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