereby a free person might be reduced to slavery: 1) By the law of force.

a. By surrender or capture in war b. By being the victim of raiding or kidnapping 2) As legal punishment for crimes (including debt) 3) Through paternal authority (a father's sale of his children) 4) Through the voluntary sale of one's self4.

Everywhere, too, capture in war is considered the only way that is considered absolutely legitimate. All the others were surrounded by moral problems. Kidnapping was obviously criminal, and parents would not sell children except under desperate circ.u.mstances.5 We read of famines in China so severe that thousands of poor men would castrate themselves, in the hope that they might sell themselves as eunuchs at court-but this was also seen as the sign of total social breakdown.6 Even the judicial process could easily be corrupted, as the ancients were well aware-especially when it came to enslavement for debt.

On one level, al-Wahid's argument is just an extended apologia for the role of slavery in Islam-widely criticized, since Islamic law never eliminated slavery, even when the inst.i.tution largely vanished in the rest of the Medieval world. True, he argues, Mohammed did not forbid the practice, but still, the early Caliphate was the first government we know of that actually succeeded in eliminating all these practices (judicial abuse, kidnappings, the sale of offspring) that had been recognized as social problems for thousands of years, and to limit slavery strictly to prisoners of war.

The book's most enduring contribution, though, lay simply in asking: What do all these circ.u.mstances have in common? Al-Wahid's answer is striking in its simplicity: one becomes a slave in situations where one would otherwise have died. This is obvious in the case of war: in the ancient world, the victor was a.s.sumed to have total power over the vanquished, including their women and children; all of them could be simply ma.s.sacred. Similarly, he argued, criminals were condemned to slavery only for capital crimes, and those who sold themselves, or their children, normally faced starvation.7 This is not just to say, though, that a slave was seen as owing his master his life since he would otherwise be dead.8 Perhaps this was true at the moment of his or her enslavement. But after that, a slave could not owe debts, because in almost every important sense, a slave was dead. In Roman law, this was quite explicit. If a Roman soldier was captured and lost his liberty, his family was expected to read his will and dispose of his possessions. Should he later regain his freedom, he would have to start over, even to the point of remarrying the woman who was now considered his widow.9 In West Africa, according to one French anthropologist, the same principles applied: Once he had been finally removed from his own milieu through capture the slave was considered as socially dead, just as if he had been vanquished and killed in combat. Among the Mande, at one time, prisoners of war brought home by the conquerors were offered dege (millet and milk porridge)-because it was held that a man should not die on an empty stomach-and then presented with their arms so that they could kill themselves. Anyone who refused was slapped on the face by his abductor and kept as a captive: he had accepted the contempt which deprived him of personality.10 Tiv horror stories about men who are dead but do not know it or who are brought back from the grave to serve their murderers, and Haitian zombie stories, all seem to play on this essential horror of slavery: the fact that it's a kind of living death.

In a book called Slavery and Social Death-surely the most profound comparative study of the inst.i.tution yet written-Orlando Patterson works out exactly what it has meant to be so completely and absolutely ripped from one's context.11 First of all, he emphasizes, slavery is unlike any other form of human relation because it is not a moral relation. Slave-owners might dress it up in all sorts of legalistic or paternalistic language, but really this is just window-dressing and no one really believes it; really, it is a relation based purely on violence; a slave must obey because if he doesn't, he can be beaten, tortured, or killed, and everyone is perfectly well aware of this. Second of all, being socially dead means that a slave has no binding moral relations with anyone else: he is alienated from his ancestors, community, family, clan, city; he cannot make contracts or meaningful promises, except at the whim of his master; even if he acquires a family, it can be broken up at any time. The relation of pure force that attached him to his master was hence the only human relationship that ultimately mattered. As a result-and this is the third essential element-the slave's situation was one of utter degradation. Hence the Mande warrior's slap: the captive, having refused his one final chance to save his honor by killing himself, must recognize that he will now be considered an entirely contemptible being.12 Yet at the same time, this ability to strip others of their dignity becomes, for the master, the foundation of his honor. As Patterson notes, there have been places-the Islamic world affords numerous examples-where slaves are not even put to work for profit; instead, rich men make a point of surrounding themselves with battalions of slave retainers simply for reasons of status, as tokens of their magnificence and nothing else.

It seems to me that this is precisely what gives honor its notoriously fragile quality. Men of honor tend to combine a sense of total ease and self-a.s.surance, which comes with the habit of command, with a notorious jumpiness, a heightened sensitivity to slights and insults, the feeling that a man (and it is almost always a man) is somehow reduced, humiliated, if any "debt of honor" is allowed to go unpaid. This is because honor is not the same as dignity. One might even say: honor is surplus dignity. It is that heightened consciousness of power, and its dangers, that comes from having stripped away the power and dignity of others; or at the very least, from the knowledge that one is capable of doing so. At its simplest, honor is that excess dignity that must be defended with the knife or sword (violent men, as we all know, are almost invariably obsessed with honor). Hence the warrior's ethos, where almost anything that could possibly be seen as a sign of disrespect-in inappropriate word, an inappropriate glance-is considered a challenge, or can be treated as such. Yet even where overt violence has largely been put out of the picture, wherever honor is at issue, it comes with a sense that dignity can be lost, and therefore must be constantly defended.

