Debt: The First 5000 Years - autonomous learning

GAMES WITH SEX AND DEAT H 13 9
while climbing a tree, one would check to see if they had been involved
in any quarrel that could be said to have caused the misfortune. If all
else failed, one could employ magical means to identify the sorcerer.
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."
As with the Tiv, the system quickly became immensely complicated.
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. Douglas's Lele informants
emphasized that any man would naturally want to have many of these
as possible:
Ask "Why do you want to have more pawns" and they invariably
say, "The advantage of owning pawns is that if you incur
a blood-debt, you can settle it by paying one of your pawns,
and your own sisters remain free." Ask, "Why do you wish
your own sisters to remain free" and they reply, "Ah! then if
I incur a blood-debt, I can settle it by giving one of them as
a pawn . . ."
Every man is always aware that at any time he is liable for
a blood-debt. If any woman he has seduced confesses his name
in the throes of child-birth, and subsequently dies, or if her
child dies, or if anyone he has quarreled with dies of illness
or accident, he may be held responsible . . . Even if a woman
runs away from her husband, and fighting breaks out on her
account, the deaths will be laid at her door, and her brother
or mother's brother will have to pay up. Since only women
are accepted as blood-compensation, and since compensation
is demanded for all deaths, of men as well as of women, it is
obvious that there can never be enough to go around. Men fall
into arrears in their pawnship obligations, and girls used to be
pledged before their birth, even before their mothers were of
marriageable ageY
In other words, the whole thing turned into an endlessly complicated
chess game-one reason, Douglas remarks, why the term "pawn"