Debt: The First 5,000 Years

by David Graeber

everyone insisted that this was not payment. The value of the wampum in no sense represented the value of the dead man’s life:

Among the Nuer, forty cattle were set as the standard fee for bloodwealth. But it was also the standard rate of bridewealth. The logic was this: if a man had been murdered before he was able to marry and produce offspring, it’s only natural that his spirit would be angry. He had been, effectively, robbed of his eternity. The best solution would be to use the cattle paid in settlement to acquire what was called a “ghost-wife”: a woman who would then be formally married to the dead man. Sometimes she was paired off with one of the victim’s brothers, sometimes she was left to cohabit with anyone she liked; it didn’t really matter too much who impregnated her, since he would be in no sense the father of her children.

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

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

The Lele were matrilineal. Children belonged not to their father’s clan, but to their mother’s. There was another way that men gained control over women, however.26 This was the system of blood debts.

Once the village was satisfied that a culprit had been identified, that person owed a blood-debt: that is, he owed the victim’s next of kin a human life. The culprit would thus have to transfer over a young woman from his family, his sister or her daughter, to be the victim’s ward, or “pawn.”

Pawnship was inherited. If a woman was someone’s pawn, so would her children be, and so would her daughters’ children. This meant that most males were also considered someone else’s man. Still, no one would accept a male pawn in payment of blood-debts: the whole point was to get hold of a young woman, who would then go on to produce additional pawn children.

the whole thing turned into an endlessly complicated chess game—one reason, Douglas remarks, why the term “pawn” seems singularly apropos. Just about every adult Lele male was both someone else’s pawn and engaged in a constant game of securing, swapping, or redeeming pawns.

Several points need to be emphasized here. First of all, what were being traded were, quite specifically, human lives. Douglas calls them “blood-debts,” but “life-debts” would be more appropriate. Say, for instance, a man is drowning, and another man rescues him. Or say he’s deathly ill but a doctor cures him. In either case, we would likely say one man “owes his life” to the other. So would the Lele, but they meant it literally.

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

The third and most important point is that in practice, “human life” actually meant “woman’s life”—or even more specifically, “young woman’s life.”

Still, even Mary Douglas, who was in no sense a feminist, was forced to admit that the whole arrangement did seem to operate as if it were one gigantic apparatus for asserting male control over women. This was true above all because women themselves could not own pawns.

Of course, since almost everyone was a pawn, or had been at some point in their lives, being one could not in itself be much of a tragedy. For male pawns it was in some ways quite advantageous, since one’s “owner” had to pay most of one’s fines and fees and even blood-debts.

To be a pawn, on the other hand, meant to have not one, but two different families to look after you: you still had your own mother and her brothers, but now you also had your “lord.”

There were all sorts of rules, but with no government, no courts, no judges to make authoritative decisions, no group of armed men willing or able to employ the threat of force to back those decisions up, rules were there to be adjusted and interpreted. In the end, everyone’s feelings had to be taken into account.

Except the women.

In other words, it was only when violence was brought into the equation that there was any question of buying and selling people.

but if one was able to move from A = A (one life equals another) to A = B (one life = one hundred cloths), it was only because the equation was established at the point of a spear.

Money almost always arises first from objects that are used primarily as adornment of the person. Beads, shells, feathers, dog or whale teeth, gold, and silver are all well-known cases in point.

There are exceptions (cattle, for instance), but as a general rule, it’s only when governments, and then markets, enter the picture that we begin to see currencies like barley, cheese, tobacco, or salt.

Perhaps because these are...bartered?

Slaves, after all, had no parents, or could be treated as if they didn’t; they had been forcibly removed from all those networks of mutual obligation and debt in which ordinary people acquired their outward identities. This was why they could be bought and sold.

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.

It seems like slavery is more important to discuss than debt.

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.

In principle, these three levels—ordinary consumption goods, masculine prestige goods, and rights in women—were completely separate. No amount of okra could get you a brass rod, just as, in principle, no number of brass rods could give you full rights to a woman.

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.

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 the average Tiv as much as it would the average American. 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.

Seems more like human foibles. We think our foes must be cheating all the time and being horrible doing it.

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 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.

There’s only one way out, and that’s to pledge a member of your own family as substitute.

Tellingly the other option is self sacrifice. Which many cultures find acceptable.

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.

Horror stories, whether about vampires, ghouls, or flesh-eating zombies, always turn out 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.

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.

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.

Power corrupts.

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.

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 into 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.

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.

Some of them had been captured in wars or raids, or simply kidnapped. The majority, though, were carried off because of debts.

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.

On arrival, European traders would negotiate the value of their cargoes in the copper bars that served as the currency of the port.

The goods were then advanced to African merchants, again on credit, who assigned them to their own agents to move upstream.

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.

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.

In Calabar and other ports, masters of slaving ships, on advancing goods to their African counterparts, developed the custom of demanding pawns as security—for instance, two of the merchant’s own dependents for every three slaves to be delivered, preferably including at least one member of the merchant’s families.

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.

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.

This ignores weirdly that a lot of tribes fought back seeing what would happen.

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.

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.

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.

The most ingenious trick of the merchant societies, though, was to assist in the dissemination of a secret society, called Ekpe, which made its members complicit in their own potential enslavement. 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.

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.