Читать книгу The Punishment Monopoly - Pem Davidson Buck - Страница 11

CHAPTER 3

Ancestor Tales of Slavery, Slaving, and Women with Voice

FEB 13, 1748

… APPRAISED YE ESTATE OF ALEXANDER DAVIDSON:

As follows: Negro woman named Venis ..... 30.0.0

One Negro boy named Adam ...................... 25.0.0

Into the story now come two sets of people propelled to Virginia by the two elite uses of force in the pursuit of power and wealth: war and punishment.¹ The first set were Africans, a “Negro woman named Venis” and a boy named Adam. Africans were captured in wars between rival kingdoms, wars defined by the Christian religious hierarchies and the English state as “just,” making it legally and religiously acceptable to sell those taken captive. Or, equally justified by African elites, they were taken to pay off debts, to punish misbehavior, or handed over as religious sacrifices.² The second set now entering the story were Scottish Jacobites, including Alexander Davidson, “choosing” to be sold, also with the approval of Christian religious hierarchies and the English state, rather than risk execution as punishment for participation, willingly or not, in a war between elites contending for sovereignty. Alexander, Venis, and Adam were all unfree laborers, but unlike Venis and Adam, Alexander’s servitude was temporary, probably for seven years. He died eventually as the owner of the unfree laborers listed in the appraisal of his estate. His ownership gave him the freedom to punish; he was the recipient of the benefits of the now well-established racialized difference between indenture and slavery, between whites who could not be enslaved and Africans and Indians who could.³

So first, Venis and her life in Igboland; then, in chapter 4, Alexander and his flight from Scotland. Finally, in chapter 5, Sarah Ellis enters the story. Born in Virginia, she became Alexander’s wife, and so starts the intertwining of the stories, Igbo, Scottish, and English Virginian, free and enslaved in a slave society.

“VENIS,” A NAME TO WHICH SHE SURELY answered, but quite likely not her own. “Negro,” a well-honed legal identity by 1748 but quite likely not the one she was born with. “Woman,” another well-honed legal identity but quite likely carrying implications far different from those where she was born. Thirty pounds, a monetary value placing her worth above all else Alexander owned, higher than a boy’s, and many times that of the cattle she was appraised with at Alexander’s death. It is likely, according to statistical analysis, that, described as a “woman,” not a “girl” or a “wench,” or an “old woman” and valued at thirty pounds, she was somewhere between twenty and thirty years old at the time of the estate evaluation. Adam, as a “boy,” could have been anywhere between childhood and twenty years of age, but given his above-average evaluation for a “boy,” he was quite likely in his late teens.⁴ Venis could have been his mother … or not. Alexander died intestate, so there is not even a will that might have indicated the relationship between Venis and Adam and might have given clues to where she came from, or what was to happen to her after Alexander’s death. So that is all I know of her—a brief surfacing in a court record in Spotsylvania County, Virginia, but otherwise invisible, despite living a life every bit as real as that of those Radfords and Davidsons whose traces are far more visible.

What follows is therefore fiction, at least as far as the actual person is concerned who was identified as “Venis” by those who held her enslaved in Virginia. But what happened to nine and a half million people, including Venis, and what they themselves did, in Africa and in the Americas, is not fiction, and it is that story I want to tell about punishment and state formation and people’s lives.⁵ So I am briefly borrowing Venis to be the central character who carries us from her life as a very young woman in what is now Nigeria to becoming a human commodity in the hands of Aro traders from the southeastern edge of what is now called Igboland, where I am assuming she lived.⁶ Apparently deemed unsuitable for purchase into a wealthy Aro or Igbo household, she would have been sold to English traders on the coastal Bight of Biafra sometime around 1730 or a bit after.⁷ Eventually she found herself the property of Alexander, perhaps a gift or a purchase to relieve Sarah, Alexander’s wife, of the female outdoor physical labor that marked a white Virginia family’s lower-class status. The contrast between these two ways of life, that of the Igbo town and of the recently formed Spotsylvania County, must have been stark, despite the fact that people lived enslaved in both.

