The Punishment Monopoly. Pem Davidson Buck
slaves, rather than marry wives.57 Given the way in which Igboland household slaves became incorporated into both production and reproduction, in many ways gaining something of the status of wives and lineage members, it seems that there could have been considerable slippage between the two positions. Nwokeji says that it was the British objection to slavery after its abolition that made colonized Igbo female husbands claim that what they were practicing was a traditional form of marriage, not slavery. However, before colonization a woman simply owning a slave did not become a man. That gender became more flexible under the British seems highly improbable, given their extreme inflexibility on matters of sex and gender, and the way British colonialism typically destroyed whatever power women held, as it did for the Igbo.58
This is the context in which Venis would have grown up, expecting as she aged to gain status, perhaps wealth, perhaps wives. She would certainly have expected to exercise a certain amount of autonomy and initiative, to live a life where her own work directly benefited her and those around her, to whom she was bound by kinship, duty, and, we can hope, affection. That is not the life she lived, however.
BY THE TIME VENIS MIGHT HAVE been in her teens the Aro had expanded their trade network throughout Igboland from the base they had established at Arochukwu, near the border of what became Cameroon.59 Their focus by this time was on the provision of saleable people for the Atlantic slave trade, rather than for the smaller trade north across the Sahara. Nwokeji describes their spread as a trade diaspora.60 Aro merchant lineages set up in many Igbo towns, often establishing their own separate ward. Others started new Aro towns, often attracting a diverse group of non-Aro from around the region.61 The slave trade through the Bight of Biafra was an African affair, shaped by the social structure and cultural values of the various African societies involved. Although Aro traders were taking advantage of English demand, the slave trade didn’t become an English business until the traders reached the coast with their captives.62 Nor, in the Bight of Biafra, was it Muslim, as Americans often assume, although it certainly was in other areas.
The Aro used the existing systems for producing saleable people and modified those systems to take advantage of the growing English demand for slaves.63 Local wars produced captives; some of these wars were apparently fomented by the Aro, much as the English fomented wars between Native American polities for the same purpose.64 Raids, not rising to the level of war between polities, but specifically for the purpose of stealing people to sell to the Aro, were another source of captives, mostly carried out by non-Aro in need of income. Kidnapping was extremely common—that is what happened to Olaudah Equiano.
Pawning people was part of the existing system before the Atlantic slave trade. You could even pawn yourself or someone over whom you had power. Junior members of lineages often found themselves pawned, as did children and slaves. Pawns were given in exchange for a loan. Theoretically, pawns would return to freedom once they paid off the debt and sometimes they did. Pawns worked part of the Igbo four-day week for the owner, part for themselves. With luck, they accumulated enough during the days that belonged to them to eventually pay off the debt. Or the family that had pawned them might later redeem them. Without luck, the pawn might be sold to pay off the rest of the debt, or might simply remain a pawn forever.65 Poverty and sometimes famine were quite real in war-torn areas of Igboland by the 1800s—a point of similarity between Venis’s home and Scotland, the home of Alexander Davidson, her owner-to-be.66
Thus debt was common, an incentive for pawning and, as the Atlantic slave trade grew, for kidnapping and raiding among those who could pull it off. Alternatively, needy parents sometimes sold their children to pay off debt or in hopes that the child would now have enough to eat. It is unlikely that this happened to Venis; people sold by their parents for economic reasons were usually bought and kept as domestic slaves, rather than sold into the Atlantic trade.67 Nonetheless, Venis could have been caught up by any of these systems for producing slaves.
Another possibility: perhaps Venis was trapped in the “justice” system. That system played a critical role in the slave trade; punishment provided unfree labor, as it did in England with indenture. At this point, we need to make a digression, back to village governance in Igboland, but also back to the concept of dual sovereignty, to see how the Aro did not simply use the existing social control system, but enhanced it, or perhaps changed it so dramatically that it was to all intents and purposes a new system.
IN TALKING ABOUT HOW IGBO VILLAGES worked, I described only a part of their system of governance, the secular part, with some intimations of the role of religion. However, anthropologists seem to agree that “the real rulers of Igbo towns were the ancestors or spirits, and that the living persons who acted as rulers were merely the agents of these divinities.”68 Reminiscent of dual sovereignty for the Powhatan and for the early English, Igbo priests had great authority.69 They determined the desires of the spirits or gods through divination, and in consultation with the elders decided what should be done. The outcome was then declared to the village. These invisible divine beings made their presence very real, manifested sometimes by strange noises in the night and regularly in the performance of masquerades. Displeasing them caused sickness, bad luck, or death for individuals, for lineages, or for whole villages.70 It thus behooved everyone to avoid those specific behaviors that could bring supernatural disaster, major offenses such as murder, adultery, incest (which included sex between people born in the same village), or sex after the birth of a child before the woman had had a period (if the result was a birth, she was punished by being buried alive and the baby was thrown away). Seizing and selling the child of a member of your own village was another such offense, punished by hanging.71 Unauthorized viewing of the secret and sacred masquerade costumes was another. Land disputes that couldn’t be settled by mediation were also under the purview of the priests. As in England and in Virginia’s parish processioning, control of land, the validation of who had the right to use a particular bit of land, was so critical to the entire social structure that it was overseen by sacred authority. Igbo priests used divination to determine who was right in such disputes. Apparently, the priest often concluded that both were wrong and redrew the boundaries.72
Other offenses, such as stealing, were merely against the law but did not offend the gods.73 Traditionally, when a violator was caught red-handed those involved administered punishment instantly. Some thieves were buried alive; other forms of execution, or beating, were also possible. Less severe offenses against human law, such as refusal to return the bridewealth in a case of divorce, unpaid debts, or fights in which someone was injured, required less severe punishment. Fines or various forms of restitution were common. In cases that were not clear-cut, a group of elders would act as arbitrators. If they didn’t reach an agreement or if the defendant refused to cooperate with the judgment, either party could call for a trial at a meeting of the whole village. Judges would be appointed, everyone who wanted to express an opinion was given their say, and if necessary, the priest would consult spiritual beings through divination. For less dramatic offenses the secular organizations concerned, for instance the men’s age-grade cohorts or the organization of patrilineage wives, did the judging and punishing.74 These organizations generally imposed fines of some sort, which were paid into the organization itself and used both for feasting and for division among the organization members.
Some Igbo villages had oracles they consulted through their priests.75 The Igbo generally assumed that illness, death, and disasters were the result of violations that displeased the gods, and oracles could tell you what you needed to do to remove the pollution that was the cause of your problems. A class of slaves served these oracles and their shrines, supervised by the shrine priest, carrying out religious duties, sometimes mediating disputes, and sometimes enforcing the priest’s decisions. Some authors have described this as a caste system; others disagree.76 In any case, a possible sacrifice was to provide a slave for the shrine. You could buy a slave for this purpose, or you could volunteer yourself or a family member. You could take refuge at a shrine in a neighboring village to escape capital punishment—but in exchange for your life, you became a slave in service to the shrine. War captives could do the same to avoid being sold into the trans-Sahara slave trade. Traditionally, such slaves served for life and were not sold away.77 Their situation was different from that of household slaves.