Debt: The First 5000 Years - autonomous learning

15 4 DEBT
social currency, "used for gifts and for payments in funerals, titles, and
other ceremonies. "73 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:
In the old days, if anybody got into trouble or debt in the upper
parts of the Cross River, and wanted ready money, he used
generally to "pledge" one or more of his children, or some
other members of his family or household, to one of the Akunakuna
traders who paid periodical visits to his village. Or he
would make a raid on some neighboring village, seize a child,
and sell him or her to the same willing purchaser.74
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.75 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."76 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.n
Such expedients were not always effective. Often debtors would be
forced to pawn more and more of their own children or dependents,
until finally there was no recourse but to pawn themselves.78 And of
course, at the height of the slave trade, "pawning" had become little
more than a euphemism. The distinction between pawns and slaves
had largely disappeared. Debtors, like their families before them, ended
up turned over to the Aro, then to the British, and finally, shackled and