Debt (28 page)

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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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:

By the height of the trade fifty years later, British ships were bringing in large quantities 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.
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The goods were then advanced to African merchants, again on credit, who assigned 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.
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As a result, a system quickly developed in which European captains would demand security in the form of pawns.

The sort of “pawns” 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 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.
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Pawns were not slaves; they were not, like slaves, cut off from their families; but neither were they precisely free.
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In Calabar and other ports, masters of slaving ships, on advancing goods to their African counterparts, soon developed the custom of
demanding pawns 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.
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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 pawns instead.

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. 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 institutions 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.
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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 God.”
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Backed by heavily armed mercenaries and the prestige of their famous Oracle at Arochukwu, they established a new and notoriously harsh justice system.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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The most ingenious trick of the merchant societies, though, was to assist 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.
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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.
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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 brass rods the merchants themselves supplied. In Calabar, the fee schedule for each grade looked like this:
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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 pawns.)

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.” Brass 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, titles, and other ceremonies.”
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Most of those payments, titles, 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:

The passage 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.
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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.”
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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.
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