Obviously, I have just made an enormous leap, from a mere entry in the appraisal of an estate to statements about who Venis was and where she came from. That leap is based purely on probabilities. About sixty percent of the people shipped to Virginia in the early 1700s were Igbo—or at least that is how the English identified them, perhaps less than accurately—and the numbers shipped from Biafra increased with time. The result was that most of the people growing tobacco in the Chesapeake had arrived on ships coming from ports on the Bight of Biafra, and most Igbo being shipped out of Africa were shipped from the Bight.⁸ Though in general many more men than women were sold to the Americas rather than kept as domestic slaves locally, an unusually high proportion of the people shipped from the Bight were women.⁹ This all makes it somewhat more likely that Venis came from Igboland rather than elsewhere in West Africa. If so, then she probably went through the hands of the Aro, as did a great many Igbo.¹⁰ The Aro traders from the periphery of Igboland organized the slave trade through the Bight during this period, using a highly developed network for creating debtors and criminals for sale, as well as for wars and raids to produce captives who could be sold.

Actually, Venis could have been born in Virginia. Africans who survived shipment to Virginia in the 1700s generally lived long enough to reproduce.¹¹ This was very different from what happened to Africans (and English indentured servants) who were shipped to the West Indies. There, conditions were so awful that it took three imports to raise the population permanently by one—they died too fast, and women were mostly too overworked and underfed for successful pregnancies.¹² So if Venis’s parents had arrived in Virginia in the early 1700s, they could well have lived to produce a healthy baby who would also survive. I’m guessing that this is not what happened, however, judging by her name. Owners commonly gave African arrivals classical names such as Caesar or Pluto, much as owners might name a dog or horse. Baptismal records in one Virginia parish rarely include such names. Babies born in Virginia to Africans were named by their parents, with the owner’s consent, or by negotiating with the owner, who had ultimate naming rights, and were often recorded with names that were diminutives of English names—Tom, not Thomas, Betty, not Elizabeth. African names were quite rare, although the family may have used them privately.¹³ So it is likely that Venis (or Venus) was named for a Roman goddess after her arrival; Adam, with a common English name, on the other hand, was probably born in Virginia. As for the timing of her arrival, there were importation peaks in Virginia in 1725, with 3,500 people, and in 1735, with 3,000.¹⁴ Of these, at least 1,600 a year came from Biafra.¹⁵

AFRICANS WERE AT FIRST ONLY ONE of several sources of coerced unfree labor in the developing Atlantic world, but by the 1700s they were the primary source. Enslaved Africans by then had outstripped the temporarily enslaved English indentured and enslaved Native Americans. Trading in human lives was hardly new; the business of the production and sale of unfree labor was probably the world’s first globalized business. Arguably, it was at the epicenter of a developing capitalism and funded the take-off of the Industrial Revolution.¹⁶

But long before capitalism had anything to do with it, people were selling each other all over the world.¹⁷ Slavery was often the punishment for crime. Often, particularly in somewhat less stratified societies, this slavery was tempered with some rights and with the possibility of earning freedom, as it was for Igbo household slaves before the burgeoning of the Atlantic slave trade in the 1600s.¹⁸

War captives were sold pretty much wherever people fought wars and had social structures that were sufficiently unequal that one person could benefit from the labor of others—labor in either sense of the word, whether the labor of reproduction or the labor of production. Male war captives were bought and sold in societies able to mount such a believable threat of force that owners assumed these well-trained fighters, now enslaved, would be too intimidated to kill them in their sleep. Greece and Rome, for instance, pulled this off, but there were male war captives in smaller numbers throughout much of Europe, along with many other people in various forms of unfree labor—serfs in Europe, “untouchables” in India, bound peasants in China.¹⁹ Coerced labor was the basis of wealth creation in all societies whose elites could muster the force to get away with it. However, in societies where the use of force was less centralized, where rapid and sure punishment by some form of police or military action wasn’t available, most male war captives were killed, often with ceremony.²⁰ At least some groups of Venis’s Igbo, for instance, gained respect by bringing home the heads of men they killed in war for ceremonial display—they didn’t leave them rotting dishonorably in public on posts as the English were wont to do.²¹

Women and children captured in war or raids were a far safer bet. Women could be quickly tethered by children, particularly if their children were given rights within the household or kin group that owned them. This was quite common in societies where having a large household and many kin and clients gave status. “Wealth in people” was what counted, as it did for the Powhatan, and as we will encounter again in the Scottish Highlands. Being able to support lots of followers marked the abundance you controlled.²² A bought woman could provide domestic labor; her children, fathered by men of the household, could be absorbed into the kin group or could be freed to become grateful retainers or clients. In some cases, she could also be eventually freed to function as an additional wife. For women, none of this was particularly unusual around the world, except in Europe with its formal and unusual insistence on monogamy—supplemented by rampant prostitution, kept women, and considerable winking at infidelity, at least among the elite and for men more generally.

