Debt: The First 5,000 Years

by David Graeber

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.