Debt: The First 5000 Years - autonomous learning

13 8 DEBT
required, but not doing so was considered decidedly unwise); if an
adulterer was caught, he was expected to pay 50 or roo 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.
Gifts tended to flow upward. Young people were always giving
little presents of cloth as marks of respect to fathers, mothers, uncles,
and the like. These gifts were hierarchical in nature: that is, it never
occurred to those receiving them that they should have to reciprocate
in any way. As a result, elders, and especially elder men, usually had a
few extra pieces lying around, and young men, who could never weave
quite enough to meet their needs, would have to turn to them whenever
time for some major payment rolled around: for instance, if they had to
pay a major fine, or wished to hire a doctor to assist their wife in childbirth,
or wanted to join a cult society. They were thus always slightly
in debt, or at least slightly beholden, to their elders. But everyone also
had a whole range of friends and relatives who they had helped out,
and so could turn to for assistance.25
Marriage was particularly expensive, since the arrangements usually
required getting one's hands on several bars of camwood. If raffia cloth
was the small change of social life, camwood-a rare imported wood
used for the manufacture of cosmetics-was the high-denomination
currency. A hundred raffia cloths were equivalent to three to five bars.
Few individuals owned much in the way of camwood, usually just little
bits to grind up for their own use. Most was kept in each village's collective
treasury.
This is not to say that camwood was used for anything like
bridewealth-rather, it was used in marriage negotiations, in which
all sorts of gifts were passed back and forth. In fact, there was no
bridewealth. Men could not use money to acquire women; nor could
they use it to claim any rights over children. 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.
It is a common understanding among many traditional African
peoples that human beings do not simply die without a reason. If
someone dies, someone must have killed them. If a Lele woman died
in childbirth, for example, this was assumed to be because she had
committed adultery. The adulterer was thus responsible for the death.
Sometimes she would confess on her deathbed, otherwise the facts of
the matter would have to be established through divination. It was
the same if a baby died. If someone became sick, or slipped and fell