Thus, that many African societies had slaves, like much of the rest of the world, should be no surprise. Most were women, but there were also men who were born as slaves or who were captured as children. Slaves performed a wide variety of tasks, from mining to farming to accounting to transportation to soldiering. The Igbo apparently had relatively few slaves, unlike some of their neighbors.²³ But even where slavery was more common in polities in what became Nigeria, it was not the basis of the political and economic structure of these polities in the 1700s. That changed in some areas after the British outlawed the Atlantic slave trade in 1807 and African elites needed another source of income. They turned to plantation production, such as the palm oil industry in Nigeria. So African elites continued buying and selling slaves, but instead of selling them to American elites, they used the slaves’ labor themselves.²⁴ This, of course, is long after Venis or her ancestors had left Africa. In her time and place, it was the Aro who organized the trade that would have carried Venis to the coast, to be used elsewhere.

IF VENIS ARRIVED IN VIRGINIA in her late teens or early twenties, the most common age for enslavement, she would have been old enough to have been thoroughly involved in the life of the Igbo village from which she came. Unfortunately for my story there was very little contemporary reporting about Igbo life in the 1700s. Although a lot was written by contemporary Africans and Europeans about the coastal kingdoms through whose ports Igbo captives were shipped, hardly anything was written about the inland villages where they had been captured. Europeans waited on the coast for African traders to deliver people to purchase, having negotiated the permission to do so with the local kings, who taxed them and restricted their movements.²⁵ Not that the European traders had much interest in going up the rivers of the Niger Delta to capture or purchase slaves themselves. They thought the coast was healthier.

The result was that African kings and traders determined the form taken by the slave trade just as much as did the Europeans. For a while Europeans recognized African sovereignties, just as they had recognized Powhatan sovereignty.²⁶ Africans maintained the political independence of what is now Nigeria into the mid-1800s, when the British began establishing protectorates. The first Europeans did not see anything at all of Igboland until 1830. And it wasn’t until the end of the 1800s that they penetrated much beyond the rivers. Missionaries were operating in what they referred to as that “Citadel of Satan” by the mid-1800s, but when the British declared a Protectorate over all of what is now southern Nigeria in 1906, there were still sections of the Igbo interior that had yet to see a European.²⁷ Thus for Venis’s time there are no recorded Igbo oral histories, no missionary reports, no travelers’ tales, no European traders to describe Igboland markets; nor did the international traders and historians from the Mediterranean world have much to say, although they did earlier.

There are detailed reports on the earlier medieval kingdoms of West Africa; the wealth, the kings, and the markets 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 gave in without much fuss.

Venis herself would have belonged to another organization—the multigenerational organization of patrilineage daughters. Patrilineage daughters had serious clout. As a group, they could decide to discipline the men of their patrilineage, all of whom would have sisters and cousins, women of their own generation and above, among the members of the organization of patrilineage daughters. Abusive husbands might find themselves punished by their lineage sisters. If the men were threatening to go to war with another village-group, the organization of patrilineage daughters, with members married into many different villages, mediated the quarrel. They likewise mediated disputes between individuals. A village dispute that couldn’t be settled at the village level might be referred for judgment to the organization of village-group patrilineage daughters. They might also decide to “sit on a man,” going to his compound en masse, hollering insults, exposing their private parts—the ultimate insult—and generally creating an enormously humiliating ruckus.⁴⁵ Patrilineage men, reportedly, were quite reluctant to get in wrong with the women of the patrilineage. Actually, Venis’s mother would have belonged to both these organizations, attending meetings of the patrilineage wives in her marital village, and travelling to different villages for meetings of the organization of patrilineage daughters. Meetings rotated among the homes of married members, and so the organization formed a network of connections between all the villages into which women of the patrilineage had married.

Religion provided other forms of enormous prestige and authority for biological women. The senior woman of a patrilineage was revered; her status was greater than that of the senior man, and her word carried greater authority. The senior woman of a patrilineage branch, within her own branch, was likewise revered, although in terms of the whole patrilineage her position was of lesser importance than that of senior women of more senior branches. Such women carried a semi-sacred aura, as, to some extent, did all elderly women and men. Beyond purely age and seniority—both ascribed characteristics—was the possibility of achieving another form of status. Wealthy women, whose exceptional ability to acquire wealth proved that the goddess had chosen them, would pay the costs of taking on the title of ekwe. In some parts of Igboland, these titled women functioned as the community’s final court of justice and law enforcement.⁴⁶ The most senior ekwe of a village-group, the agba ekwe, held “the most central political position” in the village-group, with vetoing rights in village and village-group assemblies.⁴⁷ She was second in rank only to the local goddess, and while there were also titles that men could take, and some gained such widespread influence that they were called eze—king-like—they could be challenged, be questioned, even lose status. This could not happen to the agba ekwe.⁴⁸

