Debt (27 page)

I have dwelt on the Lele in such detail in part because I wanted to convey some sense of why I was using the term “human economy,” what life is like inside one, what sort of dramas fill people’s days, and how money typically operates in the midst of all this. Lele currencies are, as I say, quintessential social currencies. They are used to mark every visit, every promise, every important moment in a man’s or woman’s life. It is surely significant, too, what the objects used as currency here actually were. Raffia cloth was used for clothing. In Douglas’s day, it was the main thing used to clothe the human body; camwood bars were the source of a red paste that was used as a cosmetic—it was the main substance used as makeup, by both men and women, to beautify themselves each day. These, then, were the materials used to shape people’s physical appearance, to make them appear mature, decent, attractive, and dignified to their fellows. They were what turned a mere naked body into a proper social being.

This is no coincidence. In fact, it’s extraordinarily common in what I’ve been calling human economies. 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. All are useless for any purpose other than making people look more interesting, and hence, more beautiful. The brass rods used by the Tiv might seem an exception, but actually they’re not: they were used mainly as raw material for the manufacture of jewelry, or simply twisted into hoops and worn at dances. 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.
⁴⁰

It also illustrates the peculiar progression of ideas that so often mark human economies. On the one hand, human life is the absolute value. There is no possible equivalent. Whether a life is given or taken, the debt is absolute. In places, this principle is indeed sacrosanct. More often, it is compromised by the elaborate games played by the Tiv, who treat the giving of lives, and the Lele, who treat the taking of lives, as creating debts that can only be paid by delivering another human being. In each case, too, the practice ends up engendering an extraordinarily complex game in which important men end up exchanging women, or at least, rights over their fertility.

But this is already a kind of opening. Once the game exists, once the principle of substitution comes in, there was always the possibility of extending it. When that begins to happen, systems of debt that were premised on creating people can—even here—suddenly become the means of destroying them.

As an example, let us once again return to the Tiv. The reader will recall that if a man did not have a sister or a ward to give in exchange for one’s wife, it was possible to assuage her parents and guardians by gifts of money. However, such a wife would never be considered truly his. Here too, there was one dramatic exception. A man could buy a slave, a woman kidnapped in a raid from a distant country.
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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.

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 brass 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.
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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 brass rods.
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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 brass rod, just as, in principle, no number of brass 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.
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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.
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The problem was—and most Tiv of that time appear to have believed that this was
the
problem with their society—that it was also possible to augment one’s
tsav
through artificial means, and this could only be accomplished by consuming human flesh.

Now, I should emphasize right away that there is no reason to believe that any Tiv actually did practice cannibalism. The idea of eating human flesh appears to have disgusted and horrified them as much as it would most Americans. Yet for centuries, most appear to have been veritably obsessed by the suspicion that some of their neighbors—and particularly prominent men who became de facto political leaders—were, in fact, secret cannibals. Men who built up their
tsav
by such means, the stories went, attained extraordinary powers: the ability to fly, to become impervious to weapons, to be able to send out their souls at night to kill their victims in such a way that their victims did not even know that they were dead, but would wander about, confused and feckless, to be harvested for their cannibal feasts. They became, in short, terrifying witches.
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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.

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.”
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There’s only one way out, and that’s to pledge a member of your own family as substitute. This is possible, because you will find you have terrible new powers, but they must be used as the other witches demand. One by one, you must kill off your brothers, sisters, children; their bodies will be stolen from their graves by the college of witches, brought back to life just long enough to be properly fattened, tortured, killed again, then carved and roasted for yet another feast.

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.
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In the Tiv case, what would that be? Clearly, Tiv did have a major problem with authority. They lived in a landscape dotted with compounds, each organized around a single older man with his numerous wives, children, and assorted hangers-on. Within each compound, that man had near-absolute authority. Outside there was no formal political structure, and Tiv were fiercely egalitarian. In other words: all men aspired to become the masters of large families, but they were extremely suspicious of any form of mastery. Hardly surprising, then, that Tiv men were so ambivalent about the nature of power that they became convinced that the very qualities that allow a man to rise to legitimate prominence could, if taken just a little bit further, turn him into a monster.
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In fact, most Tiv seemed to assume that most male elders
were
witches, and that if a young person died, they were probably being paid off for a flesh-debt.

But this still doesn’t answer the one obvious question: Why is all this framed in terms of debt?