Debt: The First 5000 Years - autonomous learning

GAMES WITH SEX AND DEAT H 14 1
you: you still had your own mother and her brothers, but now you also
had your "lord."
For a woman, the very fact that she was the stakes in a game that
all men were playing afforded all sorts of opportunities to game the
system. In principle, a girl might be born a pawn, assigned to some
man for eventual marriage. In practice, however,
a little Lele girl would grow up a coquette. From infancy she
was the centre of affectionate, teasing, flirting attention. Her
affianced husband never gained more than a very limited control
over her . . . Since men competed with one another for
women there was scope for women to manoeuvre and intrigue.
Hopeful seducers were never lacking and no woman doubted
that she could get another husband if it suited her.30
In addition, a young Lele woman had one unique and powerful card
to play. Everyone was well aware that, if she completely refused to
countenance her situation, she always had the option of becoming a
"village-wife. "31
The institution of village-wife was a peculiarly Lele one. Probably
the best way to describe it is to imagine a hypothetical case. Let us say
that an old, important man acquires a young woman as pawn through
a blood-debt, and he decides to marry her himself. Technically, he has
the right to do so, but it's no fun for a young woman to be an old
man's third or fourth wife. Or, say he decides to offer her in marriage
to one of his male pawns in a village far away from her mother and
natal home. She protests. He ignores her protestations. She waits for
an opportune moment and slips off at night to an enemy village, where
she asks for sanctuary. This is always possible: all villages have their
traditional enemies. Neither would an enemy village refuse a woman
who came to them in such a situation. They would immediately declare
her "wife of the village," who all men living there would then be
obliged to protect.
It helps to understand that here, as in many parts of Africa, most
older men had several wives. This meant that the pool of women available
for younger men was considerably reduced. As our ethnographer
explains, the imbalance was a source of considerable sexual tension:
Everyone recognized that the young unmarried men coveted
the wives of their seniors. Indeed, one of their pastimes was to
plan seductions and the man who boasted of none was derided.
Since the old men wished to remain polygynists, with two or