Anthropologists call this whole system, in which men and women had parallel positions and powers within their own sex, a dual-sex system.⁴⁹ Each sex had its areas of authority in relation to the village as a whole, and each had its own internal systems of organization. For men, the age-grade system was critical. Men went through life in cohorts, each cohort with its own leadership, and cohorts took on a succession of different responsibilities as they aged. Aged men who also were talented as informal leaders and in their own economic endeavors carried the greatest authority in the general village meetings.⁵⁰ Additionally, men could raise their status through the acquisition of wealth and of titles.

So far, we have been talking about men and women in the roles assigned to them, or available to them, as members of their biological sex. In that system, in daily life, men probably did have somewhat greater power and access to wealth than women did. Husbands had somewhat more power than wives. Only men could perform in masquerade as spirits who patrolled the village and brought people to judgment before the village council. It was men who received most of the bridewealth when a daughter married. Men of the patrilineage and its branches controlled land and houses; men controlled the crops (yams and palm oil) that produced the greatest profits and status. Women, farming a husband’s land, did largely control the crops they grew, but more of their crops went to feed their families, and when sold they didn’t bring in as much, so routes to prestige for women through wealth were a bit more difficult to traverse than they were for men.⁵¹

However, this isn’t the end of the story. Women could sometimes become men and as men take positions of authority, controlling land or people, or both.⁵² That they were not biological men did continue to matter, however. They were not “full men”; like many biological men, they were only regular men—men who had not been successful enough to acquire the right to perform as a supernatural in masquerade. They could not, through mask, costume, and dance, perform as a spirit.⁵³ Despite that restriction, a woman could become a husband; she could marry a wife in what anthropologists call woman-woman marriage and become a female husband. The women who became female husbands were especially likely to be wealthy and without children from their own marriage, and thus in need of heirs, but this choice was available to any woman with ambition and the resources to pay bridewealth. Readers who are steeped in American culture might assume this describes a lesbian relationship, but woman-woman marriage had nothing to do with sex between the two women. Instead it had to do with gaining a workforce and children for the female husband—and thus access to status, wealth, perhaps ekwe titles, and heirs.

Perhaps Venis was the daughter of a woman married to a female husband. Probably she wasn’t, since more women were married to men than to women, but let’s just suppose for a moment. Her “father,” not the sperm donor, but the person who paid the bridewealth that validated her mother’s marriage and who fulfilled the responsibilities of a father toward her, would be the female husband. By paying bridewealth, the female husband laid claim to the children born to the wife, in the same way that any man did in paying bridewealth. Some anthropologists say that bridewealth isn’t really about claiming a wife. Instead, it is about claiming the children the wife has, regardless of who the biological father might be. Perhaps a way to think of it is that the husband is laying claim to the fruits of her womb, not necessarily to sole insemination rights. Among the Igbo and many other societies, in a divorce, the woman’s family returned the bridewealth, and the husband had no claim on later children.⁵⁴

Let me add that for the Igbo at least (for there were numerous African and Native American societies that legitimized some version of woman-woman marriage) adultery in any marriage was a serious offense against the gods.⁵⁵ A wife in a woman-woman marriage, however, was expected to produce children for her female husband, and thus did—discreetly—have sex with a lover who at least sometimes was acknowledged by the female husband, while sex with anyone else would be considered adultery. In any case the lover would never be able to lay claim to the children. He had not paid the bridewealth, so they were not his children. Alternatively, a wealthy woman could also formally marry a wife “for her brother” or even for a slave or former slave. She paid the bridewealth, the woman acted as a wife for the man, perhaps one of his many wives, but the children belonged to the woman who had paid bridewealth. She was their father. A woman could also become a man if her father formally declared she was a man, making her a male daughter. Men without sons might take this step in order to have an heir, so that the lineage branch did not die out. In this case, the male daughter would not marry, but might have children, or might marry a woman. In either case, the lineage would carry on through her, so the land would not revert to the patrilineage.⁵⁶

As male daughters or as female husbands, women gained authority over people and labor. Getting the wealth together to provide bride-wealth for a marriage would be more difficult for a woman than for a man. But if she succeeded, she had made an investment that could be expected to pay off. She would have increased her labor force with a wife, enabling her to accumulate wealth. So having a wife enhanced her ability to handle the enormous costs of the feasting and gifting entailed in taking on a title that would raise her status. As men, such women participated in village councils with authority equal to that of a biological man. They could take male titles, expect service and respect within family and lineage as a man, and have a public house in the compound surrounded by the houses of their wives and perhaps sons.