The result is that to this day, "honor" has two contradictory meanings. On the one hand, we can speak of honor as simple integrity. Decent people honor their commitments. This is clearly what "honor" meant for Equiano: to be an honorable man meant to be one who speaks the truth, obeys the law, keeps his promises, is fair and conscientious in his commercial dealings.13 His problem was that honor simultaneously meant something else, which had everything to do with the kind of violence required to reduce human beings to commodities to begin with.

The reader might be asking: But what does all this have to do with the origins of money? The answer is, surprisingly: everything. Some of the most genuinely archaic forms of money we know about appear to have been used precisely as measures of honor and degradation: that is, the value of money was, ultimately, the value of the power to turn others into money. The curious puzzle of the c.u.mal-the slave-girl money of medieval Ireland-would appear to be a dramatic ill.u.s.tration.

Honor Price (Early Medieval Ireland).

For much of its early history, Ireland's situation was not very different than that in many of the African societies we looked at in the end of the last chapter. It was a human economy perched uncomfortably on the fringe of an expanding commercial one. What's more, at certain periods there was a very lively slave trade. As one historian put it, "Ireland has no mineral wealth, and foreign luxury goods could be bought by Irish kings mainly for two export goods, cattle and people."14 Hardly surprising, perhaps, that cattle and people were the two major denominations of the currency. Still, by the time our earliest records kick in, around 600AD, the slave trade appears to have died off, and slavery itself was a waning inst.i.tution, coming under severe disapproval from the Church.15 Why, then, were c.u.mal still being used as units of account, to tally up debts that were actually paid out in cows, and in cups and brooches and other objects made of silver, or, in the case of minor transactions, sacks of wheat or oats? And there's an even more obvious question: Why women? There were plenty of male slaves in early Ireland, yet no one seems ever to have used them as money.

Most of what we know about the economy of early Medieval Ireland comes from legal sources-a series of law codes, drawn up by a powerful cla.s.s of jurists, dating roughly from the seventh to ninth centuries ad. These, however, are exceptionally rich. Ireland at that time was still very much a human economy. It was also a very rural one: people lived in scattered homesteads, not unlike the Tiv, growing wheat and tending cattle. The closest there were to towns were a few concentrations around monasteries. There appears to have been a near total absence of markets, except for a few on the coast-presumably, mainly slave or cattle markets-frequented by foreign ships.16 As a result, money was employed almost exclusively for social purposes: gifts; fees to craftsmen, doctors, poets, judges, and entertainers; various feudal payments (lords gave gifts of cattle to clients who then had to regularly supply them with food). The authors of the law codes didn't even know how to put a price on most goods of ordinary use-pitchers, pillows, chisels, slabs of bacon, and the like; no one seems ever to have paid money for them.17 Food was shared in families or delivered to feudal superiors, who laid it out in sumptuous feasts for friends, rivals, and retainers. Anyone needing a tool or furniture or clothing either went to a kinsman with the relevant craft skills or paid someone to make it. The objects themselves were not for sale. Kings, in turn, a.s.signed tasks to different clans: this one was to provide them with leather, this one poets, this one shields ... precisely the sort of unwieldy arrangement that markets were later developed to get around.18 Money could be loaned. There was a highly complex system of pledges and sureties to guarantee that debtors delivered what they owed. Mainly, though, it was used for paying fines. These fines are endlessly and meticulously elaborated in the codes, but what really strikes the contemporary observer is that they were carefully graded by rank. This is true of almost all the "Barbarian Law Codes"-the size of the penalties usually has at least as much do with the status of the victim as it does with the nature of the injury-but only in Ireland were things mapped out quite so systematically.

The key to the system was a notion of honor: literally "face."19 One's honor was the esteem one had in the eyes of others, one's honesty, integrity, and character, but also one's power, in the sense of the ability to protect oneself, and one's family and followers, from any sort of degradation or insult. Those who had the highest degree of honor were literally sacred beings: their persons and possessions were sacrosanct. What was so unusual about Celtic systems-and the Irish one went further with this than any other-was that honor could be precisely quantified. Every free person had his or her "honor price": the price that one had to pay for an insult to the person's dignity. These varied. The honor price of a king, for instance, was seven c.u.mal, or seven slave girls-this was the standard honor price for any sacred being, the same as a bishop or master poet. Since (as all sources hasten to point out) slave girls were not normally paid as such, this would mean, in the case of an insult to such a person's dignity, one would have to pay twenty-one milk cows or twenty-one ounces of silver.20 The honor price of a wealthy peasant was two and a half cows, of a minor lord, that, plus half a cow additionally for each of his free dependents-and since a lord, to remain a lord, had to have at least five of these, that brought him up to at least five cows total.21 Honor price is not to be confused with wergeld-the actual price of a man or woman's life. If one killed a man, one paid goods to the value of seven c.u.mals, in recompense for killing him, to which one then added his honor price, for having offended against his dignity (by killing him). Interestingly, only in the case of a king are the blood price and his honor price the same.

There were also payments for injury: if on