Debt: The First 5000 Years - autonomous learning

GAMES WITH SEX AND DEAT H 15 5
chained, crowded into tiny slaving vessels and sent off to be sold on
plantations across the sea9
I I I I I
If the Tiv, then, were haunted by the vision of an insidious secret organization
that lured unsuspecting victims into debt traps, whereby they
themselves became the enforcers of debts to be paid with the bodies
of their children, and ultimately, themselves-one reason was because
this was, literally happening to people who lived a few hundred miles
away. Nor is the use of the phrase "flesh-debt" in any way inappropriate.
Slave-traders might not have been reducing their victims to meat,
but they were certainly reducing them to nothing more than bodies. To
be a slave was to be plucked from one's family, kin, friends, and community,
stripped of one's name, identity, and dignity; of everything that
made one a person rather than a mere human machine capable of understanding
orders. Neither were most slaves offered much opportunity
to develop enduring human relations. Most that ended up in Caribbean
or American plantations, though, were simply worked to death.
What is remarkable is that all this was done, the bodies extracted,
through the very mechanisms of the human economy, premised on the
principle that human lives are the ultimate value, to which nothing
could possibly compare. Instead, all the same institutions-fees for initiations,
means of calculating guilt and compensation, social currencies,
debt pawnship-were turned into their opposite; the machinery was, as
it were, thrown into reverse; and, as the Tiv also perceived, the gears
and mechanisms designed for the creation of human beings collapsed
on themselves and became the means for their destruction.
I I I I I
I do not want to leave the reader with the impression that what I am
describing here is in any way peculiar to Africa. One could find the
exact same things happening wherever human economies came into
contact with commercial ones (and particularly, commercial economies
with advanced military technology and an insatiable demand for human
labor).
Remarkably similar things can be observed throughout Southeast
Asia, particularly amongst hill and island people living on the fringes of
major kingdoms. As the premier historian of the region, Anthony Reid,