Although there is a great deal of literature supporting this description of the role of female men, one authority, Ugo Nwokeji, maintains that becoming male in this way was not part of Igbo culture in the 1700s, and thus Venis would have known nothing of this kind of gender flexibility. Instead, Nwokeji says, women could and did buy 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. Freedom was not a possibility; they could marry only among themselves; and their children would be slaves. They were in many ways an outcast group; but they were also under the protection of the god of the shrine they served. They could marry, were often provided with land, and had a share of the food donated at the god’s shrine.⁷⁸

Aro traders used Igbo secular punishment as a source of saleable people. A heavy fine for a poor person could lead to debt, and thus to pawning and possible slavery. As the Atlantic slave trade gained momentum, slavery became a more common Igbo punishment for crime—and selling criminals to the Aro was profitable. The Aro began to use their oracle to produce even more saleable people by tweaking the system of offenses against the gods by “spreading the belief in the dangers of abominations and taboo violations,” such as a woman climbing a tree or a child whose lower teeth came in before the upper ones.⁷⁹ The Aro at Arochukwu had what neighboring people believed was a particularly powerful oracle, and some non-Aro traveled there for difficult cases of either crime or disaster. Using their oracle, the Aro enhanced this system out of all recognition, producing saleable people by defining many more offenses against the gods than the Igbo had previously recognized.

Whether the Aro devised their strategy with malice aforethought and a cynical manipulation of religion is a matter of dispute. But regardless, their oracle was “one of the most effective agencies of Aro domination.”⁸⁰ Members of the Aro trade network established a shrine to their oracle in each of their villages and town wards spread around Igboland. The Aro themselves were not seen as conquerors, but they did expect, insist upon, and receive high status, setting themselves apart from local people. Northrup and Nwokeji both believe that maintaining that Aro identity was critical to their ability to dominate the trading networks of Igboland.⁸¹ That a trade diaspora could pull this off is, as Nwokeji points out, unusual. The respect in which their oracle was held may have contributed to their status—the Aro were the “children of god.” So also, surely, did their military prowess, their alliances, and their trade relationship with Europeans.⁸² Meddling with an Aro trader was definitely not a good idea.

The Aro themselves didn’t consult the Arochukwu oracle for judgment; according to Nwokeji they “knew better than to expose themselves to the … ruse.”⁸³ Instead, the Aro had an organization, the Ekpe society, which handled their disputes, provided law enforcement, oversaw credit, and provided financial security for transactions between themselves and various European traders. The society guaranteed the trust system of credit by which European traders advanced trade goods to coastal traders, who in turn advanced them to the Aro, who eventually repaid the original trader with slaves.⁸⁴

The Aro high status made it possible for them to encourage non-Aro to consult the oracle. They purposely spread belief in the laws they promulgated, according to Nwokeji, claiming that violators needed to be sent to the shrine at Arochukwu, “manipulating information and local people’s fears.”⁸⁵ Only sacrifice could alleviate the consequences of violations. And the presence of illness or other problems proved that someone, perhaps unwittingly or perhaps in secret, had committed an offense. The priests were needed to detect the offender. They usually chose someone the people involved could accept as the violator, either because they believed divination proved guilt or because the person chosen was believable as a violator.⁸⁶ The violation may in fact have been real, or the fact of illness could be taken as proof that a violation had occurred, regardless of facts. Ultimately, someone had to accept responsibility and perform the sacrifice/punishment that would remove the impurity and its threat.

Like the British turning petty crimes into serious offenses in order to provide convicts who would volunteer for indenture, the Aro oracle, and sometimes village elders, prescribed slavery for quite minor offenses as demand grew on the coast.⁸⁷ Meeting the cost of sacrifices to remove the deadly threat of spiritual displeasure drove more and more people into debt, creating more pawns or causing people to volunteer themselves or others as slaves for the oracle. On top of that, the oracle frequently indicated that slavery was the only option for the offender. Many of those who were enslaved to the shrine no longer served the oracle for life, as they had previously. Instead, they were never seen again. People believed the oracle “ate” its victims. Really, they were handed off into the Atlantic slave trade through the Aro trade network. Just how many slaves the Aro oracle produced, how many more were acquired through local punishing and sacrificing, and how these methods might have ranked in comparison to kidnapping and raiding is a matter of debate.⁸⁸ Perhaps Venis was one of those powerless people handed over by a relative to appease the gods and save a lineage or a village from disaster.

