The Punishment Monopoly. Pem Davidson Buck
of kingdoms such as Ghana impressed Muslim historians. Many of them, writing between 900 and 1500 CE, were armchair travelers who had never been to Africa. They drew on the knowledge of merchants who crossed the Sahara, following the spread of Islam, to reach the burgeoning markets for gold and people in Africa and the Mediterranean.28 Igboland was largely left out of these accounts. It had no great kingdoms; the Aro trade network had not yet developed; it had no gold; it wasn’t sufficiently unequal to produce large numbers of saleable people. Even its kola nuts were not the type preferred by Muslims to the north.29 Igboland remained “pagan” and off the map as far as both Muslims and Christians were concerned.
And while some enslaved Igbo in the Americas certainly learned to write, they didn’t have the freedom to spend time detailing their lives in Igboland. Of those who gained their freedom, only Olaudah Equiano wrote a narrative that includes a description of Igboland, the land from which he was captured as a child in approximately 1756, perhaps a couple of decades after Venis might have been shipped from the Bight of Biafra. His narrative is the only real, albeit limited, source of knowledge about Igbo life in the 1700s.30 So to get a picture of Venis’s life before she was enslaved, and how she might have come to be enslaved, we have to depend on reading backwards into history. Accounts began trickling in during the late 1800s, and in the mid-1900s anthropologists were sent by the British to give British administrators advice on controlling these people, whose women had a terrible tendency to “riot” with “savage passions” in “frenzied mobs” against British restrictions on women’s autonomy.31
Reading backward this way, assuming that little has changed in 150 or so years, is often an iffy proposition. The temptation to do this is particularly dangerous when we assume that so-called primitive people—Powhatan, Igbo—led a stagnant tradition-bound life, with no new ideas, no coming and going of peoples and powers, no realignments of neighboring polities, a “people without history.”32 In the case of the Igbo, however, we can be somewhat more confident about reading backwards—Equiano’s account provides a baseline against which to compare. More recent historians and anthropologists have therefore been able to use oral history as another source. People who were themselves quite elderly in the 1970s and 1980s told the histories they had learned as children from grandparents and great-grandparents. Those oral histories give a window onto life at the end of the 1800s. With caution, we can say that many attributes of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Igbo life do appear to be consistent with Equiano’s recollections, or more likely with the knowledge he acquired from other Igbo as an adult and included in his memoir.33 We can glean a bit more because kingdoms surrounding Igboland recorded their own histories, at least in terms of kings and conquests and migrations.
African, African American, European, and Euro-American historians and anthropologists have used all these sources to piece together a picture of Igboland in the 1700s. Their analysis depends on the older texts as well as on the more recent number-crunching computer analyses of census materials, shipping reports, days spent loading people at particular ports, and a wide array of other data. Needless to say, the perspective is no longer primarily colonialist. Since Igbo culture varied considerably from village to village, and since there is no way of knowing which might have been Venis’s home, I have tried to make a generalized composite picture of Igboland in the early 1700s and of the life Venis might have led.34
POWER AND AUTHORITY AMONG the Igbo were widely dispersed, and the power to punish was held in thoroughly local hands. Many small autonomous polities, in other words, held sovereignty, and there was nothing resembling a “state.” For the British, of course, this later became the source of massive headaches as they attempted to demonstrate their sovereignty by consolidating the power to punish in their own hands.
In Venis’s time, the power of the coastal kingdoms still held off the British, who thus had little direct effect on Igboland. Parts of Igboland were to some extent under the sway of the Igala, others under that of the kingdom of Benin, while Nri, another kingdom, had for a time a significant influence over northern Igboland, particularly in religious matters. There was considerable variety in the details of Igbo social structure, partially because of these differing influences, and partially because there was no overall governing or organizing structure; instead the Igbo shared certain aspects of culture.35 Basically, Igbo village-groups were autonomous groups of kin, organized into corporate lineages, and “governed” by elders in council and a number of separate organizations, all more or less cooperating and playing complementary functions. All controlled the punishing related to their own functions, and all were dependent on the acceptance of their rulings for enforcement.36 Village-groups in some areas did have a highest-ranking leader, called an eze, sometimes referred to in English as king. However, the eze was chosen by the elders, could be removed, and was under the guidance of the council.37 Thus, there was no king with power, no kingdom, and no centralized use of force. This is not to say the Igbo were thoroughly egalitarian. Some people had more wealth and power and influence than others, but gaining that prestige depended on giving away wealth. A certain amount of leveling was built into the system—you gave away much of your wealth, trading it in for prestige.38 Age mattered, as did seniority in the lineage system. Age and seniority got you respect; combined with talent they could get you influence and some power.
Venis most likely grew up in a large compound—a cluster of family buildings.39 One would have been her father’s public room, where he received visitors and carried on business, with his bedroom in back. Each of his wives would have had her own house, with garden land behind it and her own farmland farther away, outside the compound. In essence, each wife had her own sub-compound. The oldest son of the senior wife would inherit the compound and its land. Other sons inherited the land that had been allotted to their mother. This meant there was frequently a land shortage, and younger sons often moved out to establish their own compounds on unused patrilineage land. Or brothers could continue to share a compound. Having the land and organization to keep a large compound going, with lots of people in it, was a sign of prosperity and status.40
Near Venis’s family compound would be others headed by men who were close relatives of her father—forming other branches of the same patrilineage. If a branch died out, the land reverted to the patrilineage. The village itself would contain several such patrilineages, with highest status held by the patrilineage descended from the first son of the senior wife of the original village founder. Within each patrilineage, highest status went to the senior branch. Then there was one further level of organization: villages were part of village-groups, that is, several villages that saw themselves as related. The village-group was the largest cooperating unit in Igboland, carrying out some rituals together, coordinating rotating market days, and to some extent creating laws that applied to the entire village group. “Laws” on any level, however, were really a matter of consensus. The elders in council, after hearing what everyone who wanted to put their oar in had to say, could make a ruling. Everyone there could even approve of the ruling. But if people on a day-to-day basis ignored it, it would gradually fade away.41
Now, if you are like me, and like some of the anthropologists and historians who have written about Igboland, you have been subconsciously picturing men carrying out all this governance.42 That picture would be wrong, though. Wrong in two ways. Women as biological females did hold considerable authority. Beyond that, women could become men, fill positions that had to be held by men, and carry the authority that biological men typically held in those roles.43
So first, women as biological women. Each village and village group had an organization of the women who lived there—the women who had married into the patrilineages. The villages were exogamous—you had to marry an outsider, and on marrying, women moved to the husband’s village. So Venis’s mother would have been a member of the organization of patrilineage wives. As such, she would have helped settle disputes among the members, participating in judging and fining if necessary, but more often mediating. Most important, women were the traders, and the organization of wives ran the market, regulating prices and setting rules that men had to abide by.44 In cases of desperation the organization might decide that all the members would go on strike together, refusing to cook, refusing to have sex, maybe picking up and all going back to their natal village. The husbands apparently