Return to Laughter

My friend Anna Rain just sent me this excerpt from Return to Laughter, by Elenore Smith Bowen. Both the account (of her fieldwork in Nigeria) and her name are fictionalized. The book was first published in 1954:

What had been given must be returned, and at the appropriate time--in most cases, within two market weeks. For more valuable gifts, like livestock, one should wait until the giver is in sudden need and then offer financial aid. In the absence of banks, large presents of this sort are one way of saving. Fortunately, I had kept lists in the back of my notebook: as many as three pages of names opposite entries of two ears corn, one vegetable marrow, one chicken, five tomatoes, one handful peanuts. I couldn't remember; I didn't think anyone could. But they did, and I watched with amazed admiration as Udama dispensed handfuls of okra, the odd tenth-penny and other bits in an endless circle of gifts in which no one ever handed over the precise value of the object last received but in which, over months, the total exchange was never much more than a penny in anyone's favor. For me this gift-exchange system was such a nuisance that I had to keep counting its blessing. It furnished me with a steady supply of eggs and vegetables. It gave me an acceptable reason for visiting. The truth, that I just wanted to meet people, aroused suspicion, but everyone thought it quite right and natural that I should walk four miles to give a woman tuppence in return for three eggs.

Juloo, “rope” to a Mandinko, means several things at once. It can refer to a small-scale trader, or to credit or debt. Every Mandinko knows the meanings are related. Traders are also lenders, and their loans, while sometimes useful like a rope ladder, also tie down a farmer like a rope around the neck. When rural people in The Gambia speak of juloo, in any of these uses, they consciously or unconsciously connote slavery. The Mandinko and other peoples of this small and impoverished West African river nation, an ancient trade route winding thinly through southern Senegal, have had occasion in history to learn quite a bit about ropes and involuntary servitude, and about debt. The linked images and overtones are not empty of emotion.