REGARDLESS OF HOW VENIS MIGHT have found herself in the hands of Aro traders, it would certainly have been through an exercise of power. Force would have been behind her trip to the coast—force exerted by kin, by an owner if she was already enslaved or pawned, by the gods through their agents the priests, by military might, or clandestine kidnappers. But it is hard to conceive of a less centralized system for the exercise of force. No individual, no group, had a monopoly on the control of punishment (the exercise of force internally in a polity) or on the control of a military (for a polity’s external use of force), whether in the Aro trade network or in Igbo villages. Igbo village-groups were autonomous little polities. The power to punish, on which governance ultimately depended, was atomized, with bits held by various secular organizations believed to have religious legitimation, and other bits held directly by a variety of representatives of the sacred. Control of the use of force externally was likewise atomized. For the Igbo there was no state, or anything even resembling a state.⁸⁹

In Venis’s time, the British did not claim sovereignty over Igboland, and neither did the Aro. Yet it is hard to imagine that the slave trade could have gotten off the ground without the power of a state behind it to finance the use of force it required. Applying force came at a price, at both the European and the African end: manacles, ships, crews, some form of credit, food, guards, holding facilities on the coast, and warehouses for goods to trade into the interior. In the interior, transport canoes and their crews, credit, war matèriel, food for captives and captors, guards to prevent escape and to prevent raids by rival slavers bent on theft—all of this cost something in money or goods, and all of it required careful organization and legitimation.⁹⁰ The Aro and local kings provided the African organization, credit, and protection for the trade, while European investors had state backing, and in the case of the English the navy, the granting of a royal monopoly to select investors, and a stable banking system. This was all part of what the historian Sven Beckert calls “war capitalism,” a term he finds far more accurate than the more usual “mercantilism” for a description of a system of merchant capitalism directly dependent on military might.⁹¹

Although the question of “stateness” for the Aro is complicated, it seems clear that in order to manage trade they needed some of the functions normally performed by a state. While some argue that the Aro had no state, power was slightly more centralized than among the Igbo; some historians argue that the court, the Ekpe society, and officials at Arochukwu performed some state-like organizational functions.⁹² There was someone identified as a king at Arochukwu after 1650. However, a council actually controlled the king’s power. Without the council, the king could not act.⁹³ The council and king together did perform at least one function of a state, that of providing a source of extremely cheap labor for elite use in wealth creation. The Aro needed that labor in order to carry on their wide range of trading functions. This need expanded as the slave trade expanded, and the Aro council and king provided support for the expansion of Aro trade, kick-starting the process by sending a consul to each outlying Aro post, along with the retinue required to administer the connection between that post and the rest of the network. This connection was a major piece of Aro success in dominating trade in people and other commodities. Private enterprise took over later, and along with it a resort to far more violence.⁹⁴

European states also were obliged to provide cheap labor and, like the Aro, subsidized the trade in unfree people, providing in various ways the subsidies and policies that initially nourished the trade in laborers. For the British, this meant providing people who would be desperate enough to “volunteer” to sell themselves as indentured servants, as Alexander Davidson did, but it also meant making conditions as favorable as possible for those engaged in the slave trade. The Crown gave the Royal African Company, a joint-stock company of mostly private investors, a monopoly on the British trade in people from Africa and goods to Africa. Thus investors were far less likely to lose their investment in the required infrastructure—for instance, the ships and warehouses they funded before transporting and selling a single African whose sale would provide some return on their investment. Once the trade was well started, more private investors wanted a piece of the action, and in 1698, the Royal African Company lost its royal monopoly.⁹⁵ It began charging other traders for the use of its forts on the coast.

So I am imagining Venis, transported for private profit with state connivance, arriving on Powhatan land from which the Powhatan had largely been removed, likewise for private profit and with state connivance. There she would have been sold for private profit, to be herself a source of private profit, with state connivance, in the hands of Alexander Davidson, who had himself been transported and used a number of years earlier for private profit with state connivance. Punishment or fear of it in the case of Alexander, possibly in the case of Venis, but certainly in the case of many enslaved Africans, was what enabled making them into a source of profit.